Part of my own professional journey in the HCM space had led me to the marketing discipline for a while. I had a chance to work with teams that focused on promoting and selling the very solutions that are helping transform HR today. And, while I have hung up my marketing hat and moved back over to our solutions strategy, I am a firm believer in good marketing. I mean, let’s face it: marketing departments have gotten pretty sophisticated in their approach. They are data driven, know the behaviors of their buyers, create messages that pull at people’s heartstrings, and get access to cool toys to help promote their solution and brand to the world around us. Which raises the question, why should marketing get to have all the fun?
When you really think about it, candidates are not that much different than consumers. And when I think about the consumer, I think about the evolution of the consumer experience over the last 15 years. Fifteen years ago, we would have never dreamed of buying a car online, or grocery shopping with an app, or depositing a check without a bank teller. We now live in a world where the consumer is first; their experience is paramount. Companies spend millions developing and fostering relationships with consumers via complex and tailored marketing strategies.
If the consumer’s experience is that important, then the candidate experience too, should be paramount. That experience goes beyond just the application process; it includes how you find and communicate with the candidate. How you build a relationship and engage them before they even apply.
We have the opportunity to bring consumer-grade marketing tools to HR that make the process faster, smarter and more efficient. And we don’t need to create all these tools from scratch. Marketing departments already have access to the tools that can help us create marketing-grade candidate campaigns, candidate web tracking, and candidate experiences. The trick is finding HCM providers that have access to those marketing tools and brining them into the HR fold. Beyond that, we can start to leverage creative skills to rethink how we communicate with candidates – creative writers owning job descriptions, designers creating job ads, and digital marketing teams running recruitment campaigns, just to name a few. And some of you already have the teams in place to do this. Over the last few years we have seen more and more marketing-like jobs crop up in the recruitment space, but let’s make sure they have the tools to pull off the new job you have given them.
I may be biased as a former marketer who has lived a life inside of the HCM space, but in a world where we don’t have time to re-create the wheel; this seems like a win-win for HR departments and the great talent they seek.
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