HR needs to become more like the marketing function in the future in order to attract and hire the right talent to boost organisational performance, according to an expert on organisations and the changing workforce.
HR could learn many lessons from marketing, said executive fellow of organisational behaviour at the London Business School, Tamara Erickson, who predicted that the focus of the HR function will evolve in line with marketing over the coming years.
“HR needs to have a better sense of promoting an image to a community of potential employees, just as marketing does to a community of customers,” she said.
“HR needs to have a stronger sense of ownership over the worker experience, just as marketing has ownership over the customer experience with a particular product.”
As such, Erickson predicted that HR professionals will begin to think more like marketers in the future.
“It’s less about how we standardise processes and put in place global common processes and more about how we think like a marketer to influence people,” she said.
“The pendulum has to swing toward the employee making the decision about who they will work for”
Erickson, who recently spoke at the World Business Forum Sydney, also said that the way companies select the right talent needs to change.
“The pendulum has to swing toward the employee making the decision about who they will work for,” she said.
“I’m not a big believer in there being any way that the organisation can choose. They can certainly choose skills, they can decide if a person does or doesn’t have the skills.
“However, when it comes to hiring the right employees, what I would recommend (somewhat facetiously) is that the organisation’s job from then on is to try and push the candidate away.
“In other words, the hiring manager should be able to tell a candidate what it would be like to work in the organisation in such a way that if the candidate wouldn’t like it, they would run screaming for the door.”
Erickson said this will be a truer test than any psychometric fit assessment, and companies should aim to determine candidates’ own sense of whether they would love to work there.
Some companies, such as Zappos and Whole Foods, currently provide potential employees with opportunities to see what it’s like to work for them, ahead of any formal employment arrangement.
“I think we’re going to see more of that, where companies ‘open the kimono’ and transparently let potential employees experience what it’s really like,” he said.
“Then they decide if they really want to work there.”
“I don’t think I’d invest in an outsourcing company right now”
Many organisations are also undergoing transformation, and a significant part of this is redesigning the workforce with less full-time employees and shift towards utilising skilled contractors for certain work, Erickson added.
“Most large organisations around the world are in the very early stages of this journey, to be honest,” she said.
“For example, some big companies are now getting pretty skilled at some form of outsourcing, so they’ve figured out how to do this.
“But I wonder about the future of this, and I don’t think I’d invest in an outsourcing company right now.”
Erickson suggested that the process of outsourcing through companies may be disintermediated in the future, thanks to technological advances which allow companies to manage this process themselves.
“So having an intermediary which assembles cadres of offshore workers may not be very necessary,” she said.
For some things this may be necessary, but not for everything, according to Erickson, who observed that companies have already started this process by taking big chunks of their activities and managing these more cost-effectively through different models.
“They are saying that they’re not going to stick to the old kind of industrial models,” she said. “Instead, they acknowledge that technology has improved to the point where they could probably handle things themselves and just assemble people when needed.
“I think we may see some very interesting changes in the way this is done down the track,” she said.
For the full interview with Erickson and feature on how organisations need to change their approach to leadership and workforce management, see the digital edition of Inside HR magazine. Image source: supplied
