A Reality Check for Talent Marketing
One of my favorite podium clips is former Jets head coach Herm Edwards' "You play to win the game!" rant.
It's clearly true in sports, where there's one winner and a scoreboard to tell the collective team what is and isn't working. But I think it's true off the field and in the corporate arena as well. If you want to have a high performing team that drives results, you need everyone focused on winning the game together. The challenge is that personal stats or games within the game can distract so easily, and the ambiguity of often not having a scoreboard can mask freelancing for some time.
I've long seen talent acquisition - the combination of recruiting and talent marketing - as the sales and marketing of HR. It promotes and sells opportunities at the company to candidates, and does the inverse, championing certain candidates to hiring managers. The ultimate goal is to bring candidates into the recruiting "funnel" and taking them all the way down to offer acceptance.
Recruiters are on the hook for their openings. They aren't originating them; instead they're more like salespeople with a very strong inside sales team... they're have their opportunity set, and they need to execute. They're incentivized to play and win the game. They hear it directly - from hiring managers, HRBPs, and recruiting leaders - when they're not delivering. They have a scoreboard, and it's populated by time-to-fill, quality of hire, cost of hire, client satisfaction, and related stats.
Talent marketing is where a problem with goal alignment can arise. A multi-billion dollar industry has grown up around talent marketing - much of it in the form of job-specific ads, but a lot of it increasingly about branding. It's incredibly enticing to get caught up in the art (e.g., beautiful imagery and language), the subject matter (e.g., interesting people and captivating narratives), the activity (e.g., blogs, posts, podcasts, livestreams and stories), and the plaudits (e.g., Webbys, top employer awards, conference speaking spots).
Much of that is necessary, but it's a means to an end. Ultimately, "you play to win the game." And in this case, the "game" is the hyper-competitive battle for talent, and "winning" is about getting the best and right talent to fill your needs.
There are a few reasons why talent marketing might not track against the winning goal or be coordinated well with recruiters:
- It's typically a one-to-many relationship between the talent marketers and recruiters. Sometimes, they're supporting efforts around the world. That automatically encourages marketers to elevate their activities, above helping promote individual positions to the point where the marketing message can start to feel a bit too academic.
- Many talent marketers have a primarily (or completely) marketing function-oriented background, as opposed to a HR or recruiting background. The recruiting strategy and process are therefore not always intuitive for them, and so they default to what they know how to do, instead of what they need to learn (re: recruiting). They converse and coordinate with other marketing people in the organization. They often subscribe to traditional marketing-oriented goals as opposed to hiring goals.
- Attribution of hiring success to talent marketing activities can be difficult. The candidate journey can be a long one, in which they're exposed to different information and advertisements over time. They may wander over to the jobs section of the career site, compelled by seeing earlier talent marketing, but later and without clicking through. Lack of reliable attribution can make marketers flee to other measures of success that they can confidently point to as justification for their value add and investment asks.
Despite these reasons, ultimately it's imperative for talent marketers to get sync'd up with recruiters and act as a cohesive unit. What does it take to do this (and consequently deliver against talent objectives)?
- A clear, shared articulation and understanding of hiring priorities for the business (what talent do we need, where, when). What are the handful of MOST important things to get right. Everything should be built around this, and anything that doesn't clearly support it gets de-prioritized or dropped completely (no matter how cool it might be).
- Development of campaigns to support these priorities. Some could be quicker hit and more self-contained. Others might be long, recurring, and/or sprawling. Regardless, we need to bring both the related marketing activities and recruiter efforts with candidates into these cohesive campaigns, with coordination, consistent success measurement, and continual improvement.
- An identification of the value of each marketing vehicle throughout the funnel. Perhaps the career fair participation and social posts are driving upper funnel applications. Sell sheets on a particular function / geography could help the recruiter cultivate a relationship and even close out on an offeree. This needs to be spelled out, with the proper process of educating and activating recruiters to use the "marketing stuff" considered.
- An analysis across the campaigns to assess a) how they all map against the calendar, b) the total investment required to support them (in both monetary investment and personnel), c) the collective payoff we expect from the effort and the marketing team.
It's so easy for talent marketing to become a vanity exercise for your CHRO or Chief Talent Officer to look at pridefully and attract kudos. It would be wrong, though, and it would keep talent marketing marginalized. The best talent marketers should be tapped into the pulse of the recruiting effort specifically and the talent needs of the business more generally. Essentially, they contribute to winning by serving as a trusted partner of sales and putting relatively more emphasis on the "talent" part of the role than the "marketing" part.
The views expressed here are my own and do not necessarily reflect those of my current or past employers. If you would like to read more of my writing, you can follow me here on LinkedIn and/or on Twitter at @chrislouie.
You can also read a few of my other LinkedIn posts:
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6 年Interesting to see what can be done in talent marketing, nice perspective.
Connecting People?| Advocate for Inclusion | Executive Search | Recruitment Marketing | Talent Strategies | Lead | Systems Configuration (ATS) | Bookworm ?? | Art Dabbler
6 年Such challenges often sadly occur frequently when companies outsource their recruitment marketing / brand development. The other challenge is that in many of the larger global organisations, consultation between Marketing and HR / Recruitment is often overlooked before developing strategies and campaigns. It is so important for content to be relevant to the candidates, passive or active! HR / Recruitment teams will certainly have valuable input regarding what they specifically hope to achieve from marketing efforts, and also advise on what they themselves can contribute towards marketing efforts. You make a very valid point about the need for more 'trusted partnerships' - though that trust is sometimes difficult to obtain initially. I'm still unsure how such challenges could be overcome, particularly when dealing with offices in different countries.