HR Marketing: How to Market Your Company

Guest post by Raisa Yogiaman from Zavvy.io

When talking about marketing, we often quickly associate it with product/service marketing where you promote the features of your product and reasons why people should use your services. 

There is, however, another subcategory of marketing that is highly important as product marketing, but many companies often ignore it: HR marketing.

When done right, HR marketing can help your brand attract talented candidates and increase employee retention. Eventually, this strategy can bring more profit to your business. 

This article will help you understand what HR marketing is, its benefits, and tips on where to start.

What is HR Marketing?

As the name suggests, HR Marketing promotes all activities related to employee experience and the company itself to the public. These include company announcements (PR), recruitment marketing, company culture promotion, and employer branding, among others.

There are two types of HR marketing:

1. Internal marketing

The audience for internal marketing is your current employees and stakeholder. You use the company’s internal communication channels, such as emails, Slack, or newsletters, to inform the team about the latest updates happening around your business.

For example, your company will welcome a new CFO next month, or there’s a new Spanish class open for registration as part of an employee development program.

2. External marketing

On the contrary, external marketing focuses on the public perception of your company. Therefore, your (potential) customers and potential employees will be the audience of your marketing communications.

For instance, posting team events on your business’ LinkedIn page or sharing company achievements in the monthly newsletter. 

3 Benefits of HR Marketing

Excellent HR marketing will not only be beneficial for your sales and marketing teams to gain more customers, but it also increases the chance for you to attract talented candidates.

The followings explain the benefits in more detail:

1. Strong Employer Branding

Employee branding is the public perception of your company. Generally speaking, people are more attracted to buying products or joining companies with a good reputation than entering an organization with a negative reputation.

From the HR perspective, good employer branding stems from the level of the employees’ satisfaction. The happier the employees with their jobs, work culture, and the chance to develop, the likelier for them to share their positive work experiences online.

Keep in mind that employee testimonials are much more convincing than you mentioning ‘why you should join us’ on your vacancy page.

You also actively participate in building the company brand by regularly sharing the perks and benefits your employees get, the social life within the team, and other worth-mentioning events/achievements.  

With this, not only do you gain excellent PR exposure, but you also promote yourself as an employer who cares for its workers.

2. Improve candidate experience

You can also use HR marketing during the recruitment process. On your job vacancy advertisement, share what someone will get if they join the family. Don’t only focus on the financial aspects but vary the list from social to development areas of your company.

For example, promote the monthly team lunch, bi-weekly team yoga, and free foreign language training.

Continue the promotion during the pre-boarding and onboarding journey by sending them invitations or registration forms for the training classes they want to join. In this way, you’ll create a solid candidate experience for your new talents.

3. Helps Attract Passive Talent

Speaking of recruitment, HR marketing is also a great tool to persuade passive talent to make a brave move on their career path.

Passive talent isn’t as passive as it may seem. Passive job seekers are employed employees who are intermittently looking for another opportunity in another company. 

Positive employer branding (as discussed above) could drive talented passive job seekers to your company as they see what your organization offers to their talents.

Channels to Market Your Company

Consider using the following channels to put your HR marketing strategy into motion.

1. Social media and website

Establishing an active and robust social media presence can help your organization’s external and internal communication.

If your company has a blog section or a ‘company news’ section, write short blogs. To help you get started, read our guide on ‘how to write a blog post‘.

Some ideas of what content your HR and marketing teams can post include:

• Company accomplishments, e.g., being the number one brand in the European market for five consecutive years, surpassing the 1000-clients goal, etc.
• Thought leadership content to showcase your company’s work culture and the teams behind the brand
• Inspiring stories, e.g., an interview about your successful employee
• Other personal anecdotes about your company and brand

2. Career Pages

Promoting your brand starts with your career pages. It could be one of your most frequently visited pages, and it’s relatively easy to create.

Get your career page as creative, engaging, and detailed as possible. Show the employee benefits, the employee testimonials, and the career map, but with a different style.

For example, instead of simply stating ‘some benefits you’ll get’, say ‘here are what you’ll get after three months working with us’ or ‘here’s why you should join us’. 

You could also add different types of content, like emojis, gifs, and memes to make your career page visually nicer to look at and feels not too formal.

3. Job Boards

Most of us will go through several job websites when searching for a job. That’s why don’t just post on one job board, but spread out to others and market it on your social media accounts as well.

Consider the following points before creating the job advertisement:

• Job description
• Specific job requirements
• Company benefits and perks
• The platform to use for advertising

Challenges of HR Marketing

Every marketing campaign requires a sufficient budget to back it up. Although HR marketing doesn’t seem to cost too much money, you still need to calculate the cost carefully.

The expenses should include the cost of buying a premium subscription plan for social media accounts and job board websites and the cost of hiring an external/freelancer to design the illustrations, do video editing, or even write some blogs. 

Some other challenges are:

• Ensuring both the product/service marketing and HR marketing run well and do not overlap
• Lack of employee testimonials or events to cover
• Getting the right platform

Wrapping up

HR marketing is not a one-time job. It requires commitment and creativity. To achieve successful results, make sure you align the goals with other departments to ask for their best cooperation. This way, you’ll be able to share your excellent brand, product/services, and work culture with the public, which can attract more customers and talented candidates to your business.