HR marketing isn’t short on effort. There’s more content, more channels, and more ways to reach people leaders than ever before. On paper, it should be getting easier to cut through but in reality, it isn’t.
A lot of what gets produced lands somewhere familiar. It says roughly the same things, in slightly different ways, and is easy to ignore. This isn’t necessarily due to the quality of writing, but because it doesn’t quite line up with how HR teams are actually working.
That came through in our recent HR Connection episode with Anindo Chatterjee at iMocha. The discussion covered skills, talent strategy and AI, but one point sat underneath all of it.
Most HR marketing is built on a simplification that doesn’t really hold up anymore: that HR is a single audience.
Where that starts to break down
This simplification may be a useful shorthand, but once you look at how decisions actually get made inside organisations, it quickly falls apart.
A Chief People Officer isn’t thinking about the same priorities as an L&D lead. An HR manager trying to make something work day-to-day isn’t approaching a challenge in the same way as someone setting long-term workforce strategy. They’re all part of the same function, but they’re dealing with different pressures and making decisions at different levels.
As Anindo pointed out, even when organisations appear to be dealing with similar problems, the reality is more specific. The detail changes, the context changes. What success looks like isn’t the same every time and that is where a lot of marketing starts to drift.
Why so much of it feels interchangeable
Most HR marketing still follows a similar model: define the audience, build a core message, and apply it broadly. It’s efficient and it scales, but it also means the same ideas get repeated across the market.
From the outside, it can appear this is a messaging issue. A case of tightening the wording or the creative needs improving. More often though, it’s a relevance issue. If the starting point is too broad, everything built on top of it is going to feel generalised. You end up with statements that may sound right, but don’t quite land.
For example, talking about ‘closing skills gaps’ without recognising whether a business is trying to redeploy existing people, justify new hiring or simply understand what capability it already has.
That gap between message and reality may be small, but it’s enough to make it easy to dismiss.
What’s changing
The organisations described in the conversation aren’t thinking in those broad terms anymore. Instead, they’re trying to understand:
That level of detail changes how decisions get made and it also changes what they expect from suppliers and partners. Whether that’s internal mobility, workforce planning or adapting to automation, if you’re working through a specific issue, generic messaging doesn’t really fit.
What this means in practice
This doesn’t mean starting from scratch for every organisation. But it does mean thinking more carefully about where relevance actually comes from. Instead of focusing solely on who you are targeting, time and attention must be directed toward what stage they’re at, how the problem shows up for them, and who else needs to buy into it internally.
For most HR decisions, there isn’t a single viewpoint that matters. There are several, and they don’t always line up. If your messaging only speaks to one of them, usually the most senior, it often stalls somewhere along the way.
Why this matters now
This isn’t a new issue, but it’s becoming harder to ignore as more and more HR teams take on more complex, organisation-wide responsibilities. At the same time, the volume of marketing aimed at them is only increasing.
That combination makes broad messaging less effective. Not because it’s wrong, but because it’s too far removed from the detail people are dealing with day-to-day.
From our conversation with Anindo, the takeaway is fairly simple: the problem isn’t that HR marketing lacks sophistication, it’s just that it’s often built at the wrong level. And until that shifts, a lot of the content we see will feel familiar and visible and ultimately, easy to pass over.
