Do you wonder how to choose the right type of HR marketing strategy for our business? If you do, this blog article and podcast-episode is just what you need!
When does one need an HR marketing strategy?
HR marketing, or talent marketing, is the same for your hiring than for example product marketing is for the sales of your products.
A growth organization that hires regularly is likely to benefit from an HR marketing strategy.
Hiring without an HR marketing strategy is the same if you desperately tried to sell a lot, but all your business did was sending expensive sales people out and about trying to find prospective customers.
– Susanna Rantanen, Employee Experience Agency Emine
Hiring without an HR marketing strategy is the same if you desperately tried to sell a lot, but all your business did was sending expensive sales people out and about trying to find prospective customers.
It doesn’t mean you will not sell, but what it means is that you lose a lot of sales as well, because for a sales person to search for a customer ready to buy your product or service is like looking for a needle in a hay stack.
Just like personal selling is very expensive, so is head hunting. A vacancy is the product and what comes with it, such as career opportunities, leadership and culture are the complimentary services and added features of that product.
Are your vacancies are like a blank coffee cup in a need of a label?
Imagine a blank white coffee mug.
Imagine a row of those in a supermarket. Imagine, not just one row, but a whole shelf of those in a supermarket. Well, a job on a job board is like a blank white coffee mug among hundreds if not thousands of other blank white coffee mugs on a job board.
Branding and marketing are done to make sure the person who walks in the supermarket and stops at that shelf will pick up your blank white coffee mug among all the other looking exactly the same and serving exactly the same purpose.
A growth business hiring regularly needs an HR marketing strategy not to be just a blank white coffee mug.
The three key options for an HR Marketing Strategy
Depending on your business, your market, your competition as well as the available talent pool in your talent market, your business has three options:
- Recruitment marketing & communications’ strategy
- Employer awareness strategy
- Employer branding strategy
And if you are not realistic with your strategy, you will end up with the most common strategy of all: The Ad Hoc Strategy.
Recruitment marketing & communications’ strategy
Recruitment marketing & communications’ strategy is a great choice when your business is actually a recruitment consultancy or when your available resources are for recruiting only.
Notice, this strategy will not influence and impact what recruiters call passive job seekers. I know recruiters like to think it will, but it won’t. The element of recruiting is not relevant for passive job seekers. They choose to ignore your messages. Simple as that. Listen to the podcast-episode to learn more about some examples of goals and how to measure the impact of your recruitment marketing and communication’s activities. An employer awareness strategy is, in my opinion, about growing your over all talent audience and improving the awareness of what you business represents and can offer to them. It is not the same than (modern) employer branding. But you also cannot start employer branding unless you have built big enough of an audience systematically through growing awareness. Think of the employer awareness strategy as a “Getting our business on the map of our talent audiences -strategy”. The target audiences of your employer awareness strategy can be both, active and passive job seekers. You can tie employer awareness activities also with your recruitment marketing activities. So this can be a great choice for organizations that hire a lot and need to focus most resources on the actual recruiting. Listen to the podcast-episode to learn more about employer awareness strategy. Employer branding is an act to differentiate one’s career products, in other words the career opportunities and the complimentary services and added features, such as the culture, benefits, camaraderie, mission, vision, purpose, values, leadership etc from the competition. It is about setting your organization’s position firmly in the market and making sure your offer looks, feels and sounds clearly different. What is so special about the actual employer branding, is that it is very much about influencing your ideal talent audiences on an emotional level. Pursuing that emotional connection that makes them feel in their gut what you can represent for them. The stronger this emotional connection is, the more engaged and committed this part of your overall talent audience will be. In this episode #11 of Building a Modern Employer Brand, we will talk about how to choose the right kind of HR strategy for your business needs. Episode-length: 35:15 min Listen to this episode on Soundcloud >> Listen to this episode on Spotify >> Episode content: Building a Modern Employer Brand-podcast is a weekly podcast bringing you a modern breath of air into HR marketing and employer branding. This podcast is dedicated to all modern growth companies and modern employer branding practitioners who want to really influence their talent audiences and add measurable value to growing and scaling modern businesses with HR marketing and employer branding. The Building a Modern Employer Brand -podcast is sponsored by Employee Experience Agency Emine and scripted & hosted by Susanna Rantanen. Find this podcast currently on Soundcloud and Spotify.Employer awareness strategy
Employer branding strategy
The accompanying podcast-episode
About Building a Modern Employer Brand -podcast