News

Building Company Culture with Human Resources & Marketing

September 1, 2019

By Katie Long, HR Recruiter & Katie Moehn, Senior Marketing and Communications Specialist

A recruiter’s dream is finding the answer to the question, “How did you hear about us?” In today’s economy, with the lowest unemployment rate in decades (according to the U.S. Labor Department), we have more jobs available than we have people to fill them, which can be a blessing and a curse. Employees are comfortable in their current roles so, as recruiters, we have to actively seek out potential candidates that may not be happy with their current position, manager, or company in the future.

When they decide to start looking at other opportunities, we need job seekers to think of us. Often, we focus on recruitment marketing which refers to the strategies a company uses to find, attract, nurture and engage passive talent by reinforcing the employer brand. This can include posting ads in industry  publications, flyers on job boards, posting on social media, and being active participants at career fairs. As potential candidates continue to see a logo multiple times in different locations, it starts to build brand recognition for the company — meaning they recognize it by the logo.

Marketing and human resources (HR) departments traditionally have separate job functions with marketing focusing on the consumer and HR communicating with employees. However, the lines between marketing and HR are blurring because, although they have different audiences, they both have similar objectives.
“Just as organizations compete for customers by differentiating product value, they too must compete for talent by differentiating the employee experience,” Erik
Samdahl, the vice president of marketing for the Institute for Corporate Productivity, wrote in a Forbes blog post. “A critical piece of this differentiation is employer brand — your organization’s story, the message communicated about its reason for existing, its purpose and what it aspires to be.”

Our marketing and HR departments recently developed recruitment videos for WTS to do just that – bring our company’s culture to life!

By working together, we were able to align our goals and develop videos that speak to our audience. We interviewed our employees to get real, candid answers to the many questions focused on why they like their job. Every answer was a little bit different, but they all related back to our culture.

We produced two recruiting videos – a general video highlighting our culture and a “Day in the Life” video describing each job role within the company. The likelihood of losing employees shortly after they are hired increases if they don’t have a full understanding of their job roles and expectations prior to accepting the position. According to statistics provided by LinkedIn’s Ultimate List of Employer Brand Statistics, job candidates trust a company’s employees three times more than the company to provide credible information on what it’s like to work there. With our collaboration, we plan to see a higher retention rate by educating
our applicants using candid responses from company employees who participated in our recruiting video.

This project is just the start of a shift in our strategy to leverage the talents of both departments to work together on company initiatives.

To view the videos, please click here.