Marketing and HR: Reboot Your Employer Brand

Want to reboot your employer brand?  Think like a marketer.

This 5-minute Disrupt HR presentation expains how.  Enjoy!


Time To Reboot Your Employer Brand? Think Like A Marketer. | Laura Schroeder | DisruptHR Talks from DisruptHR on Vimeo.

Want to level up your employer brand? Think like a marketer!

We're seeing a convergence between HR and marketing.

See this funnel? Talent acquisition got it from marketing. In fact, HR increasingly uses marketing terms like ‘hiring funnel’ and ‘talent pipeline.’

Not that marketing minds, of course. They think it'd be awesome if HR would put on a marketing hat when it comes to attracting and engaging talent.

Since filling the funnel and building a robust pipeline is what marketing’s all about, I'll share a few trade secrets with you.

To fill your funnel, you need to get people’s attention. And that’s challenging because there are a LOT of people and companies out there competing for people’s attention.  That means you need to find a way to stand out from the crowd.

Getting attention starts with your employer brand. You may think branding is marketing’s job, but it’s HR’s job to create an employer brand that people want to work for and that attracts people you want to hire.

Marketing may be able help but since they aren’t typically paid to work on employer brand, don’t be surprised if they don’t feel the same urgency about this as you do.

Inbound marketing is about creating a space like a website where people can come and explore on their own and find information that interests them.

With inbound marketing you start creating relationships and brand awareness.

Stories are also a good way to build brand awareness. Marketers love stories, because they help create an emotional connection to your brand. Your company has an origin story, and your employees have stories about their journey with your company. These stories are an integral part of your brand.

Marketing uses personas to create the right messages for their target audience. Personas are hypothetical buyers you get to know in order to market to them effectively. HR can use personas to market more effectively to candidates and employees.

Content is how you tell your story. You can use videos, pictures, brochures, blog posts, job descriptions – it’s really wide open, the only caveat is it’s helpful to know your target audience and their preferences. This is where your persona research comes in.

Channels are how you get your content to your audience. Job boards, your corporate website and LinkedIn are examples of channels. How do you reach the people you want to hire? Again, you want to understand your personas and their content preferences rather than using the channel that you prefer.

Marketers know you don’t just hang your shingle and rake in the new business.

Similarly, you can’t expect a stuffy job description posted on your corporate website will bring in lots of top candidates.

 To build a strong pipeline you need to be persistent and try different channels where potential and future potential buyers or employees can get to know you.

Nurture is about moving people through the funnel. For example, a recruiter might promote general advice about career development, then follow up with people who engage with that content, either with more information or a call.

 Follow up’s important. Never leave a qualified lead or candidate hanging, especially after someone has taken the time to apply or request information.

Account-based marketing is personalized marketing (or so it should seem) to an audience of one. The goal is to build a relationship so you can be right there with the right solution or offer when they’re ready to make a change.

People are on a journey with your company. There’s a buyer journey, a customer journey, an employee journey and a candidate journey. Understanding and mapping out these journeys will help you create a more positive and engaging experience with your brand.

To create a positive brand experience, you have to ask what people want, need, and expect at each stage of their journey with your company. Then use that inforation to create moments that matter.

Engagement is a hot topic for HR and marketing. Marketing measures engagement by tracking what people click on, and it’s a pretty good indicator for candidates, too. That's why talent pipeline automation solutions like Candidate.ID track digital footprint.

Tracking digital footprint requires a certain amount of online stalking, which raises data privacy concerns. Marketing solves this by inviting people to ‘opt in’ and continue receiving valuable information or notifications, and this is an approach HR can follow as well.

What if instead of deleting qualified applicant data you invited people to stay in touch?

Marketers tell stories, but where possible they back it up with relevant business results and put a spin on it.  A metric like ‘time to hire’ is OK, but doesn’t have the same wow factor as ‘cost of empty seats.’

Similarly, a boring salary statement doesn’t have the same wow factor as a shiny ‘Total Benefits Statement.’

Marketing hates surprises so they practically live in their data, checking in on what works and doesn't work so they can change plans.

Customers are the best marketers and employees are the best evangelists for your employer brand.

Do you know who your most passionate employees are? You may want to cultivate them to help you define and evangelize your employer brand.

All of these marketing building blocks should be part of your employer brand strategy.

Having a strategy helps you focus and use your time doing the most impactful things to create a strong employer brand and create a robust talent pipeline.

So, instead of telling people about your company and your open roles - which is what everyone’s doing - try putting on your marketing pants and selling your company and roles as if they were solutions. After all, for someone they are.

Photo credits: Upslash.com

Top 10 Marketing Tips for HR

Over the last decade, HR has successfully re-invented itself as the strategic owner of the 'people agenda’ and (mostly) embraced the cloud.  However, in order to navigate the next wave of technology advancement, they’ll need to once more rethink how they can best serve the business.  Marketing has a few lessons to impart about that.

At most companies, the marketing department is bigger than the HR department and has a much larger programs budget.  Whereas marketers are increasingly in demand, HR jobs are starting to decline.  Both are complex, multi-faceted jobs, so what’s marketing’s secret?

Is it because so many HR functions are outsourced, either to agencies (i.e. recruiting) or service providers (i.e. payroll)?  Nope, marketing gets outsourced, too - everything from SEO to white papers to creative services, just to name a few.  In fact, marketing typically has the highest agency spend in the business.

Is it because there are more marketing people, so they can do more and therefore get more recognition?  Well, yes, but keep in mind most marketing departments start small and grow with the business. 

Is it because marketing adds more value to the business?  Again, no. HR done well adds as much long-term value to the business as marketing, although marketing has an advantage when it comes to demonstrating short-term value because they directly support sales.  It’s a contributing factor, but not the entire story.

Is it because marketing people are better at selling themselves?  Getting warmer, but plenty of people love to hate marketing.  In the words of a CEO I once worked with, ‘Half of what marketing does is crap, the problem is I don’t know which half.’ 

Unfortunately for HR, there isn’t a handy metric they can link to sales revenue like marketing can, but they can still measure stuff with more wow factor than number of performance reviews completed or time to hire.  

*I'm not saying these metrics don't matter, but I am saying they need to be tied to business outcomes.  

Here’s the skinny: Whether you're trying to attract the right talent, deliver a world class employee experience, or create ‘moments that matter,’ HR can learn a few moves from marketing:

1. BRANDING – Just as marketing is responsible for defining a company brand that inspires positive, trustful feelings, it is HRs job to define – or at least communicate - an employer brand people want to work for.  In industries with fierce competition for talent, this needs to be a priority rather than a side project, and it’s an area where HR and marketing can and should collaborate.  (Just remember, marketing isn’t compensated for hiring metrics so don’t expect them to place the same priority on this as you do. And if you don’t like that, remember HR owns the incentive strategy so it’s up to you to fix it.)
2. PERSONAS – Marketing learned the hard way that one size doesn’t fit all and spend all kinds of time and money defining personas to ensure their content is relevant for the target audience.  HR has also come to realize personalization matters but has yet to embark on serious workforce segmentation and personalization when it comes to HR programs.
3. JOURNEY – Marketing loves to talk about the buyer journey, to the point where it’s probably quite annoying for everyone else.  But this is where the rubber hits the road, because it’s the framework you use to design your buyer experience.  How can HR programs be truly effective if HR doesn’t understand the journey an employee takes with the company from the employee point of view? 
4. NURTURE – A critical aspect of the journey described above is the nurture process, which is how you help someone progress to the next stage.  To give a recruiting example, an organization might promote content about career development to create awareness of their employer brand, then follow up with more specific organizational information to candidates that engage with that content.  How do you nurture candidates and employees on their journey with your company to ensure they are able and inspired to progress to the next level?
5. CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE – Since customers are the best marketers, marketing has – or should have - a laser focus on the customer experience, although admittedly with more focus in the buyer experience. So, who are HR’s customers?  Be careful, this is a trick question: If you answered your leadership team rather than your employees and line managers, ask yourself what impact that perspective is likely to have on employee experience. 
6. DESIGN THINKING – Marketing engages in regular two-way communication with stakeholders and keep ideating, testing different ideas, and iterating to achieve the desired results.  Similarly, HR should be ideating, testing and iterating with business leaders, managers and employees about their needs and tailoring their programs to meet those needs. Practice design thinking when designing and implementing HR programs to ensure the result is customer-centric.
7. GAMIFICATION – Although typically discussed in terms of customer engagement, gamification is becoming increasingly popular within HR to improve employee engagement, create a learning culture and drive innovation.  Taking a gameful approach to work design and skills development can help drive employee engagement, creative problem solving, and competitive advantage. 
8. STORIES – The secret sauce of any successful marketing initiative is a good story.  Similarly, great stories can help attract, retain and inspire the right people.  What is your company’s origin story?  How do people succeed and progress at your company?  How are you helping customers solve problems?  How are individuals who work for your business making a difference?  There’s a reason so many great leaders are also great story tellers.
9. OUTCOMES - Stories are important, but marketing pros don't just tell stories, they make sure to back up the information with business relevant facts and figures.  Guess what? Numbers like ‘# of people who completed training x’ are interesting for HR but don’t really have bottom line impact to the business. I grant you it's harder to measure the value of a person than it is to measure the value of a sale, but you can align HR processes and programs with company goals and try to measure their impact on overall business performance.
10. EVANGELISM – Just as customers are the best marketers for your brand, your employees are – or should be – your best employer brand evangelists.  If you aren’t actively trying to understand who your best brand ambassadors are, you’re really missing a trick.  Who are your most passionate employees and how are you identifying, recognizing, rewarding and developing them?  Those are folks you want to keep an eye on as possible high potentials, but also to ensure their external representation of your company is brand compliant.

One more thing: It takes courage and humility to ask how you’re doing and there’s an unfortunate human tendency to focus on the negative when giving feedback - no one understands that better than a marketer.  Having said that, employees are subject to performance management processes designed by HR, but who’s measuring HR’s performance from the employee perspective? 

Here’s the money question: Do your customers value what you do and if not, how can you improve?

I’ll leave you with that thought.

HR, Meet Marketing

If you are a typical company, your marketing department is bigger than your HR department, although HR is ostensibly responsible for recruiting, compensation, benefits, talent management, workforce analytics, workplace safety and legal compliance and marketing just has to write a few white papers.

So why does the marketing team typically have its own wing while HR fits in a cubicle?  I have a theory about that from the marketing side of the house and you can get the inside scoop from HR over at Dave Ryan's HR Official.

So, why? 

Is it because so many HR functions are outsourced?  Nope, marketing gets outsourced, too - everything from SEO to white papers to creative services, just to name a few.

Is it because marketing adds more value to the business?  I don't think so.  HR done well adds as much long-term value to the business as marketing, although marketing has an advantage when it comes to demonstrating short-term value.

Is it because there are more marketing people so they are able to do more and therefore get more recognition?  Well, yes, but keep in mind most marketing departments start small and grow with the business.

Is it because marketing people are better at selling themselves?  Getting warmer, but it's actually not down to a popularity contest.  There's more to it than that.

The secret sauce is this: Marketing constantly measures how their results impact bottom line performance and generously share that information with the people who make business decisions. 

The good news is, HR can do this too.  It all comes down to portfolio management, customer success, proactive communication and driving business success.

• Portfolio management: Marketing religiously tracks data points like how many people view online content, how many viewers become buyers and what buyers have in common.  This information is used to develop an effective portfolio of marketing programs and assets.  Similarly, HR can track capacity available across the organization, skills needed to drive strategic initiatives and how effective HR processes are at attracting, developing and retaining those skills.  Armed with this information, HR can develop an effective portfolio of talent strategies.
• Customer success: Marketing is also highly in tune with the needs and objectives of marketing stakeholders, including customers, sales and business leaders.  Marketing engages in two-way communication with its stakeholders to ensure the right messaging, tools and support are delivered to meet business objectives.  Similarly, HR should be talking to business leaders, managers and employees about their needs and tailoring their programs to meet those needs.
• Communication: Marketing isn't for the faint-hearted... or the modest. But marketing pros don't just talk about their successes in vague terms, they make sure to back up the information with actual facts and figures.  I grant you it's harder to measure the monetary value of a  person than it is to measure how people click a link but you can align HR processes and programs with company goals and measure their impact on overall business performance.
• Enablement: Marketing supports sales by building brand awareness and arming the sales force with tools and information to help generate revenue.  Likewise, HR must empower leaders, managers and employees with information and tools that help them work effectively and collaboratively.

Hey, now that you mention it, marketing and HR are kind of the same job... ;-)