HR v Marketing

5 May 2011:

Forget Noel, Angelina and Brad: let’s hear it for Paul Gallagher, James Jolie and Julie Pitt. Placed beside marketing, HR feels like the less famous sibling. Marketing is sexier, more famous, more creative and definitely more out there.

Marketing is sexier, more famous, more creative and definitely more out there. The paparazzi love it. Various surveys, including our very own HR magazine one, seem to underline the message.

The discipline of marketing is full of people with high energy, great communication skills, high adaptability and proven strategic ability. Their understanding of brand and customer/consumer is innate. Marketers have the ear of the CEO and board - indeed, they have a good chance of being on that board.

Even Wikipedia rubs it in. Marketing is "the activity, set of institutions and processes for creating, communicating, delivering and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners and society at large". Human resources, meanwhile, is "the name of the function within an organisation charged with the overall responsibility for implementing strategies and policies relating to the management of individuals".

No wonder, then, that organisations are increasingly looking to marketers to head their HR strategy. The discipline is one of a number identified by global executive search firm Heidrick & Struggles as a career path to the chief HR officer role.

"Instead of turning to career HR practitioners, companies are filling the CHRO role with leaders from functions on the business side, such as operations, marketing or corporate law," the company says in a report, The New Path to the C-Suite, which made cover story of the Harvard Business Review for March 2011.

It's the same old story: HR is still struggling to gain clout in the C-suite, despite widespread acknowledgment that talent is integral to competitiveness.

As the Heidrick study says: "The HR role has long been viewed as largely administrative, except in the most forward-thinking companies and its leaders have mostly been relegated to managing policies and cultural initiatives.

"If companies continue to award top HR jobs to non-HR executives, the CHROs of the future will be more likely to have an understanding of commercial models, as well as experience with change management and finding pragmatic solutions to complex issues."