Not enough employers consider the overlap between marketing and hiring. They are, after all, from an administrative perspective, different departments. Human resources typically handles most aspects of hiring, while marketing is, well, marketing.
And yet, there is overlap.
When you’re looking for an ideal fit, you need to use language and statistical support elements that not only generate attention but capture the interest of the right people.
In this article, we take a look at how marketing can be used to supercharge hiring initiatives and why more companies should make this a priority.
Marketers
Marketers think the way recruiters should. Marketers know that you don’t want to get your messaging in front of everyone. You want to find the right people. Potential customers who fit snugly within a predetermined profile. The marketing language for this is ideal customer profile. Essentially, a set of characteristics that a hypothetical person will have.
For example, a marketer might understand that a company’s ideal customer is a 48-year-old upper-middle-class stay-at-home mom. Not only is she most likely to buy this product, but she’ll use it often, she’ll be interested in cross-sells and upgrades, and she’ll refer friends.
It’s worth targeting this particular type of person, even at the expense of limiting the number of people who see the marketing messaging.
Why?
Even though the volume of impressions will be lower by targeting a very specific kind of person, the conversion rate could be higher, the marketing messages will be more efficient, and the total amount of revenue produced by a single campaign will be greater.
In What Way Does This Overlap With Hiring?
Companies also have ideal profiles in the context of employee demographics.
- People who are aligned with the company culture.
- People who are likely to stick around for a long period of time.
- People who have the skills and background to thrive within their position.
It’s not enough to say, we need to hire a nursepractioner; let’s find out who has an MSN. Why? Because a lot of people have an MSN, and if you’re not filtering those applicants based on very specific criteria, you’re prolonging the hiring process and diluting the quality of it.
How to Integrate Marketing Into Your Hiring Initiatives
It’s one thing to say that marketing should be built into the hiring process, quite another to make this statement a reality.
In the next few headings, we take a look at how businesses can pair their hiring processes with marketing techniques that will help them find better hires.
Step 1: Establish a Clear Line of Communication Between Marketing and Human Resources
It’s first important that each department understands where their responsibilities begin and end.
Develop a clear communication process and feedback loop that delineates responsibilities and also allows data to be shared freely between the two departments.
Like any effective business process, this partnership should be as systemized as possible to eliminate guesswork and maximize efficiency.
Step 2: Develop a Clear Ideal Employee Profile
In the same way that marketers will identify the qualities of a good customer, you should focus on figuring out what factors go into a good employee.
This could include education, personal demographics, personality traits, and more. They should align with your company culture and overall success criteria.
It can help to review employment data from high-performing teammates over the years.
What type of people have done the best within your organization? What qualities did they share?
Who lasted the longest? And so on. Of course, this profile will never be perfect, nor will you necessarily ever find someone who matches it completely.
However, developing a baseline can help considerably when it comes to identifying who will be a good fit.
Step 3: Treat Your Job Listing Like the Marketing Task That It Is
Ultimately, any job listing is at least partially rooted in marketing principles. Instead of convincing someone to buy something, you are putting a message out into the world and hoping that it’ll find the right people. Develop your marketing materials in a way that is consistent with the ideal employee profile that your team developed.
Prioritize accurate descriptions of your company culture and your overall expectations be as clear and transparent as possible.
The idea is to attract not only qualified professionals, but people who will fit in naturally with your existing environment.
You don’t just wanna fill the position; you want to find someone who will be able to thrive within it for many years to come.
Step 4: Review and Revise
Marketing campaigns are modified constantly to adjust to new data. After a few days or weeks, depending on the timeframe for your hiring process, it’s a good idea to take a look at your candidate pool, determine how closely it reflects your intended audience, and refine based on results.
In other words, if you find that the people applying to your listing don’t quite match up with the traits you’re looking for, it indicates that you should probably recalibrate the language and targeting.
Step 5: Keep It Going
If you really want your partnership between HR and marketing to be effective, it’s important to think of it not as a one-off experiment, but a long-term project. Both departments thrive on data, and data thrives on time.
To get the most out of this collaboration, it’s a good idea to reinitiate it anytime you’re making a hire.
You should find that with repetition, your hiring initiatives become more efficient and your candidate pool more refined.
This doesn’t happen overnight, but with effort and tinkering, you’ll get there.
Conclusion
Hiring is a genuinely challenging process. It’s also an expensive one. Studies have shown that hiring someone new can cost up to 50% of their annual salary. This includes both the cost of the search itself as well as the price of training them.
The higher up the position, the harder it is to fill. We used finding a nurse practitioner as an example in an earlier heading. It’s tricky because:
- Demand is high.
- Supply is relatively limited, and
- Competition is fierce.
But what if you need to hire someone with a doctorate in nursing? Only about 1% of nurses in the United States have this credential, making it genuinely hard to find candidates.
Adding an extra layer of complexity in the form of cross-departmental collaboration will probably add to the expense in one way or another. That can be unappealing to cost-conscious businesses. Is it really worth the effort? It absolutely can be. Finding someone who will fit your company culture well and stick around for many years is very much worth the front-end investment.
It’s difficult to fully buy into this idea, partially because the value can be slightly abstract. You can’t compare the value of a hypothetical excellent fit candidate to the cost of a hypothetical bad fit candidate because there are simply too many variables to make those conclusions objective or accurate.
Here’s what is true. If you’re constantly hiring and replacing employees, you’ll wind up spending a fortune on recruitment, you’ll lose efficiency through gaps in your staffing, and you might erode your company culture, turning away or frustrating good employees through your chaotic work environment.
It’s very worth fixing these problems anyway you can. Pairing marketing with human resources is an efficient way to do that.
