I’ve written a couple times about the relationship between human resources and marketing. You can check those posts out here and here. Today’s reader question takes the conversation one step further.
Hi Sharlyn! The company I work for has approached me with the opportunity to be a director of either Marketing or HR. I explained that I think there is a perfect blend between the two. They aren’t seeing the vision, but are open to it.
Do you have any recommendations for job descriptions, benchmarks for the positions, key results areas, statistics to support this structure, etc? Anything you can provide is appreciated. Thanks so much!
I don’t believe having a combined HR and marketing role is farfetched. In fact, I know someone who has that role right now. And she was incredibly gracious to give me a copy of her job description and performance appraisal. You can download a copy here.
The purpose of the download isn’t to critique the form. Job descriptions and performance appraisals have a connection to corporate culture. I’ve worked for companies that wanted pages of detail and others that wanted very little. The form is a place for creative inspiration. Here’s what you want to ask yourself:
- Are there HR responsibilities I would add/delete or change?
- Are there marketing responsibilities I would add/delete or change?
- I’m in the XX industry. How does that impact the responsibilities?
- What measurements or metrics should be attached to my performance?
- What would be reasonable goals for this position?
Whenever I’ve created a brand new job, I needed someplace to start. This is that place. Once a starting point was developed, we conducted regular reviews to perfect the information.
My thanks goes out to my colleague who was willing to share. That’s what friends are all about.
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Miki says
First time perusing this blog and this post has drawn me in!
The head of HR at my former company (Frontier Communications) has responsibility for Marketing as well as Human Resources. She has held dual roles for most of her career at Frontier, but I thought the Marketing mix was very interesting. The dual role is clearly an emerging trend.. one possibly driven by the push to hire HR execs with experiences that extend beyond HR?
Steve B says
NO. One person can not handle both HR and Marketing. Two completely different headsets.
Sharlyn Lauby says
@Miki – Welcome to HR Bartender. And thanks for sharing! I totally agree that the combination marketing/human resources role is an emerging trend.
@Steve – Thanks for the comment. I admit, I’ve only known a handful of people who’ve had a combination role. But those that I’ve seen with the role, have done it quite successfully. It might depend upon the industry.
Cathy Shanes says
Although there really are many concepts in marketing that HR should adopt and a close cooperation between marketing and HR would benefit any company, I believe that actually making one person in charge of both departments or combining these departments is not the best idea. I think it’s a tricky path, because thinking like CMO doesn’t make HR being CMO.
Michael Miller says
I think this would really depend on both the type of HR and type of Marketing role you are speaking about. We’ve blogged a couple of times on our website about how HR can benefit by borrowing from Marketing in their recruiting efforts – particularly for A-level talent. Community building, target marketing, creating personas, these are all marketing activities that can be ported over to HR. However, this is more marketing communications and public relations. If I think of brand marketing and product marketing, those activities are very different and, I think, radically different from HR.
If I look back at my career in marketing and communications, I have on a few occasions had the same reporting officer as my peers in HR. This has been more the case when marketing and corporate communications are merged, though, as their is much more logical case to put those two together.
Erika says
While HR and marketing can definitely overlap at times, they are both crucial roles in a company that should be handled by two separate people, in my opinion. HR employees can blog about various aspects of the industry and also about the company, but if any two roles were to combine it would be marketing with PR. The HR professional can easily get overwhelmed with two such heavy roles, which is when things start to slip through the cracks.
Interesting write up though! Each company is different and this dynamic might work well for some.