It is indeed a very thoughtful and thought provoking article.I was searching something on branding our organsiation In India as we are new and came across your article .Thanks for helping me understand the similarity between Marketing and Recrutiment .The 4 P’s are helping me ocnnect dots ….The article has given me lot of questions to ask my employees and to position ourselves .Lisa do let me know incase you have written more articles .I am sure it would add to my knowledge.

Regards
Nk

I almost jumped from my chair. Hallelujah!! Thank you for connecting the dots between HR and Marketing.

Having several decades of experience in the Marketing trenches, I definitely see many similarities between marketing and HR. When I talk to HR Directors about how they can improve their communications or use tools to help them predict employee success, they tend to get a glazed look in their eyes.

Regardless of the terms used to describe the marketing process? all of the techniques (the operative word is ALL) apply to the process of attracting, hiring and retaining good employees. It is no different than the process of attracting, servicing/selling and retaining good customers. In fact, as I think of it, if some companies treated their customers as they do their employees, they?d be belly-up.

Your suggestions concerning packaging, pricing, positioning and differentiation, are great and I would expand these marketing approaches beyond the limited scope of recruiting and ?landing the best candidates?. A strong marketing head-set can serve when companies consider how to select, promote, retain and develop good personnel. There are many parallels to add to your list and here are a few more.

The Scientific Method
Your reference to ?the Scientific Method? was unclear to me, but if you?re asking where research comes into play, testing and scientific tools should come into play throughout the process just as it does in successful marketing. It certainly has a role in the screening and assessment tools that are available. These tools utilize sophisticated analyses such as factoring and regression techniques to identify the behaviors and talents that are critical to success for a particular job. These are the same tools used to identify product features, pricing levels, etc. in the marketing world.

Knowing one?s audience
Understanding the intricacies and mind-sets of one?s audience is critical to reaching them. This is definitely true for marketing in researching (the Science) audiences for new product development, image, branding, awareness, wants and needs. It should be true for HR and Management as well. Companies should want to know which represents not only the ?top? personnel? to hire, but they should also want to know which of their current staff have the potential to be top performers.

Developing Relationships
The buzz these days in Marketing is about developing relationships with customers. How about management developing two-way dialogues with their employees? Customers often have perceptions of a company or a product that are not based on fact. Often the work of marketers is to identify those gaps and create communications that attempts to fill-in the perceptual gaps. The same happens in the workplace between management and employees. Research audits can identify departments, functions were workers and/or management is out of sync with the rest of the organization as a very similar tool identifies when customers perceptions of a company are not in sync with a particular company or product.

The net result should be something more than a once a year performance review and monthly newsletters. The benefits of real, on-going dialogue can produce some wonderful results and help to strengthen the ties between management and employees? just as it does between manufacturer and customer.

Make it easy for them to make the purchase decision.
A company may have designed and created a great product, but without the right systems to not only deliver but to also service and support that product, customers will not respond. The same is true of employees. You may have a ?great career bundle? to entice them to sign on the bottom line, but without good management, support systems to achieve success, career development system, etc., employees will become disenchanted and will leave – costing the company even more money in turnover and replacement.

Effective Communications
Boy, is this an area for major improvement! Communications should be enticing, loaded with impact, stimulate interest and stir action on the part of the readers. Typically, Help Wanted ads fall a rung behind the Obituaries in stimulating interest. If HR wants to attract qualified candidates, try upgrading the quality of the communications.

Again, Lisa, thank you for making the connection and seeing the great possibilities when these two disciplines are working hand-in-hand.

Sheila Hibbard
shibbard@involved.com

Many points are accurate, BUT a few things that need to be added. In the marketing world, a world from which I have years of experience, the 4 ‘P”s are being questioned and are considered outdated to a certain degree. What ‘marketing’ is really is candidate attraction – which channels you use to source, the compensation, the job description (how it is presented), the ‘differentiating’ factors all create ‘stickiness’ and a pull of a certain type of candidate. In B-to-B marketing we term it the advertising, branding, telemarketing which is an umbrella for awareness and identification of ‘immediate buy’ lead generation.

What I advocate and others are moving toward is a research-based method. In the recruiting world Shally Steckerl’s model for sourcing, candidate development, and recruiting is more and more being accepted in traditional B-to-B marketing where more targeted ‘sourcing’ of opportunities is uncovered. That model (versus the 4 P’s) is proving to be more effective at finding higher profit opportunities, better fit jobs between the company and the client. Hence, in recruiting – Shally’s model is similiar and I am sure has similiar ‘best fit’ results.

From what I understand, many staffing agencies – at least, do use the traditional concepts of marketing very well. Some even have ‘sales support functions’ where people work with recruiters to enhance their productivity. A job fair is a tradeshow, job advertising is advertising, calling prospective candidates – telemarketing – how they do it, where they do it, the job description – yes, that is close to the 4 P’s.

Having run Marketing/Biz Dev functions, Market Research, and being responsible for marketing/biz dev for recruiting support firms – I see NO difference between recruiting and marketing/biz dev as a function. Marketing/Biz dev is strategic fit between companies (in B-to-B), where recruiting is strategic fit between people and companies – both contribute to the growth and success of a firm in my opinion.

Side comment: My colleague and I were just discussing the job search theory of business development, we were relating the function of ‘opportunity identification to close’ as a function analagous to that of a job search. That is another topic all together.

My two cents.

Persistance–If we don’t have that, then we have no clients. Our candidates (our Product) either we don’t contact, or they get stall because the client takes forever to decide to interview.

With out the fifth P the others don’t mean much.

IMHO