How marketing can help in the race for talent - Business to Human marketing

Earlier this week, TheMarker published an article about how Amazon, desperate to attract talent for its different design centers in Israel, is offering salaries dramatically above the market average: “Start-up company managers, faced in the past large recruitment efforts by Google, Apple and Facebook in Israel, but nothing could prepare them for what Amazon is doing in the last couple of months.” as per the article.

Never was the job of attracting talent – or retaining existing employees – was harder. The digitization of so many aspects of our lives increase the demand for technology-savvy professionals to a level much higher than their availability. This is surely not only an Israeli specific phenomenon, but an almost ubiquitous trend, from the US and Western Europe, to places where in the past companies could find talent in abundance and lower cost like Easter Europe and India.

In fact, according to a recent study[i], three of the top five critical business challenges faced by companies today are related to attracting and retaining talent. This often ranks higher in importance compared to issues related to finding customers, dealing with technology or pricing and operational matters.

Marketing is usually leveraged to handle the later class of challenges: to spark customer’s interest in the company’s products, to differentiate its products and technology, to justify its pricing. For these purposes, different tools and methodologies were defined and fine-tuned, to target the precise audience, with the accurate message at the right time.

But with so much at stake if the company can’t fill its ranks with the appropriate people, it’s imperative to use similar tools (along with the necessary adaptations) for selling not only the company’s products to customers, but rather the company itself to future and existing employees.

Taping on ShareOn’s experience in this field, we’are launching a series of Blog posts on employer branding, talent nurturing and acquisition, and company culture marketing.

We’ll also keep an eye and share best practices we see in the Israeli and international market space.

Just to circle back on the Amazon case we mentioned above: breaking the market salary benchmarks is equivalent to cutting prices to break one’s competitors. Maybe Amazon can do it, but it’s not a solution for other employers, and it’s not sustainable in the long-term.

Customers don’t always buy the cheapest product, and employees don’t always go for the highest paying offer – as much as it may be tempting. What else plays a role? And how to make sure the right people know about it?

That’s the fascinating topic we’ll be discussing.

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[i] Hinge Marketing, Employer Brand Study, https://hingemarketing.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/Research-EmployerBrandStudy-1.pdf