With talent acquisition and retention as one of the main concerns for SME owners, HR personnel are being encouraged to think with a marketing mindset to find and keep top talent. What may seem like an unlikely pairing is, in fact, a critical partnership that can create a working culture that is on-brand, effective at delivering a talent-centric approach to the overall employment experience for current and future staff.

When you strip back to the fundaments of HR and marketing, the deliverables are the same:  to motivate people into action.

Marketers attract people to a product or service with a strong and recognisable brand, motivate them into action, provide an excellent experience, and retain their loyalty over the competitor. When this is applied to your recruitment strategy, you will continue to attract top talent and provide a culture that engenders loyalty to the company.

To attract and retain top talent, a company brand must be positive, clear, consistent and recognised as one that favours the employee experience. The clearer your brand, the more attractive it will be to people who share the same values while filtering out those whose ideas are not aligned.

When attracting talent to a role, your marketing mode should be on high: What is great about the job? What’s your point of difference and why should they choose you over other companies?

Job descriptions should be written as a creative copy to attract top performing talent and induce excitement at the thought of them working for you.

A candidate will browse their potential employer online and across social media platforms, so it is important to keep your digital up-to-date. Keep your social media platforms active with insights into your company culture and post events that will appeal to potential recruits, such as Friday lunches and team achievements.

Marketers continue to deliver a positive experience by continually improving processes to ensure the brand and everything associated with it remains positive. The guy who never hears back from his interviewer could be the one deciding between your company and another one that’s bidding for a multimillion-dollar project a few years down the line. Keep the whole experience positive so your brand remains positive.

Beyond knowing how to sell a product, marketers know how to read data. They know how to look for their audience, measure strategies to know what works and to adjust what doesn’t. Data is key to continually improving processes. HR must think about data more strategically; it’s not just about collecting the data but knowing what the data empowers you to do when you have it.

Marketers understand their audience through the study of demographics, behaviours and attitudes. From these findings, they can better understand their customers in order to deliver products and services that fill a gap in the market.

When this method is applied to recruiting, employers can find out why people are attracted to a company and adjust their recruitment and mentoring methods accordingly. Data-based strategies can be implemented via training programmes, new employee orientations and performance evaluations.

When you target your recruitment efforts with marketing techniques through employment branding and strategies, you gain better insights into your company to attract and retain the best talent.

Deployed actively seeks top talent in the Philippines to help overseas businesses grow with offshore staffing solutions. We offer ongoing support to our clients to ensure that they maintain a positive relationship with their remote team to receive the optimum benefits of outsourcing. If you would like to leverage on the benefits of hiring a virtual assistant or grow a remote team in the Philippines, contact a Deployed adviser today.