Last week, I met a visionary HR Professional who mentioned HR and Product Management in a way that I never thought of before. He has a vision of HR as a Product Manager of ‘Employees’. He had several plans for Employer Branding from a pure Marketing perspective and sees the employees as real values of the company as they need close attention and caring as much as the most precious products of the company. I started to think about HR’s role in C-Level and tried to imagine an HR role with a Product Management job definition but this time the precious product is the employees themselves.

Having a perspective of a Product Manager about employees may seem odd at first since they are real humans not just some materials or goods. However, it gets easier when you change your point of view. Traditionally, we have seen products as the end results of companies’ value chain while employees as a critical ingredient or input of the production process. Let’s challenge this mindset for a second. What if we see the employees themselves as our end results and product lines as a development tool for them? We mostly offer our employees’ skill, talent and efforts to customers in a variety of ways like goods produces, services offered or customer support. They pay not only the materials we use but the employees who create the added value. Therefore, HR roles might be more successful with a more similar job definition to a Product Manager. Is it hard to think that way? Let’s make it easier by listing the main two functions of a product manager and make a comparison of them with HR roles.

1-     Product Development

Basically, Product Managers decide the features of the product, forecast and plan according to feedbacks and requests from the customers and the market. It needs to be quite similar for HR because having a reactive role is not enough anymore. Fulfilling a position in a short time matters but fulfilling a position in a very short time from a proactively composed talent pool that specifically tailored for the company’s future and strategy and adapting that candidate as soon as possible matters much more. HR needs to understand the company’s needs and prepare its processes and efforts according to those future needs with a proactive approach.

HR eliminates candidates with a predefined mindset/criteria and choose the ones with the best performance potential. The product Manager does just the same and choose the product with the best revenue or market share potential considering an organization’s strategy. Despite the fact that managing the whole lifecycle for both products and employees is much harder, it is still alike when we compare talent management processes like competency assessment, performance management, rewarding to product management processes like product-focused R&D, customer reviews and promotions.

2-     Product Marketing

As companies focus on creating value-added services and products more than producing the lowest-cost version of a mainstream product, it is much more important to have the right marketing strategy to show its products’ advantages and get the customers to use/buy those. It is just the same for employees’ side nowadays, when we talk about employer branding, we mainly focus on to show-off our companies’ values, culture, compensation, benefits, development opportunities etc. However, it is much more convincing to see some strong profiles working for the company that just offered you a job. People are social creatures and tend to follow other human beings and this goes the same way for employer branding. When you see someone from the college with the best possible resume working for a specific company, suddenly that company starts to seem much more interesting and hard to reach for.

Like product managers, who decide to marketing strategy, target audience, communication channels etc. HR needs to determine how to advertise employees and attract both customers and possible future candidates. Thanks to 21st-century talent-wars, HR started to work with MarCom much more closely and now there are many projects that may be considered close to this approach and they are featuring employees in company advertisements, introduction videos etc.

When we see HR and Product Management roles in such comparison for both of these functions, it is easier to understand the concept of ‘HR as a Product Manager’. This mindset would require HR Professionals who are much better at:

• Understanding the Value Chain and Business Model of the company
• Strategic Planning, not just in terms of the workforce but also business perspective
• Business Intelligence Tools to analyze data sets
• Forecasting the competencies that will be required and get candidates with those on board
• Marketing and Communications
• Organizational Awareness

I felt excited when I first thought of these because I felt it would be much better to have such a role in the organization rather than just a classical HR position that drives only internal processes with nearly zero understanding of the business, technology, customers, market or the product.

What are your thoughts on this concept? How does it sound to position HR as a Product Manager of Employees for the whole organization? Please share your ideas so that we may have a new approach and may discover some improvement areas.

Article originally published on Linkedin.com on 21/10/2016