Extending Relationship Marketing to Human Resources Management Using the CaRM Approach to Personnel Recruitment

Abstract

Since the early 1990s, relationship-oriented approaches to product and services marketing have gained increasing interest by research and practice. While the overall approach of managing customer interactions has been inherent to the ways of doing business ever since, the recent change from transaction-oriented to relationship-oriented marketing is typically considered as a major paradigm shift (Grönroos, 2004). The current boom of customer relationship management concepts and solutions is only one indicator of this development. However, while relationship marketing has been discussed in various contexts such as business-to-business and business-to-consumer marketing, little attention so far has been paid to the question of what such an approach could add to the human resources field. This is astonishing as labor markets due to demographic effects and other changes in labor offer and demand tend to get increasingly narrow. Thus, traditional approaches to personnel marketing might no longer be sufficient and new concepts for the successful recruitment of qualified staff might be needed. Therefore, our research question is: How can we transfer the concepts of relationship marketing to personnel recruitment and what are potential benefits of such an approach? In order to answer this question, we present an approach for the ISsupported management of employer-candidate relationships. We outline two major dimensions of the approach together with selected validation results. The objective is to enhance human resources information systems (HRIS) research and to present an approach that could potentially assist employers in better facing mid-term shortages of qualified staff on a drastically changing labor market.