If you are a human resources executive, you are at the heart of any organization. After all, it is you and your position that are largely responsible for the success or failure of that organization.
Unfortunately for many HR executives, their success largely can be determined by the actions (or inactions) of others around them in their own business, and understanding how to navigate that and adroitly traverse the “internal mine field” is critical.
Human resources is at the center of attracting and retaining talent, communicating internally to all members of any successful organization regarding policies and programs, as well as training, planning events and a host of additional responsibilities.
Identifying the challenge
The challenge is that many of these core responsibilities also fall into other camps and internal disciplines, such as marketing, public relations, community relations, operations and legal. After all, if your brand has a bad reputation, attracting talent is going to be that much more challenging. If you don’t have a strong, well-communicated corporate culture, it’s also difficult to retain talent who may lack understanding of the direction of the boat.
Working with these folks — either internally or outsourced through a professional firm — is increasingly more important. Human resources professionals are increasingly tasked with doing more for less, it seems. In some small businesses, HR is the PR department as well, needing to stay current on communications, legal and operational issues.
But HR, when hiring for communications positions, often may ignore the expertise, experience and cost savings that would be gained from a communications agency partner rather than simply the latest in-house hire.
In many cases, this is significantly less costly than even entry level in-house hires.
Stability, objectivity
With the right agency, you have no overhead. No downtime, and no need to retrain each time the last hire leaves. If I were the CEO of a business, I’d at the very least, want the stability and objectivity of a professional agency with specific industry knowledge, expertise and experience that offers that high-level strategy, as well as the ability to seamlessly execute with the most contemporary and proven techniques and tactics.
The ability to properly communicate a brand to both internal and external audiences makes attracting and retaining talent that much easier as well. Few people want to work for a company they’ve never heard of, or worse, one with a bad reputation.
If your business has little in the way of external communications, a dated website, no community relations program, or a poor social media presence, attracting the best and brightest is just that much more difficult. It’s easy to fix with a firm — you give them the assignment; however, more challenging when dealing with folks in house (how many meetings would that take?).
The bottom line is that agency is not perfect, but the perfect agency for “you” is indeed out there, with expertise in your industry and all the skills necessary to competently and consistently help to communicate your brand messages both internally and externally.
Rodger Roeser is the CEO of the Greater Cleveland and Greater Cincinnati based digital marketing and PR consultancy The Eisen Agency. Recognized as one of the foremost experts on professional services marketing and branding, Roeser works with leading financial, legal, healthcare, real estate, construction, and home services companies to more effectively market their services. Roeser was named 2010 Cincinnati PRSA PR Person of the Year, and served as president of the Cincinnati PRSA Chapter in 2005. He earned of SoMe Social Media Impact Award from Smart Business in 2012, was a Jefferson Award Finalist in 2013 and was named of the Cincinnati’s top CEOs in 2014. His agency was named 2013 Cincinnati PRSA Large Agency of the Year and in 2012, cracked the Inc. 5000.
