A mid-sized company just hired a new Chief People Officer, and everyone on the HR team agrees that this is worth announcing.
But how? One option is to post an announcement on the company's LinkedIn page as a hiring update and tag the new hire in the post. It could also be boosted to extend the reach of the announcement.
But then there's the option of pitching the announcement to the trade press as a story. Either way, both options are worth exploring. It's the kind of decision covered regularly in Onrec's own Appointments news, which tracks how companies handle these announcements across the industry.
What Each One Is Actually Trying to Do
Post to your own company's pages as a hiring update (e.g., LinkedIn, Facebook). Tag the new hire. Write a brief caption. Possible to 'boost' a paid ad to extend reach. But reach candidates and your current network only.
On the other hand, pitching the same appointment to Personnel Today or People Management is something else. If successful, it will appear in the week's round-up of senior HR appointments alongside those of other companies.
The publication and its readership are made up of industry peers, journalists, potential clients of the company, and others who would not normally see the company's own announcement on its own website. So here, the goal is not merely to reach people but also to gain credibility that the company could not gain by announcing the appointment itself.
As we noted earlier, what the company writes, edits, and controls to the end is very different from what an editor chooses to run, unpaid and unguaranteed. So, neither recruitment marketing nor PR "wins" in this scenario.
They simply communicate different messages. For a sense of what that earned coverage can look like in practice, it's worth looking at some of the 20 best PR examples.
Half of the Work.
Why does all this fall on the recruitment marketing approach of a post on the company's own LinkedIn page? It is quick, it is free, and it is within the control of the HR team.
Write a great caption, tag the new Chief People Officer in the photo, and reach out to LinkedIn to add a small budget to extend the reach of the post to more relevant candidates. But the main audience here is candidates interested in future roles at the company and the company's existing network of employees, former employees, and connections.
So, while announcing the new Chief People Officer is worth announcing, announcing it on the company's own page is recruitment marketing and showing the appointment off to the world in order to attract better candidates for future roles.
This is not a failure on the part of HR Directors to market their organization's appointments. Rather, this is a skills and relationship gap on the part of many HR generalists.
Most HR Directors are capable of crafting a strong LinkedIn caption announcing the hiring of a new Chief People Officer. However, writing a strong LinkedIn caption announcing a hire and pitching a trade outlet's press coverage of the same appointment are two very different skill sets.
The former are typically within the skill set of HR generalists. The latter are typically outside of their skill sets and are the domain of a public relations specialist.
What a Pitched Announcement Actually Requires
Getting a trade outlet to actually run a story isn't about sending a polished press release and hoping. A few things tend to separate a pitch that gets picked up from one that gets ignored.
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A reason the appointment matters beyond the company itself. A new strategic direction, a notable background, something that's a first for the sector. "We hired someone" isn't a story on its own. Why it matters to the industry is.
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The right contact at the right outlet. Sending a press release to the press@company.com email address is rarely as effective as sending a well-worded pitch to the editor of the specific trade publication that covers that type of news. People are far more likely to give attention to a well-written pitch sent to someone who can actually use the information than a mass email to a generic email address.
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Enough lead time before anything goes public elsewhere.Most outlets won't run a story that's already been posted on the company's own channels. If the internal LinkedIn post goes up first, the press opportunity is often already gone by the time anyone reaches out to a journalist.
This is exactly the process that shows up, made visible, in strong examples of PR done well. Seeing what a genuinely effective pitch or announcement looks like tends to make the whole process far less abstract for a team that's never done it before.
The Real Question Was Never Either/Or
This all comes down to a few very simple questions: what are you announcing? How are you going to announce it? Is a simple update on your own company's LinkedIn page sufficient to announce a new Chief People Officer's arrival?
Almost certainly yes, a simple update on your own company's page is sufficient for most company announcements, a hiring update in particular. But then that leads onto another simple question: what is the value in letting your own company's employees know that the Chief People Officer has arrived before the rest of the industry does?
