Leverage Marketing Tactics to Improve the Talent Acquisition Process
Marketing is the business of acquiring new customers while talent acquisition is the business of recruiting and engaging new employees. Marketers are well aware of the importance of user experience to their consumers. Apple is a great example of an intuitive user experience out of the box and generally sits as the user experience gold standard. How many times have you downloaded an app to serve some purpose for you (looking up the weather, playing games, photography filters, etc) and immediately deleted it if you did not instantly enjoy the interface, if the app wasn’t easy to use, or you just didn’t like the look or feel of it?
For Talent Acquisition professionals’ user experience is intimately interwoven with candidate experience. If your candidates aren’t having that great candidate experience as they work through your hiring process they are likely to drop out and share their experience and frustration to their personal networks. Job prospects expect to have a consumer grade experience when interacting with your brand. Understanding your candidate experience should start with HR partnering with the Marketing department to clearly communicate the employer brand and successfully attract and engage great candidates. Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic for the Guardian agrees stating, “Despite apparent differences between the functions of HR and marketing, the digital world has brought them closer than ever by eliminating differences between employees and consumers.”
A quick search of the web shows some great case studies of HR leveraging the Marketing team. Pat Nazemetz, former CHRO of the Xerox Corporation, shares her experience with the Harvard Business Review, “When Xerox re-branded itself as a document solutions leader, it partnered once again with Versant to communicate what this new brand would mean to Xerox employees. Through videos, employee events and facility branding, we built employees’ interest in and support for Xerox’s new brand promise to its customers. Employee engagement was integral to Xerox’s transformation and continued growth as a Fortune 500 company. After all, productivity and the strength of the company brand both live within Xerox’s workforce. Employees, at first skeptical, embraced their new work environment. And HR, as a full partner in this effort, made sure our messages were consistent and reinforcing – not conflicting.”
Marketing can help to more effectively communicate the employer brand and help drive engagement by connecting employees and candidates with work that matters and is meaningful. Tim Sackett will be joining HCI to explore another way marketing can assist HR in this free webcast Crafting Strategic Job Descriptions? Think Like a Marketer on November 12, 2014 at 3pm ET. In today’s competitive talent market, strategic job descriptions are the teasers attracting candidates to jobs. If as you read over your current job descriptions you naturally hear Ben Stein’s voice in your head, you won’t want to miss this webcast to hear examples and tips for how well crafted job descriptions can distinguish your firm from the competition and lead you to the top of the best employer brands list in talent acquisition.