Here’s why HR and Talent Acquisition is NOT like Marketing.
This is marketing –
Nike, Addidas, Under Armour, etc. all fight for market share. Nike signs Lebron, KD and Kobi. Under Armour signs Steph Curry. Addidas gets D Rose and Wiggins. All of the shoe companies are trying to sign the top sports talent to shoe deals, so you’ll go out and drop $200 a pair for your kid to run around and act like they’re the next Steph Curry.
The ‘brand’ of the shoe you kid is wearing, that you are wearing, matters. It matters to them, it matters to you. I know it matters because the shoe game is a $63 billion industry. Billion! You care about what you put on your feet. Your kids really care! Accept my 12-year old who didn’t know who Kevin Durant was when I bought him a pair of KD’s earlier this year. See if he get’s another pair!
The shoe companies spend billions of dollars to create a brand that you want to be a part of, so, you’ll spend even more billions to buy their shoes made by 12-year-olds in China.
This is HR and Talent Acquisition –
We are spending more and more of our organization’s resources to create employment brands. We are doing this because we need to let ‘talent’ know we are the best option for them to come and work. If we don’t play the game, other employers will beat us to the best talent. Employment branding then becomes a strategic imperative to our organizations.
The one major difference is, we are only selling an idea. The shoe companies are selling a product (and an idea that you’re cool if you wear our product!).
Read the whole post over at The Tim Sackett Project (an FOT contributor blog).
If you Google “Tim Sackett” you’ll find our Tim, and a truck driver chaplain. Our Tim is NOT the truck driver chaplain, although how awesome would that be if he was!? He is a prolific writer in the HR and TA space who just happens to also run an Engineering and IT contract staffing agency (HRU Technical Resources) out of Michigan. He also writes every day at his own blog, the Tim Sackett Project. Weirdly, he’s known as an expert in workplace hugging, which was kind of cool years ago, but now seems painfully creepy, but we still love him and he’s fairly harmless. Tim is also on the board of the Association of Talent Acquisition Professionals (ATAP), lifetime Michigan State Spartan fan, husband to a Hall of Fame wife, 3 sons, and his best friend Scout. He also wrote a book with SHRM called The Talent Fix, you can find it on Amazon.