Employment Marketing Review of the Year

I have had this blog for a year, and this is an overview showing how my blogs build up a model of employment marketing. It’s also the season when everyone else is doing a Review of the Year.

The earliest articles, “What is Employment Marketing?” (Dec 2011) and “How marketing can sell your personnel product” (Jan) are blog versions of articles I had published in the mid-1990’s. These outline the idea that in HR we are marketing employment, and so marketing provides a model for everything we do.

The next January blog, “We have already got Employer Branding – isn’t that enough?” explored the difference between employment marketing and employer branding. Most HR people seem to see branding and marketing as synonymous, which is incorrect. The final January blog “What role does branding play in Employment Marketing?” explores the difference further, and analyses the different kinds of purchasing decision a consumer makes.

The early blogs had all been fairly theoretical, so February’s blog, “Solving HR problems using Employment Marketing” illustrated how employment marketing can be used on a practical tactical level.

March’s blog “What is the product behind the Employer brand?” examined the issue of the size of the employment product. For those of you who have only encountered employer branding so far, the concept of an employment product might be unfamiliar. The idea that such products could be of different sizes will probably be alien. Essentially, it comes down to whether you are selling careers within an organisation, or jobs that will form an episode in someone’s career. 

The May blog, “Was that HR ad sexist?” picked up on a job advertisement that had provoked considerable debate in the CIPD Member LinkedIn discussion group. As my blog article had a wider scope than the just sexist adverts, I republished the blog in October under the title “Targeting a segment, or indirect discrimination?”

Many articles about employer branding assume every HR person is working in a large corporation, and is aspiring to build a brand as well-known as Google. June’s blog “Too small for an employer brand?” shows how employment marketing can be used in any size of organisation.

July’s blog “”Internal recruitment” or Internal recruitment” is a little diversion away from employment marketing, trying to restore the correct use of the term. Agency recruiters will be offended, but most of them deserve to be.

For years HR people have been bleating that they are not taken seriously by organisations, and that HR must become strategic. September’s ironically- entitled “Easy ways to make HR strategic” pops a few balloons in describing some of the vacuous ways some HR people try to appear strategic. In November, I realised I had missed a favourite route to instant strategy, hence “Another way to make Human Resources strategic”.

For 2013, I plan to do more blogs on the practical application of marketing techniques to HR problems, employment marketing in a recession, and the irrelevance of brand management to the employer brand. I will continue to throw sticks into the spokes of any HR bandwagons that come too close, and will enjoy doing so.