What can HR learn from marketers?

HRD spoke to Elizabeth Williams, President at Candler Chase and speaker at our upcoming e-learning course ‘Recruit like a marketer’. She talked us through what recruiters can learn from marketers.

“Marketers are very good at targeting,” she explained. “We’re great being tightly targeted in the audience we’re trying to reach. In recruiting, you should be looking to do one very targeted advert rather than a huge blanket outreach. HR already has a pretty good idea of that kind of candidate they want to fill the role on offer – from that point it’s easy.”

Being specific about the kind of person you want walking into a new job should come easily for recruiters and HR managers. As an HR leader, you already know what fit the new employee should be and what attributes you’re looking for. From there, it shouldn’t be a huge leap to targeting marketing.

“One of the tools marketers use that I’d love to see in recruiting is a method called personas. A persona is where a marketer will make up a character for the kind of candidate they want. You take your existing, or desired, customer base and create a character out of that data.”

Perhaps the best part of this method is that HR already has access to that all-important data. You need only look into the employee database to analyze what kinds of people fill the roles and what types of skills sets are the most successful.

“Personas also help diversify the workforce,” continued Elizabeth. “Take a look at your staff database, see what demographics are lacking and use that information to bring another competitive advantage to your organization. I’d love to see recruiters starting to use this method. Once they have that clear picture in their heads about who they’re reaching out to, what they like and where to find them, then targeting marketing becomes a lot easier.”

Could your recruitment processes do with a revamp? Elizabeth will be guiding our upcoming e-learning course – in which she’ll reveal exactly how a marketing approach can revolutionize your hiring practices.

Sign up for the course here.