The Indispensable HR-Marketing Collaboration

Does your human resources staff have a friendship or a partnership with your marketing staff? Friendships are great, but these days true partnerships are more critical. Along with IT and accounting, these functions have the reputation of being the “necessary evil” of non-billable positions within architecture, engineering, construction, and environmental firms. And yet, they are integral to a firm’s long-term success.

Human resources and marketing professionals are often stretched too thin to begin with, so it may defy logic to add more to their collective workloads. And yet, it is when they work in tandem that greater things can be achieved – particularly when compared with having these professionals operate in their own silos. The world has changed, and savvy firms understand that when it comes to staff recruitment and retention, HR and marketing are closely aligned.

Potential employees – particularly Millennials – are technology savvy. They are vetting potential employers online, checking out company websites, reading company blogs, and researching social media posts from both a company and its key staff members. Don’t fall into the trap of believing that these activities are exclusively the purview of marketing, because they are also critical to employee recruitment efforts. And when you factor in the talent war – already here in some design and construction disciplines, and coming to a profession near you in others – the reality is that companies need a high level of HR-marketing collaboration now, more than ever.

Marketing needs staff members to write blogs and be active on social media. HR can institute guidelines or policies for social media activities. They can work with firm leaders to add blogging to position descriptions or performance evaluations. Marketing needs a constant flow of project descriptions to update resumes and add to proposals and web activities. Again, HR can make this part of employees’ responsibilities.

AEC firms need to become more proactive with recruiting offline as well – attending job fairs and professional organizations. Often it makes sense to have the HR-marketing partnership tag-team these events, as the HR professionals know everything about your firm’s benefits and policies, while your marketing professionals know how to articulate value propositions and sell the firm to prospective employees.

Beyond recruitment, this partnership can play a role in retention, as well. Professionals want to feel that what they do matters. All too often, however, they spend day after day in front of their computer, not feeling like they are making a difference. The information that marketing collects for brochures and proposals (descriptions, photos, renderings, testimonials) needs to be shared with technical staff, as well, via emails or internal newsletters. And when a firm wins a new project, that should be a cause for celebration – whether something informal like an email or bell ringing, or more formal like a luncheon or happy hour celebration. HR and marketing staff each play a role in making this happen.

Likewise, educational opportunities are critical to staff retention. HR professionals are continually gathering information about what staff members are looking for, while marketing professionals are often looking external to the firm and finding client needs going unfulfilled. By sending staff members for training on issues of critical importance to clients and prospects, technical employees can gain new knowledge while feeling like they are adding value to their companies. Furthermore, marketers could and should be giving regular training to staff – networking, understanding company differentiators, improving business writing, giving presentations, using social media… The list of potential topics is rather lengthy!

Branding is another critical area where HR and marketing need to be partners. Employees are attracted to people. They are attracted to companies. And they are attracted to brands. Why does your company do what it does? What is the brand promise that your company is creating in the marketplace?
Company brands can ignite the passions among current and potential employees alike. No, not everyone is going to exude passion and live the brand, but having brand evangelists on staff is critical for creating a culture around your brand.

Employees don’t just want to know that they, personally, are doing something that matters – they want to know that their company is doing something that matters, too. Successful, well-branded companies exude brand from every pore.

Branding is not just marketing. It is project delivery. And it is human resources. If your staff doesn’t live the brand, your brand will fail. The human resources-marketing partnership needs to be strong now, and will continue to expand in importance in the near future as the workforce shortage grows more extreme and HR departments are challenged with recruitment and retention like never before.

At the end of the day, the success of the HR departments in this regard will dictate the success of a firm’s marketing program. If you don’t have qualified staff to deliver a project, no marketing in the world can overcome your inability to successfully complete a project. And clients are quite sophisticated these days – they are as focused on the credentials and experience of each individual member of a project team as they are on a firm’s past experience.

So what is your firm doing to ensure a successful collaboration between these two vital functions and departments?

About the Authors: Angela M. Wolfgang serves as Manager of HR & Finance for Nutec Group, a York, PA-based design and construction practice. Scott D. Butcher, FSMPS, CPSM serves as vice president of JDB Engineering, Inc. and past president of the SMPS Foundation board of trustees.

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