How Marketing and HR Can Collaborate

Marketing and HR teams have their own unique and very important functions. However, the evolving and expanding role of a marketer is one of the reasons why marketing can work alongside HR teams. It’s not news that there the job market is a very different place. Unemployment is at an all time low and there are staffing shortages in many industries.

A successful organisation is the product of good employees. But, when it’s hard to get jobs filled by the right people, organisations face problems. Therefore, a company needs to focus on attracting and retaining impressive talent.

Not only do organisations compete with its competitors by differentiating its product or service, they also compete for talent by differentiating employee experience. When choosing where to work, employees look at things like company reputation and company culture in addition to salary and opportunities for growth. Therefore, a company’s brand matters for attracting the high performing talent. Here a few ways HR and marketing can work together to create a company brand that attracts the right employees:

Building an employee persona

Marketing teams are pros at building personas for customers. They have experience bringing to life the characteristics of a potential customer. HR teams can take advantage of the marketing team’s experience and skill to define and build personas of talent they would like to attract. Marketing teams should work with HR teams to answer questions such as: ‘how are we different from competitor firms?’ and ‘how can we engage with people so that they want to join the company and stay’.

Creating a multichannel strategy

Marketing teams know about the different channels to distribute information to the reach the right audience. HR and marketing teams can work together to define the right audience and build a strategy to reach potential candidates.

Choosing channels of communication

There are multiple methods of communicating stories about your brand. Marketing professionals are doing this on a regular basis, therefore they would be the perfect people to help the talent acquisition determine the right channels to reach the right people. Marketing teams can help find out which channels are best suited to reach the defined persona the talent is searching for. In addition, the marketing team can also assist with how to use these channels most effectively.

Not surprisingly, LinkedIn can be one of the most critical channels for HR teams to engage with. Marketing and HR teams can work together to get the most out of opportunities that come with LinkedIn engagement.

Measuring success

It is difficult to know how effective your engagement efforts with candidates are. Tracking these efforts can be an extension of already existing marketing analytics. The HR team can gain valuable insight from marketing analytics to understand the effectiveness of the different recruitment efforts. It’s also important to track different online rankings and awards, such as ‘best employer’ and Glassdoor ratings, which can provide valuable insight for HR teams.