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The power of HR and marketing together

November 9, 2016

By Heather Nezich, courtesy of SBAM Approved Partner ASE

Recruiting departments are increasingly adopting marketing techniques to attract the best talent in today’s competitive environment.  Developing, maintaining, and communicating your employer brand is extremely important.  An employer brand helps attract the right talent and allows prospective employees to judge their fit with your organization. But building this brand cannot be done alone successfully, it will take careful coordination with marketing and must reflect and align with the corporate brand.

HR is tasked with creating an employee experience that properly markets the organization to recruits and employees. Crafting a relevant and resonant employer brand involves aligning your organization’s aspirations, values, needs, and wants with the people you are looking to recruit and retain.  Outlined below are four ways to launch and complete a successful employer branding project:

  1. Designate an owner. There is no better cheerleader of an employer brand than the CEO, but gaining alignment from the rest of your leadership team, securing budget, and taking the project through to completion won’t happen without a designated decision maker from either the HR or marketing team.  Be sure you have one person in charge of keeping this project moving and seeing it though to completion.
  2. Make sure the employer brand mirrors the corporate brand.  The employer brand needs to build off of the corporate brand’s foundation, otherwise it is confusing to your employees and the marketplace.  If your corporate brand has a brand promise, use that to guide you and pull it into the employee brand promise. The authenticity of the employer brand depends on HR and marketing working together to create an employee experience that is true to the brand.  The employee brand must match the “true” employee experience – not what you want it to be, but what it currently is.
  3. Get commitment from leadership. Each leader must understand the importance of the employer brand and how it influences your organization’s image and reputation.  It’s also important to have leadership buy-in when it comes time for budgeting.  Having key stakeholders aligned will do wonders to keep your branding project going and achieving the desired results.
  4. Utilize your marketing team. Once you’ve got your employer brand strategy in place and support from the key stakeholders, you’ll need advocates from both marketing and HR to roll-out the employer brand. Marketers know how to drive and measure audience engagement, create engaging experiences, nurture audiences, and tell a story that keeps people interested and engaged over a long period of time. Utilize their expertise to communicate your brand. 

Your employer brand must emotionally connect to prospective employees in order to successfully recruit and retain the type of talent best suited for your business.  Harness the power of both HR and Marketing to achieve this.  HR understands what matters to employees, and marketing knows how to effectively communicate that message.  When HR and marketing collaborate on an employer brand strategy together, your messaging will remain consistent and be properly communicated to your key audience.  The result will be a talent pool that has the right “fit” for your organization.

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