2 C-Words That Connect Marketing and HR, Part 1

Customer and candidate – two closely related concepts, as every organization strives to win over both. So why not join forces and look for customers among candidates and candidates among customers? Or at least make greater use of the resources deployed to acquire customers in order to attract candidates?

Customer and candidate, or marketing and HR

Every position advertised in a job offer is a separate product, to which you want to attract the largest possible number of candidates who meet the criteria (members of the target group). In terms of logic and mechanics, recruitment is therefore no different from promoting a specific product. On the execution side, however, these processes usually run completely differently. A whole group of people often works on product promotion; workshops and meetings of competent specialists are organized. Meanwhile, when it comes to promoting a job offer, the recruiter — usually with a degree in human resources management — is left alone on the open space floor. In this battle, their arsenal comes down to annual framework agreements with agencies or subscription packages of job ads on a well-known portal.

The question arises why we should expect an HR specialist to be equally effective at assessing candidates and at attracting them to a job offer. Does anyone know of a case where a recruiter was hired into a marketing or sales department? Even if we answer that a recruitment specialist should have both sourcing and selection competencies, another question follows: in how many companies are they given the opportunity to develop their marketing skills?

On the promotional side, hiring is usually carried out rather mechanically (a flood of vacancies and time pressure) without deeper insight into the nature of the position and the target group. Every recruitment — or at least most of them — run by a given employer follows the same path. It usually looks like this: a posting from the job board subscription, the career page (if there is one, or if anyone remembers it), outreach on LinkedIn and Goldenline, and if the matter is confidential or the aforementioned tools have failed, a nervous turn to an agency asking for candidates due yesterday. And I am not exaggerating when I say that since the heyday of the Monday edition of "Gazeta Wyborcza" and the beginnings of Goldenline (roughly 10 years ago), this puzzle seems to have stayed much the same. One reason for this state of affairs is that cooperation between the HR team and marketing is not always close and well organized, and under the regime of corporate division of competencies and FTE pressure, HR itself has limited ability to build these competencies within its own ranks.

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So how about handing candidate acquisition over to marketing? Setting shared KPIs, as is usually done in the relationship between marketing (communication) and sales, and focusing on selection tools. After all, a job position in a company is also its unique product, just like a bank account or a tube of toothpaste. The cost of a vacancy (e.g. lost revenue) can be calculated just like the income from acquiring a new customer or selling a unit of product.

The customer-candidate relationship can be quite close from the perspective of how the company is organized, as I have already written above. It can also manifest itself in the company's acquisition activity aimed at winning both Cs. I know this sounds a bit like HR fiction, but never mind, I'll press on….

I can imagine taking various, even uncomplicated actions that would be groundbreaking in the field of candidate acquisition, yet quite natural in the field of customer acquisition. After all, apart from employees, customers are the other group around us who know something about us (the company) and may be willing to promote us or take an interest in us in any way.

The customer as a candidate

Let's start with the career page. Usually located on the company's website somewhere between banners promoting products and links to terms and conditions and other similar "essential pages".

I am not a marketer, and maybe that is why I do not understand the reasons why the career page is so often neglected by online marketing specialists. An attractively presented and easily accessible job offer can, after all, make a favorable impression on a customer and be a way to extend the time they spend engaging with our company online. Easy access to the career page and its content addressed to candidates can spark or strengthen their interest in the product — or, conversely, the product may provoke a readiness to apply for the job. Research by eRecruiter, among others, shows that dissatisfaction with the recruitment process negatively affects the purchasing decisions of nearly half of respondents. Why not nurture a positive link between recruitment and sales?

Developing the career page theme further, I can imagine it having a completely unique functionality: allowing customers to refer the right people to work at the company whose products they use. This is nothing other than the member-gets-member mechanism, well known as a customer acquisition tool, applied to recruitment. What's more, the reward for such successful referrals could be the company's product or a voucher for its purchase — business combined with pleasure — we close the recruitment and at the same time cross-sell to the customer, who then walks around town or Facebook telling everyone how great it is that they got their dream sofa for free and that their friend landed a job at a great furniture company thanks to them. What's more, there is no need to invent the process mechanics. All you need to do is implement the appropriate version of the readily available ShareHire Insider application, which can support both an internal candidate referral system and act as a multifunctional career page.

Additional support for such a solution could come from discreet messages on product pages informing customers that they can become owners of these products, for example at half price or even for free, by getting involved in referring candidates to the manufacturer's job offers. Recruitment science fiction? In an era of growing competition for good employees, I believe this kind of avant-garde solution will become an increasingly common part of routine recruitment activity.

Statistics from across the ocean, but also my own HR experience, indicate that the career page is a very attractive source of candidates — only slightly behind employee referrals. So why not go all the way: a career page with a candidate referral feature, with products as rewards, easily accessible from the main page? Let's seize the chance to reach people who are interested in our brand — here our job posting is not one of hundreds browsed by a random candidate on a job board.

Of course, voices will be raised that such solutions may be perceived as evidence of a company's serious recruitment difficulties and low attractiveness. I don't think that was the effect of Ikea's recruitment campaign aimed at customers, McDonald's large ATL campaigns, or the recently visible media promotion of working at Prudential. Besides, I have never heard of member-gets-member programs, so common in sales, evoking negative associations among customers.

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While we're on the subject of customers, why not reach out to them directly and actively with an email or phone campaign in which, instead of pushing yet another product or promotion, the company encourages them to take a job or refer candidates? I can already imagine a nice lady from my bank's call center, blessed with an even nicer voice, calling me with an offer to top up my account with an extra PLN 1,000 if I refer a candidate for an HR specialist position at the bank. I would be so surprised that I wouldn't even be irritated by yet another question about increasing the limit on my credit card… which I don't have.

The company's sales outlets also have recruitment potential. After all, the topic of recruitment referrals can be used to build customer relationships. It is even better suited to this than the open promotion of products designated by headquarters. Why not start the small talk with a customer by asking whether they happen to know someone they could refer to work at our branch? You can also treat waiting customers to an employer branding video on the plasma screen in the waiting area, encouraging them to work for the company and promoting current job offers with the option of rewarded referrals. I think it could be a valuable interlude between the product spots usually served to customers in such places.

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