"Help Wanted" Meets "Buy it Now"

Why more companies are integrating marketing and recruiting.

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Razor Suleman faced a morale crisis. Employee turnover had spiked at I Love Rewards, his Toronto-based incentive marketing agency, with 10 of 22 workers leaving in the span of six months. Amid the chaos and the cost associated with these constant exits, Suleman had come to feel that running I Love Rewards wasn't all that personally rewarding.

Suleman knew he was a lot better at selling than at HR. So he decided to take a salesman's approach to hiring--treating each potential hire like a customer. He had a hunch that not only would this approach yield better results, it would spread the word about his company. "We started thinking that even if someone didn't get the job, he would either tell everyone he knew about us or would begin to use our products and services," he says.

It's a classic chicken-and-egg dilemma. To lure talent, you need to establish your business as a cool place to work, as a company on the rise. But that can happen only if you have great employees in the first place. One way to solve that problem is by integrating your recruiting and marketing efforts. Experts call this creating an "employer brand" and suggest that bringing together these two crucial business functions can help a company excel at both.

The quintessential employer brand is Google. In 2004, the company posted obscure math problems on billboards in several major cities. Any enterprising math geek who could solve the equation was directed to Google's hiring website. The billboards drew a lot of press attention as well as thousands of resumés.

Of course, getting HR and marketing to work more closely together isn't as easy as it sounds. The traditional HR tasks are focused on the internal needs of the employer, whereas marketing is all about connecting with customers in the world outside the company. Old-line marketers may bristle when they are asked to brainstorm ways to enliven want ads or hiring initiatives. For their part, HR folks may feel uncomfortable making a sales pitch.

Small companies tend to have an easier time merging marketing and HR, largely because managers are used to wearing multiple hats and the CEO or owner is in a better position to make sure his managers are cooperating. That was the case at Red 5 Studios, a video game company based in Aliso Viejo, California. CEO and founder Mark Kern had had horrible luck with traditional recruiting techniques, in part because his venture-backed company was still in stealth mode and hadn't yet released a game. Though at his previous job Kern led the team at Blizzard Entertainment that created the wildly popular World of Warcraft games, he couldn't get top programmers to submit resumés and had no luck posting want ads on online job boards. "It was hard to communicate anything about our company in a way that stood out from the other guys," says Kern.

So Kern decided to dedicate himself to creating an employer brand. He identified the 100 workers in the game industry whom he most wanted to hire and sent them each a special package in the mail. The package contained a box, with a smaller box inside of it, with an even smaller box inside of it, and so on, like a Russian nesting doll. At the center of the smallest box was an iPod Shuffle. On the iPod, Kern had recorded a personal message describing why it was worth applying for a job at Red 5. "At Red 5 we're assembling a team of incredibly talented individuals dedicated to pushing the envelope in online entertainment," the recording said.

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