I recently met Dharmesh Shah, co-founder of HubSpot. HubSpot is a software product, which they call an Inbound Marketing System. The premise is that marketing departments and small businesses need to make themselves more available and accessible online, which in turn will attract those people that are looking for them already (but to-date haven’t found them.) It’s about blogging, search engine optimization, leveraging social media and social networks, and measuring everything to understand what’s working, what’s not working, etc. Unlike outbound marketing (think: Google AdWords), HubSpot is about attracting people by “being out there” and being able to properly convert those people into leads.
This is exactly what HR needs to think about and start acting on immediately.
Louise Kursmark at Career Hub makes reference to this in her recent post, What keeps recruiters up at night? –
My final thought about recruiting: It needs a shot in the arm from the marketing department. In fact, successful companies need to market themselves to future employees just as seriously as they market their products or services to consumers. Yet most HR people are not marketing oriented, and despite the ubiquitous trend toward employment branding, most companies don’t invest the resources and talent necessary to make their recruiting function as vibrant as their marketing area. Those that do make the investment will reap the rewards - a more talented, more engaged workforce that creates and supports a winning culture.
HR is fairly good when it comes to outbound marketing. We post on job boards (although not always the right ones) and we source online (and offline) to find job seekers and bring them in. But when it comes to inbound recruiting, Human Resources is far behind. People are talking about this concept, although not using the term inbound recruiting, but it’s clear where the leaders of HR are pushing the industry. Kevin Wheeler talks about strategic actions HR can take in a recession. Just look at point #5 in Kevin’s list — Building Relationships — I could copy the whole thing in here, but I won’t…
HR = Marketing
It becomes more and more clear every day that HR has to evolve into a marketing arm of the enterprise. HR has to become about outreach (both outbound and inbound marketing), and focus on building employer brand, corporate presence and accessibility. HR has to become more strategic.
I would not propose that HR stop marketing in an outbound way - job boards can work, sourcing can work, 3rd party recruiters can work - but HR is missing out on inbound opportunities: creating a strong recruiting presence, optimizing it, testing it and creating community, accessibility and affinity.
Inbound marketing for HR. What do you think?
This sounds exactly on point. The companies that intuitive understand the importance of 1) online media 2) social media and 3) how to harness both to engage 1) customers 2) press/audience and 3) future employees are going to tend to succeed more than those who don’t.
And interestingly I found this post via tweet on Twitter.
Finally, we believe that BlogWerds (http://blogwerds.com/) is part of the inbound marketing equation in that it tightly focuses on helping company blogs (in theory the companies that get #1 / #2 / #3 above!) to be seen, shared, and engaged with.
I could not agree more. We get stacks of resumes from marketing and other peopel here at HubSpot, because we are so active in different communities that people want to work here. Our development team is taking the same approach, publishing a tech blog and videos on YouTube about what it is like to work at HubSpot.
Marketing is not about your product. It is about spreading ideas to build a following. And if you want to hire the best people, you want to build a following of the people you want to hire. Another compay that does this well is 37 Signals.
I think it’s time HR and recruiting got some help to create demand from job seekers. Employers are all competing for the same pool of people. The organization that makes itself desired is going to win.
while you can get ideas from inbound marketing, i think it’s an overreach. inbound marketing means being able to craft & test landing pages, have metrics for conversion, being able to do split tests, which to my knowledge standoutjobs is not doing yet (or i am wrong?)
Marsha: I agree that HR needs help. It needs the mandate and resources to shift from being reactionary and transaction-based to relationship, marketing and inbound driven.
Heri: Inbound marketing for HR may be an overreach today, but it’s a reality that’s on its way. Standout Jobs isn’t doing the things you describe at this point, but the ideas are still extremely relevant.
@Team Blogwerds: Thanks for the comment. We’re definitely on the same page. It’s great to see that you found us through Twitter. Hope you’ll follow me on Twitter - http://www.twitter.com/byosko and Standout Jobs - http://www.twitter.com/Standout_Jobs.
@Mike: Thanks for stopping by and commenting. There are too few companies right now that truly build community to increase referrals and inbound recruiting. Admittedly, it’s not easy, and for a small business can be overwhelming. I believe we’re going to bring that ease-of-use platform to employers so they can more easily leverage social media, build online communities and generate ongoing, quality results in terms of job seeker traffic, conversion to applicants and ultimately hires.
I agree completely. I’ve taken a look at hubspot’s white paper that was sent to me awhile back. Here in Tampa, FL I’ve seen competition among job recruiting companies and seems they are targeting their own niches. For example, the biggest newspaper here has their own “brand” (which I’m sure they are probably using a major platform in the background like monster or careerbuilder).
The one I believe locally that is doing a great job is Jobbing. They’ve gone to chamber of commerces and have provided free services (printing, advertising, etc) in exchange of utilizing the Chambers’ website and allowing to solely use Jobbing’s platform to search and promote jobs. There are more than 11 international chambers of commerce and all of them have agreed. As a VP-Exec of my chamber of commerce and the admin of our website, I personally experienced this.
I figured out their stance. Help them, help you.
[...] it’s great to see companies like EMC experimenting with these opportunities. They clearly get inbound recruiting and the fact that recruiting is an exercise in sales and [...]
@Marc: Jobing is definitely doing a lot of good things in the job space.
Thanks for stopping by and commenting. If you’re hiring, I hope you’ll try our platform out!
Doing a lot of research into this here in the UK with specific attention to the graduate recruitment market and really agree with a lot of what you’re saying here. Good work Ben and looking forward to hearing more of your thoughts!