Some HR professionals already started to transition to a hybrid position that requires both human resources and marketing skills. Well, to be fair, marketing has always been an important part of the HR processes. But do HR professionals really need to dedicate time and energy to become marketers as well? Don’t get me wrong, any type of knowledge can help an individual, but you might want to focus on mastering your primary specialization first and foremost.
My experience has thought me that you can accomplish great HR – Marketing synergy if you know where the two departments will intertwine. This way you can plan your requests and get the essentials of the collaboration right. I’ve interacted with HR departments as a Marketing Specialist in multiple companies (both small and large businesses), and I got to observe just how much of a difference good preparation makes. A marketer’s input will always be needed in HR activity, and if you get the fundamentals right, your collaboration will run smoothly.
There are 3 main situations where the two departments cross paths:
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Branding
Each employee is a brand ambassador, but in this endeavor few are as significant as the HR professional. Job applicants and new employees build their image of the company based on their first interactions. Understanding the core values of the company and the brand itself is crucial, and it’s generally up to the Marketing/Branding department to make sure every employee follows through with the brand’s principles. In the absence of such a department, a manager or a company founder could do that as well.
How to act on it as a HR professional: request a meeting with a representative from the marketing department (preferably with the manager) to go over the brand philosophy and essentials. HR and Marketing should both be the departments with excellent understanding of the brand.
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Recruitment
Whether you’re announcing a job opening in the local paper, on social media, on your website, or everywhere (which would be preferred actually), a marketing input will be extremely valuable and in some cases needed. It’s safe to presume that the marketer will probably know more about social media than the human resources professional, therefore could improve the success of the recruiting process.
How to act on it as a HR professional: you will need several meetings at least until you get the hang of the tools, so make sure to plan in advance. Approach the marketer with proposals at all times, don’t expect him to do the entire job from scratch, unless that’s what he’s tasked with in the first place.
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Induction
By now you should have a great understanding of the brand, and why it’s so important that all employees follow a set of rules that represent the company. It’s up to the HR and Marketing departments to make sure the new employees understand and apply these rules. Whether it’s a dress code, or document templates, all rules have the same objective: to reach those brand ideals. At one point I even designed time efficient notebooks for a company with specific fields that would make note-taking more efficient, and increase the brand’s ideal of well-organized professionals. The examples could go on, but the point is to understand why those rules need to exist.
How to act on it as a HR professional: study the brand book well and gather all the templates the company has. These should be among the first things that are made available for any employee. Request assistance from the Marketing department in the first brand talks that you have with a new employee. The marketer should want to have this talk anyway.
Miscellaneous
If you strip marketing down to the core, it can be defined as the art of convincing someone to take a certain action. That means that they have a particular set of skills that could benefit anything that requires some sort of convincing – presentations, emails, or team buildings, just to name a few. This is one of the most important department pairings you will have in any company, don’t overlook it.
