« back

Putting the Marketing in Recruitment Marketing

By Jacqueline Drew
START Marketing Inc.
www.startmarketing.com

As you well know, Alberta's economy is absolutely bursting at the seams right now, and if you lived here, you'd see some pretty unusual indicators of that. One of the most glaring things I've noticed of late is the aggressiveness of recruitment advertising. Companies here are going well beyond the newspaper ad, and are beginning to use techniques like outdoor transit advertising, radio, and even television ads to recruit employees.

As a marketing consultant, this proves to me that companies really put on their strategic marketing hats to address recruitment marketing – because not only is it marketing, it is perhaps an even more difficult kind of marketing than the product or service they are used to selling. Here's what I mean.

• First, you need a vision. If people are going to spend their lives working in your company, what will they have helped to accomplish? Does your business make the world a better place somehow, or does it just give people something they don't need, or will soon throw into a landfill?
• Second, you need values. If your ads say you care about people, how does this translate to your own staff? Are you willing to go the extra mile to accommodate the personal lives of employees, or do you expect employees to have unlimited time to donate at your beck and call? While there are employees with minimal personal lives, most, at some time or another will need an employer to be flexible.
• Finally, you need to commit to developing your people. People want to work where they can settle into a satisfying career, not just a dead-end job. If you can determine a career progression chain, make it clear when the employee is first hired, and put the support in place, it will be both a selling tool for new employees, and a retention tool for existing ones.

The upshot is, recruitment marketing is marketing… don't just leave it to your HR department, get your marketing brains involved. In fact, I could argue that you have to be even better at marketing for staff than you do for marketing to sell your product, because let's face it, a 50% of someone's life is a much bigger commitment to ask of someone than any purchase of a product or service you might be used to selling. It takes deep thinking real ingenuity to find answers to the question “Why should someone want to spend their lives in service of this business?” Because as all good marketers know, while an attractive dollar figure can get someone in the door, it seldom keeps them there.