Applying a marketing approach to what HR does might seem rather academic, and removed from everyday HR operational problems. In this blog I give some examples of problems I have solved by defining them as marketing issues.
1. “Working for you ruins careers”.
Organisations can have different reputations in different sectors. When I joined one company – the UK subsidiary of an Asian-based electronics company – I discovered how big the gap can be. One of the vacancies I inherited was for a sales person in a team selling IT products. I phoned a couple of IT recruitment agencies to give them the vacancy details. The first seemed a little guarded, saying it was quite a difficult market, and perhaps we need to increase the salary to get a good response. I was astounded when the second one refused to work on the vacancy. In fact, the recruiter said “Sorry, we will not send candidates’ details to your company; working for you ruins careers.”
I knew this sales division had a troubled past. The previous ex-pat Divisional Manager had a terrible reputation within the company. He had harassed staff to the point where several legal cases had been brought and settled out of court, the department suffered a high turnover of staff, and some of his business decisions had damaged relations with the distributors the company sold through.
This was not the kind of problem that could be solved through “employer branding”. We had to fix the product before we attempted to re advertise it. I am glad to say that the newly-seconded Divisional Manager was amiable, and keen to get the division working effectively. He was alarmed to discover what a bad reputation the division had inherited. In parallel to him establishing his relationship with the remaining staff, I started to cultivate some recruitment agencies. I worked with some that had also recruited for other divisions, as they knew that the company was a better employer in other divisions. I frankly discussed the problem division, and its reputation in its specialist labour market. I reassured one or two that with me as a new Head of HR, and with a new Divisional Manager in place, there would be a radical improvement in the employment experience. Gradually, we turned the situation round to a point where we could rebuild a full team.
2. Bums on seats in the Training Room.
One of the companies I worked for was going through a period of sustained growth. We had recruited a lot of young ambitious staff who were keen to be developed, and they needed training as well as wanted training. The HR team had grown in parallel, and now included a full-time Training Officer. She had developed a number of short skills courses to be run in-house, and was getting sufficient nominations for places on the courses. Sufficient nominations, but not all there could be. We had many employees complaining that they were interested in the courses, but never got to hear about them in time. The Training Officer had been regularly sending managers the schedule of courses, so something was going adrift.
I had previously worked for a paper manufacturer, which is where I had heard of “Back-selling”. In the paper company’s range was a high quality brand of stationary (these were pre-email days). The paper company actually sold their products to paper merchants, in the strict transactional sense of that’s who they shipped the product to, and who they got their money from. The marketing strategy was to advertise the brand to senior business executives, getting across the message that their organisation’s image depended in part on the quality of paper they used for their correspondence. The senior executives would tell their PA’s to tell their Purchasing Managers to order “Conqueror” brand stationary from the paper merchants.
Applying this to marketing our training courses, I could see that we had to use back-selling. The problem was not the courses, nor lack of senior management support, nor convincing the ultimate consumers of the courses of their value. The middle managers were not passing on the information, but it was those managers who had the power to nominate staff to attend the courses. We needed to get the junior staff to pressurise their managers. We called this strategy “the push from below”. The Training Officer started putting the training course schedule on the notice boards, and we included an item in the Induction Course on “Other Courses We Run”. We included reports of training courses, particularly photogenic ones like training in the outdoors, in the staff newsletter. When we had employees asking managers “why did we never get to hear about these course?” the level of nominations increased significantly.
3. Who, what, where and how much?.
A marketing and sales division of a hi-tech company I worked for was situated in central London. It needed to set up a small R&D team of software specialists. The Divisional Director initially wanted to keep all his division together on the central London site. I advised him that the R&D specialists he sought were currently working out of town, mostly in the Thames Valley. He could probably attract them into London by offering them all very high salaries and fully-expensed company cars, but they would appear to be on an “over the top” package compared to any salary survey. Senior management would challenge the apparent extravagance of the package. We had to get a workable and economic balance of product (employment in software R&D), price and geographical place. It was finally agreed to set up a satellite office in Reading, Berkshire for the R&D team. This put us in the geographical place where people with the desired skills could be recruited at the prevailing market rate.
All of these examples are applications of marketing concepts other than the overworked “brand”. They were all real HR problems. It is very unlikely that you will have these specific problems in your organisation at the moment, but I am sure that ones you have will be amenable to a marketing solution.
