Marketing Inside/Out: Attracting and keeping the best employees

Why is it some companies consistently and easily retain employees from the top of the food chain, while others struggle to attract any warm body, despite buff salaries and benefits? The answer is marketing. But not in the context most would think.

We’re all familiar with marketing as an external event sequence that attracts and retains customers. Few imagine that these very same events can attract the best employees. Fewer still realize that clever and consistent internal marketing keeps employees satisfied and virtually impervious to competitive H/R raids.

Consider your company’s external marketing message and image. Are the best and brightest in your industry clamoring to work for your company? When you attract a star how long before a competitor steals her/him away? How caustic is your company’s internal politics? How frequently are your employees absent and what is the average duration of each absence? If your answers are not particularly flattering, then your company’s marketing, both external and internal may be both the problem, and the potential solution.

Effective marketing, by textbook definition, ‘satisfies customers at a profit’. That corollary also extends to employees. Today, attracting and keeping highly talented employees demands a clear understanding of what marketing really is and how it should be applied within and beyond the walls of your company.

Marketing

… encompasses advertising, selling, promotion, and public relations, but goes further to include: shipping, receiving, production, accounts receivable and payable, every mode of internal and external communication, company social events, human resources, staff training and even facility maintenance. Virtually every internal and external company function, down to the maintenance of your company’s washrooms, is as much a process of marketing as newspaper or Internet advertising.

If you are not convinced, find a company with uncomfortable chairs and a grimy lunchroom, and you will have found a company with little regard for their employees and their marketing. Also you will have found a company struggling to attract both customers and employees. Locate a company named one of the ten best companies to work for and you will find innovative external marketing, clever and consistent internal marketing, a resume stream from impeccable employee candidates . - and engaged, enthusiastic staff.

The energy and spirit generated by an imaginative and sustained marketing strategy, focused both inwardly and outwardly, can transport any company from mediocrity to mastery of all it surveys.