As a marketer, you’re regularly attracting, persuading, and converting prospective customers through the use of relevant content delivered at the right time. It’s a lot to manage on a daily basis. Wouldn’t it be nice to have someone with whom you could collaborate outside of your department but inside your organization—someone with whom you could share ideas and be a sounding board?
If you haven’t already found the yin to your marketing yang, then go ask a corporate recruiter to lunch right now! That’s right—your recruiting counterpart in human resources overcomes similar obstacles as he strives to attract, and be the best talent acquisition team for your organization. In fact, many of his methods are the same as yours. Each of you has your strengths; however, you could very well round out each other’s challenges if you team up for some special projects.
Here are four project ideas that will make marketing and recruiting the new dynamic duo in your company:
You spend a ton of time making sure that your corporate brand is a shining beacon of truth for your organization’s endeavors. From perfecting standardized email signatures to enforcing the consistent usage of only the logos and colors referenced in your media kit—you’ve got branding down pat. However, how much do you know about what recruiting and HR folks are doing to align your organization’s employment brand with the perception your customers have about your corporate brand? After all, some of your customers may turn into employees and vice versa.
A partnership between marketing and recruiting presents an organization with the opportunity to craft the hiring experience. In the same way that marketing conducts surveys and sales makes calls after a major purchase to reduce cognitive dissonance, recruiting and/or HR staff members should plan activities to engage individuals who have accepted offers but have not yet started their first day. A content series can be developed to nurture those new hires with information about the history and culture of the organization, as well as set expectations for job success.
Marketing should ask recruiting to think about whether the hiring process is easy (enough) and pleasant. Can prospective new employees receive alerts about new job postings via social media and/or text? How can the selection process experience be improved for individuals who do not get hired (so that the employment brand is still preserved)?
Your organization may not always be involved in talent acquisition. It just depends on how frequently you hire employees and your stance on maintaining a passive applicant pool. I will say that the latter is a good idea since you never know when a hiring manager will surprise you with a new job opening that needs to be filled “yesterday!” But even if you don’t have any openings presently, you should always be serving up employment- and culture-related content.
If you’re doing a great job with employment branding, then odds are you have some followers who will readily engage in social conversation and amplify your reach by sharing content with their own audiences. These people are your applicant influencers. They may not always be past applicants. In fact, they could include existing employees, devoted customers, enterprising vendors, workforce development advocates, and other friends of your company.
Marketing can lend its expertise to recruiters by helping them seek and identify other influencers for various job categories. Furthermore, both parties should brainstorm new job-related hashtags and try some sponsored social advertisements that target these influencers.
While your new dynamic duo is surely a force with which to be reckoned, think about what could be accomplished if you rallied your entire workforce around the goal of finding and securing the best and the brightest for your team. Launch an internal campaign across departments to educate others about the benefits of having the best talent and what they can do to help with talent acquisition. This is a large undertaking, so much support is required, but here’s a list of milestones to include:
Your recruiting friends are probably well-liked (they tend to have the social gene) and their interpersonal skills can be the key to helping you persuade other budding writers in your organization to share their ideas for your blog, case studies, white papers, videos, etc. Recruiters' social networks also tend to be incredibly vast, which is an amazing benefit when it comes to creating awareness for your content across multiple channels.
You can return the favor by helping them create career-focused content for their applicant-sourcing efforts. While you may run across a recruiter that dabbles in blogging every now and then, the majority of them spend all day every day screening candidates on the phone and posting job opportunities in short bursts to social media. They need you just as much as you need them.
One of the best parts about befriending your talent acquisition teammate is that it offers you a chance to think outside the box and focus your efforts on a different kind of audience—your potential new employees. Those are the people that will help your organization succeed tomorrow, too, so go schedule that lunch!
