 The character of the Russian economy determines a specific situation in many regions and industries. This situation is at the root of the fact that competition in labour markets is more perfect and much keener than competition in product and capital markets. This state of affairs encourages us to look for inspiration in marketing concepts so that we can find innovative approaches to competition in labour market. I call this approach HRM 2.0, or Human Resource Marketing.
At the junction of marketing and traditional HRM there is an area of knowledge called internal marketing, which helps to increase personnel’s loyalty and motivation. Another popular idea is to create a brand for the employer, i.e. a corporate brand in the labour market. Both ideas are well known and widely covered in literature. However, the marketing approach in the sphere of HR could be applied more systematically and integrally.
The employees of a company are part of the environment - they make a separate ecosystem, which in its turn influences the company. They are not part of the company - they cannot even be called a company’s assets or resources. Well, the employees are in essence the source of labour, but very often their activity has little to do with the interests of the business. Given that employees are part of the environment, we should ask ourselves a question: ”To what extent are we able to manage the staff?”
At a qualitative level we can manage them as little as we are able to manage customers or investors. All we can do is influence the environment. I think that the key task of marketing is to use resources in such a way that they could influence the environment and it could become beneficial for the realization of a company’s objectives. In such a situation we consider an open – not a closed system. We do not try to make our subordinates do things which we consider right, we just change the environment according to our idea of beneficial conditions. This is the way many marketing managers act, but the majority of HR-managers do not have enough courage to act like that.
Should a company try to attract “the very best of the best” and win the “war for talents”? I suspect such an absolutist approach to competition for HR is a pre-historic attitude to labour market. Managers are trying to buy “the best possible labour”, “the best ideas” and “the best leader”. But they keep forgetting that these things do not exist on their own, they appear in the context of corporate culture. If we do not consider the context, then individual human manifestations will interfere with the process. It will lead to the appearance of a bureaucratic system, which will try to grade individual differences. The best companies encourage individuality. But still HR hardly ever receives the task of finding people who will become really valuable for the company and not just “the most experienced and promising professionals”.
What should we do to attract the “right” candidates? Ideologically it can be done by helping candidates make sthe right choice, and by presenting our company in the most advantageous way. Technically it can be done through the classical trio «segmentation-targeting-positioning» and marketing mix.
We need to ask ourselves the following questions:
- Which of their requirements can people satisfy if they work for our company?
- Which mechanisms to satisfy the requirements really work?
- What are the advantages our company can offer in this sphere ? Do we have any unique mechanisms to satisfy people’s requirements? What are they? It is difficult to give a single answer.
Nevertheless, we can understand what personality types our company suits best of all and how we can teach people to use corporate mechanisms right.
We can draw a conclusion – it is useless to motivate a badly chosen employee, while the “right employee” is able to achieve success despite any rational criteria. The second conclusion – it is impossible to make an employee happy by satisfying requirements that are not essential for him. Finding the “right” candidates is especially important as the inconsistency between cultures is fraught with demotivation.
And here we have arrived at two HRM tasks of great importance – how to increase motivation and loyalty. The point is not to constantly change the motivation system. If you always make alterations in the system everybody will become unhappy. The system of motivation and corporate culture, which supports it, can not be altered quickly and without damage to the “corporate ecology”. The limitations of corporate culture should be born in mind when you choose the strategy and tactics of your company.
You should ask yourself another key question: For what kind of employees are our clients most valuable? What should be done in the sphere of communication in order to create a ”brand in the labour market” which on the one hand would be attractive to target candidates and on the other hand would not cause too high expectations? One may exert every effort and carry out professional campaigns or simply follow the rule – “the highest possible openness of the company for potential candidates”. One more problem in the sphere of attracting candidates by their social qualities is the necessity of initial and permanent training. Such programmes are expensive and their payout depends directly on the ability of the company to defend its investments, i.e. to retain candidates in the company.
The main factors that influence the situation when an employee is likely to leave the company, are the following:
- Satisfaction
- Leaving barriers
- Outside opportunities
- Knowledge of outside opportunities
Two dangerous approaches to retaining employees are quite wide-spread. The first approach relates to high compensations, usually much higher than the average in the market and with some elements deferred. Such “golden handcuffs” mean that the business is based on fear. Motivation and productivity tend to zero. Very often such employees form the “fifth column” and are ready to support any processes which may help them to get rid of their dependence. The second approach is the attempt to “encapsulate” the company, i.e. to give its employees minimum information of the outside world by forming an image of a hostile environment. Barriers that are based on fear before the unknown are like sand dams – easily permeable and quickly destroyed. Many leaders are not ready to take any decline in their control level as they associate it with the loss of power.
What can be a better practice? There are many such practices. All of them are based on the perception of the company as an open system, an organism whose integrity and identity depend on the exchange with the environment and not on isolation.
 The main indicator is the feedback on leaving the company. It does not matter how many employees you lose annually. What matters is the quality of the information about your company the former employees carry into the outside world. The company is healthy if all its workers find the experience they got there valuable and they have something to regret about after they leave. A healthy company has a negative feedback: the more people leave the company, the higher the loyalty of those who stay there and the bigger number of new candidates the company receives. What are the necessary prerequisites for such negative feedback? The most important mechanism is intracorporate services of good quality and trust. When people start a new job they miss things that were habitual at their old work – the things they were not even asked about at the interview.
When a company hires nonspecialized workers it buys their labour of a determined nature. Workers of that kind cannot satisfy their high level requirements during their work process. In such cases it is very important to grant a unique compensation mix for them, which would be unattainable outside the company. The strongest mechanisms help maintain high social status. It is in this context that social responsibility of the company pays back sooner than in any other sphere. It should just be aimed at the significant for the workers reference groups.
Relationship with professionals reminds one of B2B – the role of emotions is very little. But a professional is extremely interested in developing two things – his personal assets and autonomy. As regards to autonomy it will be enough just not to violate it. As to personal assets there are two tricks. First of all, the more actively the assets grow and the tighter they are intertwined with the company’s infrastructure the less they are liquid in the outside world. Secondly, when you establish good conditions for professional assets growth you should take care of interfering social factors.
The last but not the least thing to say is that each aspect of company’s work must be sensible. Every person “lives” in three corporate realities. The first reality is job descriptions, compensation, the office and the equipment, i. e. the material world. The second reality is unwritten rules, social relations, and corporate culture. The third reality is rationalization, i.e. the way a person explains the outside world to himself. This third reality is closest to what is called “vision”. The more a company helps its employees in creating a synergic vision of the company’s aims the more effectively it can compete in the labour market. | 
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