#HRTechChat with James La Brash, Founding Managing Director at InFlight

3Sixty Insights

3Sixty Insights welcomed James La Brash late last week to the latest episode of #HRTechChat. James is founding managing director of InFlight. Truth be told, James and I have had the pleasure of engaging in several conversations, and we finally concluded that we should try to capture in the podcast as many of the great ideas we've discussed as possible. As anyone can imagine, there just wasn't enough time to cover everything, but we did get to a lot of it. The launching pad for our discussion in the video here is the idea that there just might be some room for human capital management and marketing -- the CHRO and CMO -- to cooperate, benefiting from mutual data analytics wherever possible. Furthermore, we noted that marketing has a roughly 10-year head start on HCM in the former's appreciation for measuring its effectiveness, and that CHROs may therefore learn a few things from CMOs in the interest of accelerating HCM's own foray into measuring its effectiveness. The conversation took off from there. Here's a sampling of the subject matter James and I have covered since first speaking, much of it captured in the podcast: With good intentions, many in talent acquisition have recognized the similarities (beyond the acronyms) of systems for customer relationship management and candidate relationship management. It's a good impulse. It's also good not to follow it to the extreme, as the parallels between customers' and candidates' needs are there, but limited. Are the employer and consumer brand separate? Or, are they one and the same? If it's the latter, is it preferable for HCM and marketing alike to treat them as one or as two. Is the answer, "sometimes"? In some industries, it makes especially good sense for HCM and marketing to partner. Examples are when the typical employee is desk-less or semi-desk-less or otherwise interacts directly with customers day-to-day. These employees become the expression of the brand, so employer and company brand are one and the same We all know that great marketing and a great employee experience contribute mightily to organizational success, in and outside the general ledger, but it’s notoriously difficult or impossible to quantify financially these domains’ overall benefits to the organization. Could it be that it’s because in order to prove that financially quantifiable connection, you have to measure the totality of HCM or marketing, and this just isn’t possible because of the many moving parts within these domains? One way to chip away at this apparent impasse is to introduce leadership to the idea of brand damage -- i.e., that it's potentially expensive and avoidable. This may be a viable bridge to get us to the ideal future, when organizations understand the benefits of positive brand (employer or consumer) as a point of excellence to pursue. There's much more. You just have to watch. We again thank James for joining #HRTechChat.