A New Breed of HR…People Marketers

I had the great pleasure of chairing the HR Retail event last week, which included amazing HR leaders from amazon, Gap, Walmart, Macy’s, Walgreens, Levi's, Home Depot, Sephora, Five Below, Kiehl's, Bonobos, Kate Spade, Charlotte Russe, Charming Charlie, Rag & Bone, Best Buy, Hot Topic, Fresh Market, West Marine, RaceTrac, Ahold Delhaize, just to name a few.

Within the first few hours of the event, I had to take a mental pulse check. Was I in the right place? The sessions I saw were all about “branding, engagement, digitalization, social media optimization, A/B testing, click-thru, acquisition, retention and conversion”. Was this an HR event or a Marketing event?

The beautiful answer is both. HR leaders are People Marketers.

Intuitively, we all know this, but when you’ve been in “Marketing” for a really long time, you tend to forget that everyone is a marketer in some way. Everyone has a “customer”. And for HR, that customer is the employee or potential employee.

I think the challenge all companies and all functions face is it is easy to lose sight of your customer when you are busy battling internal barriers. Which is sad, but all too often true. And is exactly why the power shifted to the customer years ago and why we all run around shouting things like “omnichannel” and “customer experience”, “seamless journeys” and “relevant interactions”. These terms are not new, they are table stakes for anyone wanting to engage their customer in the most positive manner.

In B2C Marketing, the consumer and/or shopper is the customer, and if that customer has a bad impression of your brand, they let the world know through reviews on various channels like Yelp, Twitter, Facebook, amazon, your own brand channels. The same applies for the HR customer – the employee. Look at Glassdoor (said in a whisper). I did. Here is what I found:

• I picked on a company that has had a lot of bad press recently, Uber. I fully expected to see horrible ratings, but no, Uber actually comes highly recommended.
• There are certainly some colorful comments – both positive and negative – for just about every company
• There is some great information on trends as well as resources like “Glassdoor for Dummies”.
• Bottom line – valuable source of information with a lot in the works to help HR shape their brand reputation and attract top talent.

And that’s what’s happening. In HR’s People Marketing role, not only do they build, launch and monitor campaigns to promote their brands, they also dive deep into the data to ensure they are leveraging all the valuable nuggets along the way.

So, why then, if Brand Development and NPS are shared objectives, and if the consumer/shopper could also be the employee/candidate, are we not collaborating more internally and sharing resources to fully leverage all of a company’s assets?

What I heard at the conference is there is a lot of beg, borrow, steal going on. People are busy. Everyone has their unique objectives. Budget isn’t allocated. The list goes on. I get that, but at the end of the day, Profitability and Growth are impacted. 

It amazed me how many of these HR leaders were actually outsourcing some or all of their “people marketing” (because of internal barriers) when they have some of the brightest marketing and data science talent within their own company, not to mention advanced technology and rich CRM systems.

What I find to be very impressive is how much ownership and determination these HR leaders had when it came to driving the Brand despite not always having the tools or support in place. Some did have Marketing backgrounds, others had Legal backgrounds, some had Operations backgrounds, but ALL of them were rolling up their sleeves to move the ball forward.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t clarify one thing here…this is not simply about talent acquisition. This is equally, if not more importantly about retention. Just like with consumer marketing where retention drives value 5:1 over acquisition, so does employee marketing. Take a look at these recent stats from Gallup:

• 33% of Employees are Engaged – this means they are “psychological owners” in the company and the ones who drive performance and innovation (but, oh btw, 37% are still looking for new jobs).
• 51% of Employees are NOT Engaged – this is driven by a lack of connection to the company. Either there is a mismatch on skills, where the employee does not feel they can deliver their best everyday, or they are not connected to the culture and do not feel they are valued.
• 16% of Employees are Actively Disengaged – they are angry and resentful.

Want more bad news?

• Gallup estimates that active disengagement costs the U.S. $450 billion to $550 billion per year.
• The ratio of engaged vs not engaged vs actively disengaged has barely changed in 15 years.
• No change despite the US spending $720 million annually in engagement improvement, which only represents about half the potential market ($1.53 billion).

Ready for some good news? Collectively, we can change this if we work together.

I just read this great article in HBR: Why the Millions We Spend on Employee Engagement Buy Us So Little. In this article, the author, Jacob Morgan, shares research he did which uncovered what he calls “Experiential Organizations”, which means companies that are heavily investing in three employee experience environments: Cultural, Technological and Physical work environments. 

And there you have it. Employee Experience. Just like Customer Experience. In fact, Adobe (one of the Experiential Organizations listed, along with Facebook, LinkedIn, Airbnb, Accenture and others) has an EVP of Customer and Employee Experience!

Implications?

So, let’s do this. All you marketers out there, I encourage you to go hug your HR counterparts. Together, you can make a huge impact on your business growth and the happiness of all the people who work with you.

If you liked this article, please share it. I’d love to see us change those wrenching Gallup numbers. Or, if you have some great advice to share with others, please comment!