The Hindu Business Line : Putting marketing to work in recruitment

Too many jobs chasing too few (talented) people. India Inc’s talent acquisition and management problems emanate from an ill-balanced supply-demand talent scale. Obviously then, companies that need the best and the brightest talent have to elbow their way into the potential employee’s mindspace.

Prof. Sridhar Balasubramanian, Associate Professor of Marketing, University of North Carolina, on a three-city tour of India, spoke about marketing and business concepts that HR professionals can use to become more customer (employee)-oriented. “One of my strategies is to teach how to bring the marketing mindset to the HR profession,” says the professor whose workshop titled, ‘Recruiting the best and the brightest: How to develop a market and consumer-focussed mindset,’ was conducted jointly with SHRM in Mumbai, Delhi and Bangalore.

Historically, marketing has helped companies focus on how to bring products and services into the marketplace, but these rules can be employed at the other end of the organisation to bring in a practice of quality recruiting, Prof Balasubramanian told The New Manager.

A disciplined approach to recruitment involving the application of the 3Cs (customer, company and competitor), the 4Ps (product, price, placement and promotion) and the STP (segmenting, targeting and positioning), could avoid wasteful expenditure in talent acquisition and retention. The workshops also teach managers to market themselves to their subordinates and colleagues.

The application of STP involves segmenting the marketplace, i.e., segmenting the various employment opportunities within the organisation, targeting the right kind of candidates to recruit and positioning the company to the employee. “This is where the employee value proposition comes to the fore and much depends on convincing the customer (employee) on how the company is different from its competition.”

Prof Balasubramanian also trains HR practitioners in the art of using the 4Ps of marketing while recruiting a potential candidate: product is the job design, pricing is the compensation design, promotion is employer branding and placement is the touchpoint for potential employees. “The idea is to go about the recruitment exercise in a disciplined fashion, especially in a phase of rapid growth, so that there is no wasteful expenditure,” says the professor.

Unfortunately, companies hire based only on qualifications, overlooking cultural fit, which could prove an expensive mistake.

“If companies could go a bit slow and become more strategic in their recruitment, it would yield better results, both in recruitment and retention,” he says.

In fact, using marketing concepts in the HR practice could go beyond just recruitment. For instance, Prof Balasubramanian recommends the mapping of the existing customers’ (read that as employee’s) experience from womb to tomb. “Before the customer (employee) chooses your organisation, ask him or her some questions about why he or she would like to join you. Then give your own reasons, don’t make it a laundry list, but target the potential employee and target your pitch,” advises the professor.

He also teaches HR managers about attribute categorisation and evaluation matrix where they need to strategically divide the basic attributes of the company, those that help it distinguish itself from competition, and those that can really excite the customer (employee). “These should be attributes that everybody else has kept aside. This is targeting and segmenting.”

Commenting on the popular notion that employees leave managers and not organisations, Prof Balasubramanian says that both entities could be the cause for exits. Managers should be helped to get an insight into how they can become more customer-focussed. The important point is not to give the organisation away to customers. “There are clever ways to manage employees so that they are happy, loyal, energised and engaged, and the organisation gets productivity.”

That’s why, he says, companies that are everything to everybody end up being very little to anybody. Therefore, companies should be disciplined in targeting potential employees too.

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