Using a Marketing-Driven Approach to Recruit Talent
January 11, 2019By Elliot Lum
Marketers are experts at finding customers for our brand's products and keeping these customers loyal to the business. We employ the latest technology to help us drive efficiency in our marketing investments to elevate profits. This approach needs to be relentless to drive growth. Taking our foot off the pedal can result in losing customers that hurt our market share. Striving to be better is in a marketer's DNA.
We need skilled talent to help drive that approach. However, most companies don't take a marketing approach to find the best talent. If there is a need for a job opening, a company then does a search to fulfill that need. It's a reactive approach to recruiting. Imagine if a marketer wasn't proactive when the need for their product came up with a consumer. It's not hard to see how business could be lost when our brand's products aren't even part of the consideration set. For that reason, it's not acceptable to just sit back and wait for customers to tell us what they want. We must constantly be on to demonstrate the value of our products.
Organizations with hiring needs should take a page out of the marketer's playbook. A reactive approach to hiring can lead to a job not being filled for weeks, if not months. Taking a more proactive, marketing-driven approach to recruiting can help companies find the top available talent. Recruiting often falls on the shoulders of HR, but marketing leaders must be involved to get the talent that they want for the organizations they are trying to build. There needs to be a collaboration between marketing and HR to drive brand preference for talent. Marketers can and must help drive that.
Recently, the ANA CMO Masters Circle organized a talent roundtable with Jim Trebilcock, chief concentrate and international officer at Keurig Dr Pepper. His passion for recruiting and retaining talent is infectious. Jim leads campus recruiting to identify and channel the best talent into his organization. He's not waiting around for the talent to come to him. Instead, by going directly to the source, he can champion why these candidates should come to work for his organization.
"Being so actively involved in the recruiting process allows us to find the right talent for the organization and signal to everyone the importance that I place on recruiting," Jim says. "Great talent drives growth for our organization."
The ANA encourages all marketing leaders to adopt this mindset toward recruiting and retaining talent. Don't just leave recruitment to HR. It should be a collaboration, as marketing leaders have a great sense of how to find this talent and also to articulate what the brand story is for why this talent should come work for them. Taking this marketing-driven approach to recruiting talent will create a competitive advantage that will drive growth for the organization.
Elliot Lum is the head of talent acquisition at the ANA Educational Foundation. Check out his book Entrepreneurial Confessions — How Young Founders Found Their Way, available in stores and online now.