Talent Innovators – Where did they come from?

Enjoyed a great conversation today with Employer Brand International Corporate Advisory members Kerry Noone, Marketing Communications Manager at Sodexo and Heather Polivka, Director of Employer Branding & Marketing at United Health Group.  The conversation covered top of mind territory around Employer Branding as business strategy (and not just recruiting strategy) and the cost/benefit analysis and opportunities specific to leveraging social media for talent acquisition.  Kerry and team Sodexo have built brand ambassadorship and a clearly defined social strategy that includes active participation/engagement and adheres to some of my general best practices (participation drives relevancy; transparency equals trust; listening is more important than talking; define the objective; and validate).  I am sure she’ll be sharing valuable insights around the Sodexo journey on panel at the Social Recruiting Summit later this month in NYC.  Heather (and Heather) at team UHG have a carefully vetted and clearly defined EVP leveraged across a variety of key internal/external Talent initiatives including the deployment of their new content rich careers portal.

Both are world class practitioners delivering for organizations that have strong leadership support for bringing new ideas and innovation to the talent function (which is certainly key to expedite transformation).  And both are HR transplants that come to the discipline with a marketing background and competency.  A new trend?  Will more companies adopt these titles & roles embedded into the HR/Talent function?  Is there an opportunity for more cross functional collaboration between HR/Marketing/Communications and PR in support of talent?  Perhaps…

Today’s conference call would have offered valuable lessons for anyone in sales/marketing. That is certainly part of the new talent acquisition competency.