Often when people hear about 'content creation', they associate this content with a company's Marketing department. However, curated content can have a substantial impact within the Human Resources department as well. Creating effective content can help companies bring in top talent, while keeping their current staff more connected to their brand, the company culture, and increasing their engagement level.

This new take on content use in business development can have a resoundingly positive impact within a company.

How Can HR Content Help Your Business?

While your marketing team may collaborate with other departments every day, HR's work is usually done within their own department. If HR curates some of its own content, it can help bring together your Human Resources and Marketing teams.

With HR-driven content, your company can:

• Attract new talented employees
• Help new employees feel welcome and adjust to their new environment
• Encourage current staff to address any issues and promote happiness

About 35% of job seekers prefer to find job opportunities on a company's career page rather than through outside sources. If HR doesn't provide ample information on the career page, they are missing out on a promising opportunity to attract the best employees to fill open jobs.

Through content marketing, you can offer high-quality information about your job offerings. Creating original content allows companies to actively engage with prospective employees in a personalized way to find the best talent out there.

It's also beneficial to curate internal content. Everything from weekly newsletters to an internal blog can help your employees better understand the company's policies and embrace the ideal company culture. Google did this well by introducing Diversity.Google, a page for reports and blog posts on what Google is doing internally, to create an inclusive and safe company culture.

Why Should You Tie Content Marketing and HR Together?

It can be common for each department within a company to get lost in its own tasks instead of working cross-functionally. But if all departments worked together, greater results could be produced. If your HR team writes a blog post about the dress code, it will just sound like the dress code page of your employee handbook. However, if a content creator writes that same blog, it will have a completely different effect because marketers understand how to invoke emotion and provoke a response.

Then there's the time and resource management facet of content creation. Your Human Resources team probably doesn't have the time available to craft content, manage an internal blog, post to the company's public blog page, and manage the social media announcements for published articles.

Marketing, however, manages these things on a daily basis. Now, they may not be able to sit down by themselves and write sterling content that will bring in the top talent available. They can, however, meet with HR staff to review the specifics of certain issues and craft a content calendar with the team that ensures all the content is informative to the readers. Having these teams work together is critical for an HR content marketing strategy to work.

The 5-Step Guide for Developing a Content Strategy

To get started, you'll need to hit all five of these points, and it's best to think about them before writing any content.

1. Define Your Target Audiences

You'll likely have three audiences to address - your current employees, your new hires, and your job seekers. The priority you give each audience will depend entirely on individual company goals and values. However, you should ask the same general questions no matter the audience:

• What is your biggest concern as a(n) employee, new employee, jobseeker?
• What personalities do you want to give the most attention to?
• How does the company weigh experience and education for hiring or internal growth possibilities?

Not only will these questions help you get to know your target audiences more, but they can also create a wide variety of topic opportunities.

2. Identify the Preferred Communication Avenues

Do people want to hear from you through a blog, LinkedIn, the company Facebook group, or a newsletter that travels through a company communication solution? As mentioned above, many job seekers go straight to a company's career page, so if you're only posting talent-oriented content on LinkedIn, you're missing more than a third of job seekers. It's a good practice to use a mix of two or three platforms, but be sure not to overload your HR staff or content marketing team.

After defining each of your audiences, pinpoint where each goes for information and make sure to publish content on those channels regularly. The possibilities are really endless. It's likely that initially creating an internal blog would take minimal effort, so your company could quickly create a new blog page if you don't have one already.

3. Create the Opportunity for Two-Way Communication

One of the primary purposes of any content marketing strategy is to cultivate engagement. Engagement has been a buzzword in content marketing for a long time now, but the concept is still very relevant. You need to engage your staff and create the opportunity for potential employees to ask questions and learn about what to expect as an employee.

To encourage communication, consider:

• Creating an email for questions, comments, and concerns about any HR-related content
• Allowing comments on blog posts (but consider requiring administrative approval of comments)
• Assigning a key person to address the emails or comments for HR-related questions
• Posting a Q&A form every few weeks to show what everyone has asked, along with the official company response

4. Set A Schedule

If there's one thing that content creators should focus on, it's consistency. Consistency builds trust in your brand and your business, which many employers know is hard to obtain from their employees. Consistently publishing HR content can create cohesion in the brand's voice and the company culture.

You could benefit from scheduling:

• Content creation
• Posting or publishing
• Promotion of the content (It's no good if no one reads it!)
• Auditing for quality and accuracy
• Editing cycles for information that has changed
• Engaging with commenters and responding to questions

Even if you only ever write evergreen content, you'll still need to go through a lot of audits, edits, and engagement strategies. Content creation is never as simple as just writing a blog and then making the page public.

5. Content Is a Collaboration Not an Independent Project

Finally, don't be afraid to get others involved in the creation process. For example, you can ask others within the company to contribute as employee writers. Get your staff involved. Invite them to open a discussion about the expectations of HR, company performance, and other employee concerns. Posting "A Day In The Life Of…" type of content can also come in handy in creating an engaging piece by conducting direct interviews with employees.

Content creation is always a collaborative effort, where people with different points of view and skill sets come together to deliver something that could be valuable to every reader.

About the Author: Josip Mlinaric is an email marketing and outreach specialist at Point Visible, a marketing agency providing custom outreach and link building service. He likes to say he has a simple and calm mindset in his approach towards life in general,  and likes to relax with experimenting in the kitchen or just chilling listening to music.