Human Resources IS Brand Marketing

As I prepare for next week's SHRM (Society of Human Resource Management) Annual Conference in Orlando, my Twitter feed is filled with posts from advertising agencies and companies at Cannes. Unilever is chasing Cannes glory with a new film about motherhood. I love it. Branding should be emotional and powerful. Companies need to stand for something bigger than the stuff and the money they make.

As the Beyond team head

s to SHRM, however, it strikes me that the real brand battlefield is human resources. Sure, the glory and headlines are with the ad agencies and emotional brand anthems. But human resources in all of its various guises has the greatest potential to build brand every day.

After spending the last decade or so "agency side" -- helping companies hone their brands and develop strategic plans -- I often get asked what it is like being "client side." And, more so, how did I end up in the human resources and recruiting space.

The answer is simple. HR is the front-line of brand warfare. The most important tools for a brand strategist are not television ads or billboards. Rather, it is the way that an organization talks about itself and communicates every day. And HR is a driver of much of this communication.

Few people jump up to go to work to earn a paycheck. They may work for a paycheck, but if that is the only reward, then a job truly is the daily grind, providing sustenance without pleasure. When Beyond surveyed Millennials earlier this year, it wasn't more pay that drove them to change jobs. It was company culture and fit. HR, meet branding. Employees work harder, and stay longer, if companies give them a reason to get up to go to work in the morning. Strong brands instill that reason into everything they do. Do you want to make people happy? Work at Disney. Or maybe you want to help people? Tom's shoes.

Traditionally, HR has been at loggerheads with marketing, concerned more with compliance and risk management than crafting a brand narrative. That is changing. Today, the best brands live their brand essence in everything they do, especially in the smallest details. The HR function owns many of those details, and is also responsible for ground level brand advocacy, aka recruitment.

So, what can HR do to build brand? Examine every communication, especially those which are taken for granted. Here are three quick ideas:

Rewrite the Employee Handbook: Is the employee handbook a legal document, destined to be left in a desk drawer soon after hiring? Or is it a guidebook to living the brand? It can be both. An advertising agency I recently worked for created an employee handbook in which the appendix was bigger than the core content. This was their way of including the legalese, but not making the handbook about the legalese. So the handbook itself was an inspiring read about the philosophy of the agency, with asterisks leading to the details.

Craft Inspiring Job Descriptions: Job descriptions may be the single most overlooked branding opportunity in most companies. These one page advertisements are widely distributed across the Internet, and consumers (job seekers) actively search them out and WANT to read them! And yet, most of them read like a requisition form, perhaps with a paragraph of boiler plate copy about the company. If you want enthusiastic applicants and employees, then inspire them from the start with an evocative job description. These creative descriptions will not only reach potential employees. They'll also create a brand impression with a far larger audience that includes customers and clients.

Surround Employees with Motivating Artwork: The artwork on the walls may not formally be within the realm of HR. But, HR does have a role in what is on the walls, even if it is often limited to OSHA posters and other regulatory and instructional signs that are largely ignored. Time to step it up! The simplest and most common enhancement is to create posters that celebrate progress towards company goals. Elevate these by demonstrating how the company is having an impact on the world. How many families or companies did your company help? Or, go a step further, and borrow the themes from the branding campaign and bring them inside to inspire and remind employees. At Beyond headquarters, everyone is greeted everyday by large photos of job seekers and employees with messages such as, "I Will Be Inspired," or "I Will Enjoy Mondays" as a reminder of our mission to help people in their careers.

Finding opportunities to brand is easy. Simply audit every communication that your company uses, especially those that are least scrutinized and most taken for granted. In addition to the above, rethink stationery, internal newsletters, t-shirts and giveaways, etc. With each one, ask whether it could be more inspiring or could do more to convey the brand. Marketing may own brand development. But when it comes to building brand, HR has the power.