While your company’s marketing department is likely focused on external branding and your human resources department is concentrated on internal communications, these two departments can share the responsibility of demonstrating your brand to prospective new hires. By coordinating messaging and strategy, your marketing and HR departments will be in a better position to build brand exposure and reach skilled applicants that share in the company’s values and mission.
Ongoing collaboration between these teams doesn’t have to cost these departments a lot of valuable time and resources. Most companies will find that these teams can identify helpful tools and strategies within their first meeting and share these across their departments to promote faster outreach, improved brand messaging and increased exposure to your company.
Sharing Tools and Strategies
A key reason to have your marketing team working alongside your HR department is that your skilled marketers are in a good position to help your HR representatives use their social media and email tools effectively for outreach. These tools can be leveraged to attract new talent in the same way they are usually used to attract and funnel leads. Your company may even be able to adopt aspects of your email and social outreach, such as language and follow-up cadence, in order to secure new talent. Ensuring that your HR department is making effective use of outreach tools will help them recruit new talent through creative communication and compelling stories. They can highlight the work of a standout employee and also provide ways for prospective hires to find the company and learn more about it in an engaging way.
Your HR department can also make use of some of your marketing department’s outreach tactics to encourage conversations over social media and also use email marketing to keep qualified applicants in the loop. Not only can your human resources department use social media to connect with new applicants through responsive conversation, they can also use these accounts to promote your company’s culture and show prospective hires why they should be interested in working there.
Another way that these departments can make use of social media to improve their operations includes keeping an eye on the conversations around a company on these platforms. Once these two departments have a solid grasp on what people are saying about the company, they can use this information to adjust processes, improve and then roll out brand messaging that steers the conversation in their favor.
There are probably a variety of tools and strategies, especially with regards to outreach, that both your marketing and HR departments can make use of. Professionals from either department will also be able to educate their peers on new ways to use department tools and explore how they can be adjusted and leveraged to be used in a way that brings in new talent.
Improving Internal Operations
Not only can these departments come together to attract new applicants, but they can also work as one to increase employee retention and improve your employees’ work experience. By developing cohesive branding and messaging that communicates the ideals of the company, employees will be more able to own these concepts and share helpful knowledge with team members. Identifying a clear brand identity and ensuring these two departments touch base regularly will also help team members share this identity with other professionals who might become interested candidates down the road.
To understand the real benefit of having your marketing and hr departments working together, it’s important to note both sides of creating compelling brand messaging that reflects the values of your company. Your company’s HR team is mostly focused on your employees’ understanding and ownership of your organization’s values, mission and internal operations, while your marketing department is likely focused on conveying these values through your value proposition and brand messages.
There is a good chance your employees are more likely to be good ambassadors for your brand if they have a solid grasp on your organization’s story, and coordination between your HR and marketing teams can help promote this. Your marketing team will establish brand messaging, and your HR team can communicate this messaging to employees internally so that your employees will feel more motivated to share your company with their circle of peers.
Another effective way your marketing and HR departments can work together to streamline the hiring process involves spreading the word internally to get management and employees on board with different aspects of your general onboarding process. Part of what makes your marketing team effective is the ability to persuade key stakeholders, and this talent can be used internally as well. As your HR department adjusts different processes and implements new company policies, they might make use of your marketing team’s communication methods such as promotional messaging, to communicate the changes successfully.
By working together, your marketing and HR teams can come up with clear messaging that might fit well into training and orientations. These teams can also work together on promoting your company’s special events such as career fairs and open interview days. By sharing compelling messaging and outreach tools, your HR and marketing teams can collaborate to successfully organize these events internally and promote them publically to increase attendance.
Most of your company’s branding is probably handled by your marketing team, but your HR department can support this effort by ensuring the branding is adopted and communicated by employees internally. By taking a look at both your internal and public messaging, your teams will be able to identify any inconsistencies and remedy them with clearly defined brand messaging developed by your marketing team and disseminated by your HR department.
Introducing New Talent to Your Brand
There’s a good chance that your marketing department can help your HR reps come up with language that resonates with professionals in your industry and will attract them to your company. Sometimes the difference between receiving new applications is the ability to effectively tell your company’s story and demonstrate its mission. It’s not a bad idea to encourage your HR team to lean on your marketing gurus for salient storylines that introduce your brand to new audiences in a powerful way. Some of the most attractive storytelling methods that your marketing department uses regularly might serve as the right means for sparking the interest of new applicants.
Your company’s marketing professionals are likely to be well-versed in brand messaging and lead generation, and your company’s HR department can use this expertise to attract new talent. This ongoing collaboration doesn’t just promote the sharing of useful professional knowledge, but it can also help your teams identify target markets where prospective hires live and then position your company based on the language and conversations of these target groups.
Once you’ve established effective means for collaboration between your HR and marketing teams and these teams have shared useful messaging and strategies, your HR department will have an easier time detailing your brand’s message to new audiences.
Another powerful benefit of having a clearly defined brand identity is that it will help your HR team identity the right candidates based on your company’s values from the get-go.
Encouraging regular coordination between your HR and marketing departments, with talent acquisition and company culture in mind, can help your recruiters narrow down the search for qualified applicants, save time and money on employee screening and ensure that prospective new hires will benefit the company culture.
Once your HR and marketing teams have honed in on messaging that accurately explains the story of your brand, your employees will have a better chance of communicating this story with like-minded professionals who could be your next new hires.
It’s very important that your company is accurately represented to the public and prospective new hires based on it’s values and operations so that you and your employees can follow through on their mission with clear goals in mind. Ongoing coordination between marketing and HR teams can help ensure this is the case while you market your company to new talent pools. This type of collaboration is becoming more common as businesses seek to communicate what makes their company appealing to new talent and get employees on board with the company’s mission at the same time.
