How many marketing qualifications are there in your HR department? Any there any ex-marketers in your HR ranks? If there aren’t already, I predict there will be soon and specifically in the area of recruitment. Recruitment is all about marketing.
For me at least, this is not a new idea. In the late 90s I was a recruiter first for Andersen Consulting and then in the early 2000s at IBM. Even then, I was convinced that recruitment was all about marketing. But I was somewhat of a lone voice as the industry was much more focused on 'time to hire' and outsourcing the process. I felt as if I was an early pioneer of marketing in recruitment, but it was an approach that clearly worked, even then. At Andersen Consulting we rebranded everything and were, at that time, the number one graduate recruiter in the UK.
Today, the role of the recruiter is becoming morphed into that of a marketer—selling a job, a company culture, a benefits package or a vision of a future career. Not only that, but the best recruiters are looking to build lasting candidate relationships and are the crucial first experience of the corporate brand for many potential recruits. Replace the words ‘candidate’ or ‘recruit’ with ‘consumer’ or ‘customer’ and you could be firmly in the marketing department. The same marketing skills can be applied to either audience.
Take the rapidly increasing use of mobile devices to shop, but also to search for and apply for jobs. Soon to be published research from the IBM Smarter Workforce Institute reveals that organizations that use mobile technologies to hire are more attractive to job seekers. Not only that, but mobile recruitment generates valuable data for analytics purposes. This means recruiters are much better informed about their best candidates, in very much the same way as marketers know more than ever about their customers from social, mobile and digital data.
This is not just about the technology and analytics that impress the geek in us; it’s also about enabling potential recruits to have a great experience when we come into contact with an organization. Making job search, application and even assessments a positive and brand-enhancing experience.
I believe that some of the award-winning marketing campaigns of the future won’t come from marketing departments, but from HR departments. HR will not just be sitting alongside marketing, but partnering with them. After all, recruitment is marketing!
To learn more on this topic, read Treat talent like customers not candidates
