Introduction
The contemporary business organization is continuously operating within a highly competitive and uncertain market. As the business environment and situation continues to get complicated, people working with the organizations are seen as important elements to help in creating or enhancing the competitive advantage. Studies have indicated that employees’ job satisfaction strongly link positively to customer perceptions. This implies that workers who are happy with their jobs provide services that satisfy the customers fully. In essence, such linkage results in achieving customer loyalty. This paper seeks to analyze the existing linkage and the relations between human resource and marketing in an organization.
Job Analysis and Marketing
Employees in any organisation form the first group of customers, often referred to as internal customers. The human resource management department should work towards identifying and solving practical problems that include recruitment, training, and employee relations, among other related aspects to attract the best and most competent workers (Davoudi and Ravneet 65). In other words, human resource management practice concerns itself with aspects that deal with how the staffs are employed, as well as how they are managed within the organisation. Among the significant areas that HRM focuses on include human capital management, strategic human resource management, performance management, organisation development management, employee relations, and reward management, among other critical areas.
On the other hand, organisations need to focus on the actual HR needs that they require to achieve the requisite competitive advantages prior to employing their staffs (Davoudi & Ravneet 65). Organisations are supposed to dig into history and come up with trends that can help in tackling present issues and forecasting the future. These details help in making decisions regarding compensation plans, recruitment and training needs, job design, performance management systems, and career development objectives.
All these factors call for job analysis. An organisation must determine the critical factors entailed in a particular job. It is pertinent for the organisation to be fully aware of the skills that are needed to execute various job responsibilities that the firm is offering. Additionally, the necessary job activities, tasks, behaviours, standards, and the actual performance are only determined after conducting the job analysis. However, while HRM works towards establishing these important analyses of the job, internal marketing also plays a critical role in attracting the rightful personnel needed for the job (Davoudi and Ravneet 65).
The Recruitment Process and Marketing
The firm moves towards employing the qualified personnel after determining the jobs and specific job requirements within the organisation. During the recruitment process, the organisation often targets to acquire the most qualified individuals for each of the available job positions to enhance its competitive advantage over other market rivals. The process of getting new employees into the firm calls for going for the candidates with the best qualifications for the job in question.
Effective planning is needed during the recruitment process to ascertain the human resources. The recruitment ought to be aligned with the strategy of the organisation to achieve the required results. Once this is met, the organisation will manage to hire workers in possession of superior knowledge, abilities, skills, as well as other positive characters.
Nevertheless, the organisation has to market the recruitment drive to reach out to the qualified and skilful individuals to hire them. The marketing involves creating awareness about the organisation to influence the decisions made by the qualified individuals (Davoudi and Ravneet 66). As the organisation invites qualified individuals to join its ranks, other rival firms in the industry are equally seeking to influence and attract the same qualified individuals. The marketing is, therefore, crucial in convincing the individuals to consider a given organisation over another one because they stand a better chance of benefitting if they opt to join the organisation. Part of the marketing during recruitment may entail illustrating the history of the firm in business, its profit trends over the years, and the competitive market edge that it enjoys over the rival firms in the industry.
Internal Marketing and Performance Management
The performance of employees needs to be evaluated constantly as part of the contemporary organisation’s requirements. This helps in determining the progress of each of the employees working in the firm. In particular, the HRM uses the information acquired from the evaluation process to accomplish its mission, which in turn enables the organisation to improve on its competitive advantage. Among the numerous purposes of conducting employee evaluation include using the outcome to help management determine employee decisions such as retention and advancement or training (Davoudi and Ravneet 66).
Making the right decisions about each of the employees helps the organisation to perform effectively because of the high motivation within its workforce. Apart from motivating workers, accurate evaluation equally offers information, as well as feedback that the employees use to initiate their own efforts of improvement in areas where their performance is below par.
As the organisation continues to compete in its industry, its goals and objectives may also transform at some point to maintain strong competition against its rivals. In this regard, performance management also needs to be conducted regularly to increasingly allow the employees to understand and implement changes required of them. The results of the evaluation must accompany new roles that the employees are expected to adopt. As the internal customer, the employees must be convinced by the HRM to adopt new roles and requirements that reflect on the outside competitive pressures (Davoudi and Ravneet 66). In other words, the management must use marketing principles to enable the employees to buy the new ideas and plans that are intended for adoption or implementation.
Compensation and Marketing
The HRM decides, on behalf of the organization, about the salaries and benefits that the organization should adopt to attract, retain, and motivate its employees. Workers often expect that the organization should compensate them fairly for their services. It is also advisable to know what the workers perceive as fair remuneration. An appropriate compensation system, also regarded as extrinsic rewards, motivates the employees in performing their best towards achieving the organizational goals and objectives.
Extrinsic rewards are a critical aspect of HR management because they reflect the job situation as offered by others. Such extrinsic rewards include benefits, status, and salary that an individual employee gets from his or her employment. It is, therefore, critical for the employees to realize the objectives of the organization to increase their commitment to helping the firm achieve its intended objectives.
The critical role that internal marketing plays is to draw all employees on board to help in realizing the overall objective set by the firm. Thus, using compensation, the HRM seeks to market the organization as a better alternative when it comes to remunerating its staff fairly. The idea is to convince the workers that they stand to be compensated fully and fairly when they work for the organization than when they consider working for other employers. As the internal customers, it is difficult for employees to feel motivated and increase their performance if they realize that their compensation does not measure up to the skills and general performance that they give (Davoudi and Ravneet 67).
Training & Development and Marketing
Changes witnessed in the contemporary industrial scenario have resulted in changes within the organizational structures and overall functioning. As a result, most organizations have adopted flatter structures that have a limited number of layers between the management and the lowly ranked employees. Authority and the making of decisions have equally been dispersed fairly within the organization, while the firms are adopting several practices that are associated with quality improvement, sharing of knowledge, and information technology.
This underscores the need for firms to acquire competent employees. Thus, for the organizations to achieve such workers, the HRM must plan for the training as well as the development of the workforce. These are planned efforts arranged by the organization seeking to assist in the learning of new behaviors that are related to the job. The overall productivity of workers is improved when the workers are empowered through training. The training programs influence the employees and the organization positively (Davoudi and Ravneet 67).
The HRM uses internal marketing during the training and development of programs for its workforce because internal marketing seeks to increase and enhance the performance of the employees in the organization. The employees’ satisfaction on the job increases with every training and development opportunity. In other words, the HRM expands the awareness and understanding of its internal customers, the employees, such that they accept and undertake the programs as anticipated. It is difficult for workers to integrate and accept training and development positively without the workers understanding the importance of the training and development exercises (Davoudi and Ravneet 67).
Labour Management Relations and Marketing
Uncertainty grows immensely among the workers with the continued changes being observed in the workplace, thus decreasing employee confidence about job security (Davoudi and Ravneet 67). Employees are not assured whether their wages are set to remain competitive as they would anticipate in the future. These factors are occurring as a result of uncertain economic times, decreasing health care benefits, growing volume of the temporary workforce, as well as lost or reduced pensions. The labor market has, therefore, changed, and many organizations are forced to adjust to fit within the new setup.
Among the transformations that organizations are taking into consideration include changing the labor-management relations. The economic distress faced by employers and organizations is, in turn, calling for the downsizing of the workforce, and forcing privatization in other instances. The HRM is re-examining the organizational structure and systems to maintain good relations with workers’ unions for the successful running of the organization.
However, for the HRM to achieve this good relationship with workers’ unions and organizations, new attitudes and approaches should be adopted to enhance conflict resolution in the workplace. The process of finding solutions to conflicts should be a creative one. Also, the solutions that are realized should lead to a better working environment. The labor management relation has to entail marketing principles because the aim of internal marketing is to increase personal satisfaction (Davoudi and Ravneet 67). The management has to package and present its ideas to the union in such a way that the operations of the organization will not end up being affected.
HR Strategic Partnership and Marketing
The HRM is tasked with the role of ensuring that the human resources goals are aligned accurately with the overall organizational goals (HR Marketer 9). While the workers in the firm are already employed, it should not be assumed that they are strategic partners with the organization’s objectives already, unless efforts are made towards this end. The most significant requirement that organizations need to consider in their efforts to attain strategic partnership entails the production of human resources metrics.
The HRM has to focus on the workers once it has measured all aspects of the organization’s human resources and determined the areas that require strengthening or corrections. The workers have to learn about the special or specific roles that each one of them is expected to take part in to enable the organization to achieve its anticipated strategic partnerships. In other words, the HR management has to market its intended strategies to the workers to make them understand and appreciate the efforts. The new ideas and strategies will require the direct involvement of the employees because they are the ones in charge of executing functions.
The internal marketing that the organization will use against its employees is meant to win over their trust and commitment. The employees have to understand the benefits that will accrue as a result of their participation or commitment towards attaining the strategic partnership. They have to buy the idea as a whole to increase the chances of remaining successful or risk failure on the part of the organization in terms of achieving positive outcomes (HR Marketer 9).
HR Compliance and Marketing
Laws on labor and employment exist to enable the organization to undertake its HR obligations within the acceptable legal parameters. The HR oversight enables companies to avoid liability for excessive fines, legal fees, and other related costs. The company loses public reputation when it violates labor laws (HR Marketer 10). This does more harm than good to the firm.
Observance of employment statutes that are set in any level of governance requires the firm to do regular assessments on these laws. This is a critical responsibility of HR in ensuring full compliance. The HR department staffs are charged with the responsibility of ensuring that the company expresses full commitment in as far as implementing fair employment practices is concerned. It is the duty of the HRM to assess and predict the possible effects of upcoming laws on the firm’s HR policies. At the same time, the HRM should continue implementing the existing employment regulations.
However, in seeking to achieve full HR compliance, the organization’s management has to ensure that its internal customers equally practice and adhere to the stipulated laws. It is more critical for the organization to adhere fully to the regulations and laws about HR in instances where the employees are the contact point between the firm and the market (HR Marketer 10). The organization has to adopt marketing principles to ensure that its workforce learns and understands the importance of complying with the labor laws. Such internal marketing efforts may include seminars, workshops, and incentive offers to enable the workers to commit themselves fully.
The HRM and Media Content
The media is a significant player in the operations of any organization’s human resource management efforts. The interest or content areas, such as magazines, periodicals, websites, industry events, professional associations, and blogs are useful in supplying information and news for the HR buyers. These sources are important because they help the management in keeping up to date with information regarding the industry.
A symbiotic affiliation exists between the content communities, vendors, and professionals. The HR professionals consider HR-related content communities as a source of information, while the content communities obtain their content from traditional journalism and through creating original editorial substance (HR Marketer 10). On the other hand, each of the outlets has a demand level of the submitted materials in the form of editorial contributions made by the HR suppliers and paid advertisements.
Thus, marketing offers a useful linkage that brings together HR content communities, vendors, and professionals. The potential HR customers, the organizations in this case, have to build strong relations with the other HR market players to achieve their corporate objectives. On the other hand, the HR vendors have to market their services to appeal to the buyers, who are the organizations.
Employer Branding and Marketing
The HR department is charged with the responsibility of undertaking employer branding. Companies realize that they may not match their industry rivals unless they build their capacity to attract the best and most competent personnel given the increasingly competitive business environment. The HRM must, therefore, draw a company profile that separates the organization from other rivals in terms of uniqueness in handling and observing HR related issues (HR Marketer 11).
However, the HR department has to utilize marketing principles to achieve this objective with perfection. It has to sell the company as the most appropriate brand to work with and attract all the useful skills available in the labor market. This branding of the organization entails illustrating the compensation benefits that individuals stand to benefit as a result of their working in the firm. The HR department must also mention the available training and development opportunities for their workers and the career choices and advancement that workers stand to benefit from.
This does not necessarily imply enumerating the positive implications. Instead, critical marketing principles have to be integrated to create the necessary awareness. The HRM must realize when the appropriate time for creating the awareness should be and determine the most appropriate means through which the awareness creation will be conducted (HR Marketer 11).
Conclusion
Human relations link up with the marketing function in numerous areas to enhance the overall performance of the organization. The human resource management focuses on staffing, training, developing, compensating, and managing labor relations of the organization, which mainly entail addressing employees’ issues. As the internal customers of the organization, employees have to be convinced into buying the ideas that the HRM fronts for implementation and adoption. The buying of these ideas, in turn, helps the organization to register positive results in terms of higher commitment, greater motivation, and improved productivity from the employees. Marketing principles are used to sell ideas to the employees, thereby attracting their full contribution and interest. The organization also markets itself as the best institution from where workers are bound to receive maximum benefits, such as fair compensation, training opportunities, and career growth.
Works Cited
Davoudi, Seyed Mehdi Mousavi, and Ravneet Kaur. “The Link Between Internal Marketing And Human Resource Management.” Arth Prabhand: A Journal of Economics and Management 1.2 (2012): 59-71. Print.
HR Marketer. Marketing and PR in the Human Resource Marketplace: What You Need to Know. n.d. Web.