How a digital marketing assessment can sharpen your chief human resources officer skills

Why digital marketing assessment matters for chief human resources officers

Why digital fluency is now part of the CHRO job

The chief human resources officer role has shifted from a mainly people focused function to a strategic partner in digital transformation. Workforce planning, talent acquisition, learning, and culture are now deeply connected to marketing, digital channels, and data driven decision making. A structured digital marketing assessment helps you understand how your organisation shows up online, how candidates and employees experience your brand, and how your HR strategies support or weaken that presence.

For many HR leaders, this is no longer a nice to have skill set. Search engine visibility, social media conversations, and content marketing all shape how people perceive your company as an employer. When you understand key concepts such as seo, marketing analytics, and online presence, you can speak the same language as your marketing manager and technology partners. That shared language makes it easier to align people strategies with broader marketing efforts and business goals.

From employer brand to digital customer style thinking

Digital marketing assessment tools were originally designed to understand customer journeys in online commerce. They look at how people discover a brand through a search engine, how they interact with content on social media, and how they respond to email marketing or other marketing campaigns. The same logic now applies to candidates and employees. They research your organisation on google, compare your brand with competitors, and react to your content in very similar ways to customers.

By reviewing marketing assessment outputs, you can see how your employer brand performs in digital channels. For example, analytics from google analytics or social media platforms can reveal which content attracts candidates, which pages cause drop off, and which messages resonate with specific talent segments. This is not about turning HR into a sales function. It is about borrowing proven marketing strategies to improve how you attract, engage, and retain people.

Understanding this digital customer style thinking also prepares you for more advanced work with people analytics and integrated HR and marketing data, which will be explored later in the article.

Why CHROs should care about marketing tests and assessments

A digital marketing assessment is essentially a structured skills assessment for your organisation’s online presence. It often combines automated tests, analytics reviews, and expert evaluation of your marketing strategy, content, and media mix. For a CHRO, this type of assessment offers several benefits :

• Clear view of the talent facing brand – You see how candidates experience your brand across social media, career pages, and other online touchpoints.
• Evidence for HR investment decisions – Data from marketing analytics and marketing tests can support business cases for better content, new learning path designs, or updated HR technology.
• Insight into critical digital skills – You can identify which marketing skills, such as seo, content marketing, or email marketing, are missing in HR and in the wider organisation.
• Shared metrics with marketing and IT – Using the same assessment framework as marketing and digital teams makes collaboration more concrete and less subjective.

Some organisations also use a marketing test or skills test to evaluate internal capabilities. For example, they might run tests on understanding key concepts in digital marketing, marketing analytics, or social media strategy. As a CHRO, you do not need to become a specialist in every tool, but you should be comfortable interpreting the results of these tests and translating them into people related actions.

Connecting digital marketing assessment to HR technology and content

Modern HR management relies heavily on digital platforms, from applicant tracking systems to learning experience platforms and internal communication tools. These systems are part of the same digital ecosystem that supports marketing campaigns and online commerce. When you run a digital marketing assessment, you are also indirectly assessing how well your HR content and processes fit into that ecosystem.

For instance, a review of your online presence might show that job descriptions are hard to find through search engine queries, or that your career site content is not aligned with the brand messages used in customer facing marketing. It might also reveal that your internal content, such as learning resources or policy pages, is not structured in a way that supports creating digital experiences across multiple channels.

This is where understanding the role of a composable content management system in HR becomes relevant. A flexible content architecture allows HR and marketing to reuse and adapt content for different audiences, while keeping the core brand and compliance elements consistent. When your HR content is managed with the same discipline as marketing content, it becomes easier to support both candidates and employees with accurate, engaging information.

Building your own digital marketing literacy as a CHRO

To get full value from a digital marketing assessment, you need a basic level of digital literacy and marketing skills. This does not mean passing every marketing test or becoming certified in every analytics platform. It means being able to :

• Read and question data from tools such as google analytics and social media dashboards.
• Understand how seo and content marketing influence candidate attraction.
• Recognise the difference between vanity metrics and meaningful analytics for HR decisions.
• Discuss marketing strategy and marketing campaigns with confidence.

Many CHROs build this literacy through a personal learning path that includes short courses on digital marketing, marketing analytics, and online presence management. Others learn by working closely with a marketing manager or digital team during major projects, such as a career site redesign or a new employer branding initiative. Over time, this learning makes it easier to integrate digital metrics into people analytics and to use marketing assessment insights to shape leadership development, workforce planning, and future CHRO capabilities.

Why now is the right time to start

The pressure on organisations to compete for talent in a transparent, always online environment is not going away. Candidates compare employers as easily as customers compare products. They read reviews, analyse social media, and expect a seamless digital experience from first contact to onboarding. A digital marketing assessment gives you a structured way to understand where you stand today and which skills, content, and strategies you need to improve.

As the article continues, we will look at how to connect these assessment insights to core CHRO competencies, how to use them to strengthen employer branding, and how to embed digital metrics into your broader people analytics and leadership agenda. Starting with a clear, data informed view of your online presence is the foundation for all of that work.

Connecting digital marketing assessment to core chro competencies

Reading digital marketing assessment through a CHRO lens

When you look at a digital marketing assessment as a chief human resources officer, you are not just reviewing campaigns or channels. You are reading a live snapshot of how the organisation thinks, collaborates, and learns. The same data that a marketing manager uses to optimise a campaign can help you evaluate leadership behaviours, decision making, and cross functional skills.

Most modern assessments in digital marketing cover areas such as seo, content marketing, social media, email marketing, google analytics, and broader marketing analytics. For a CHRO, these are not just technical topics. They are practical windows into core CHRO competencies such as strategic thinking, workforce planning, talent development, and culture building.

Strategic thinking and business acumen

A structured marketing assessment forces teams to clarify their marketing strategy, target customer segments, and expected outcomes. This is directly relevant to CHRO strategic capabilities.

• Understanding key digital levers such as search engine visibility, online presence, and social media reach helps you connect people decisions to revenue, commerce, and growth.
• Reviewing marketing campaigns and their analytics trains you to ask sharper questions about resource allocation, capability gaps, and organisational priorities.
• Looking at marketing efforts across channels, from content to paid media, mirrors the way you should evaluate HR initiatives across recruitment, learning, and engagement.

In other words, the same mindset used to optimise digital campaigns can be applied to workforce strategies. You move from generic HR language to concrete, measurable contributions to the brand and the business.

Talent acquisition and candidate evaluation

Digital marketing assessment is also a powerful tool for refining how you attract and evaluate candidates. Many organisations still rely heavily on CVs and interviews, which often fail to reveal real marketing skills or the ability to work in a data driven environment.

• By using structured skills assessment and skills test formats, you can design fairer, more predictive hiring processes for roles that support creating digital experiences.
• Practical marketing test tasks, such as reviewing a google analytics dashboard or drafting a short content marketing plan, show how a candidate thinks, not just what they claim.
• Standardised tests and work samples can be aligned with your broader assessment framework for other functions, improving consistency and reducing bias.

This approach is not limited to marketing roles. Once you are comfortable with digital skills test design, you can extend similar methods to HR, finance, or operations, especially in environments where online tools and data literacy are essential.

Learning, reskilling, and the digital learning path

Another core CHRO competency is building a culture of continuous learning. A robust digital marketing assessment can act as a diagnostic for current capability levels and guide the learning path for different employee groups.

• Assessment results highlight which marketing skills are strong internally, and where you need targeted development in areas like seo, social media, or email marketing.
• You can design modular learning journeys that move people from basic awareness of digital marketing to more advanced marketing analytics and google analytics interpretation.
• By tracking progress over time, you turn learning into an evidence based process, not a series of disconnected training events.

This is particularly important as HR itself becomes more digital. The same logic that improves marketing campaigns can be used to refine HR communication, internal content, and employee facing online experiences.

Data driven decision making and people analytics

Digital marketing teams are used to working with dashboards, conversion rates, and attribution models. For CHROs, engaging with these analytics is a practical way to strengthen your own comfort with data and prepare for deeper work in people analytics.

• Reviewing marketing analytics side by side with HR metrics helps you see how talent decisions influence marketing efforts and business outcomes.
• Understanding how google analytics tracks user behaviour can inspire better measurement of employee journeys across HR systems.
• Exposure to online and social media metrics builds your ability to interpret complex datasets and communicate insights to the executive team.

This shared language around data makes it easier to collaborate with marketing, IT, and finance on integrated dashboards and more advanced analytics projects later on.

Change leadership and digital culture

Finally, a digital marketing assessment reveals how ready the organisation is to operate in a fast moving, online first environment. For CHROs, this connects directly to change leadership, culture, and workforce readiness.

• If teams struggle with creating digital content or adapting marketing strategy based on social media feedback, it may signal broader resistance to experimentation and learning.
• Strong performance in digital marketing areas such as content marketing or email marketing can indicate a culture that is comfortable with testing, iteration, and transparent measurement.
• Insights from the assessment can inform your change narrative, helping employees understand why new tools, media channels, or online processes are necessary.

In sectors like healthcare or regulated industries, where supply chains and service delivery are complex, these digital capabilities intersect with operational models. For example, understanding how data flows in a consignment inventory system for hospitals can complement your grasp of marketing analytics and inform how you design roles, responsibilities, and training for frontline teams.

By treating digital marketing assessment as more than a functional tool, you turn it into a mirror of your core CHRO competencies. It becomes a way to test and refine your own skill set in strategy, talent, learning, analytics, and culture, while staying closely aligned with how the organisation presents its brand to the market.

Using digital marketing assessment to strengthen employer branding

Why employer branding now depends on digital fluency

Employer branding used to be mostly about career fairs, brochures and word of mouth. Today, your brand as an employer is shaped in real time by your online presence : search results, social media feeds, review platforms and the way your organisation shows up in digital marketing channels.

This is where a structured digital marketing assessment becomes a powerful tool for a chief human resources officer. By reviewing how your organisation appears across search engine results, social media, email marketing and other media, you gain a clearer picture of what potential candidates actually see before they ever speak with a recruiter.

Reliable sources in employer branding and recruitment marketing consistently highlight the same pattern : candidates research employers the same way customers research products, using google, social platforms and independent reviews. When you approach this with the same discipline that marketing teams use for customers, you can align your people strategy with the organisation’s broader marketing strategy and brand positioning.

Reading the digital footprint candidates see first

A practical starting point is to treat your employer brand like a customer facing brand and run a basic marketing assessment on it. This does not require becoming a marketing manager, but it does require some core marketing skills and comfort with analytics and data.

• Search engine visibility : Use simple seo checks and google analytics style reports to understand how often people find your careers pages, which search engine queries they use and where they drop off.
• Social media signals : Review how your organisation is presented on major social media platforms. Look at engagement on posts about people, culture and jobs, not only product or commerce content.
• Content quality : Assess whether your careers and culture pages follow basic content marketing practices : clear messaging, relevant stories, accessible language and consistent visuals.
• Email marketing touchpoints : If your talent team uses newsletters or nurture campaigns, treat them as marketing campaigns and review open rates, click throughs and unsubscribe patterns.

These are the same marketing efforts your commercial teams use for customers, simply redirected toward talent. A structured assessment of these elements gives you evidence, not opinions, about how your employer brand performs in the digital space.

Using marketing style tests to stress test your employer brand

To move beyond surface impressions, many organisations now apply simple tests and skills assessment style exercises to their employer branding. The idea is not to turn HR into a marketing test lab, but to borrow proven methods from marketing analytics and adapt them to talent attraction.

Examples include :

• A/B tests on content : Run small scale marketing test experiments on job descriptions, career page headlines or culture statements. Measure which versions attract more qualified candidates or lead to more completed applications.
• Skills test for messaging clarity : Ask a small group of employees and external candidates to read your employer brand content and summarise what they think your organisation stands for. Treat this as a qualitative skills test on your own messaging.
• Channel assessment : Compare performance across different media : job boards, social media, referral campaigns, email marketing. Use a light skills assessment mindset to see which channels your team actually knows how to use well.

These approaches mirror how marketing teams validate marketing strategy and creating digital journeys for customers. For a CHRO, they become a disciplined way to test whether your employer brand is understood, trusted and attractive to the right candidates.

Linking candidate experience to digital marketing metrics

Once you start using digital metrics, you can connect employer branding more tightly to your broader people analytics. Instead of only tracking time to hire or offer acceptance rate, you can add indicators that come directly from digital marketing practices.

These metrics do not replace traditional HR indicators, but they complement them. They help you understand key friction points in the candidate journey and show where your employer brand underperforms compared with your customer facing brand.

Aligning HR, marketing and IT around a shared employer brand

As you deepen your use of digital marketing assessment, collaboration with marketing and IT becomes essential. Employer branding sits at the intersection of people, technology and marketing capabilities. When HR, marketing and IT work from a shared assessment framework, you can align your employer brand with the organisation’s overall brand and online strategy.

One practical step is to agree on common data sources and dashboards. For example, using the same google analytics instance or similar tools that marketing uses for customer journeys, but with views tailored to careers content. This reduces duplication and ensures that HR decisions are grounded in the same evidence base as commercial decisions.

Another step is to clarify roles. Marketing can support with content marketing, social media strategy and email marketing design. IT can ensure the careers site, application forms and integrations with HR systems are stable and secure. HR leads on the people narrative, values and the real employee experience behind the digital promise.

When you need external support, the same discipline applies. Using a structured approach to vet third party HR consultants helps you select partners who understand both HR and digital marketing realities, rather than offering generic branding advice.

Building CHRO skills through hands on digital assessment

Working with employer branding through a digital lens is also a way to build your own skills as a CHRO. You do not need to become an expert in every marketing analytics tool, but you do need a solid understanding key concepts : how search engine visibility works, what makes content engaging, how marketing campaigns are measured and how online journeys are designed.

A simple learning path might include :

• Reviewing basic digital marketing and marketing analytics resources focused on employer branding.
• Shadowing your marketing manager or digital team during campaign planning to see how they use data and tests to refine strategies.
• Participating in the design of at least one employer branding marketing assessment, from defining objectives to interpreting results.

Over time, this hands on exposure strengthens your ability to challenge assumptions, ask better questions and connect employer branding decisions to both people outcomes and business outcomes. It also prepares you for future responsibilities, where creating digital experiences for employees and candidates will be as central to the CHRO role as traditional HR operations.

Independent research in HR technology and talent acquisition consistently shows that organisations which treat employer branding as a measurable, digital first discipline attract stronger candidates and reduce hiring costs. By embedding digital marketing assessment into your employer branding work, you position HR as a strategic partner in how the organisation shows up to the market, not only for customers but for the people you hope to hire and retain.

Integrating digital marketing metrics into people analytics

Bringing marketing style metrics into people decisions

For many chief human resources officers, people analytics still focuses on classic HR indicators : headcount, turnover, time to hire, engagement scores. Useful, but incomplete. A digital marketing assessment opens the door to a richer view, closer to how a marketing manager reads campaign performance.

Marketing teams use data from google analytics, social media dashboards, email marketing tools, and search engine reports to understand customer behavior. HR can borrow the same mindset to understand how candidates, employees, and even alumni interact with the organisation’s online presence and brand.

The goal is not to turn HR into a marketing department. The goal is to use marketing analytics style thinking to improve people decisions, workforce planning, and talent strategies.

From campaign funnel to talent funnel

Digital marketing teams track every step of the customer journey : impressions, clicks, visits, sign ups, purchases. In HR, you can mirror this logic for the talent journey, using a structured assessment of your digital touchpoints.

• Awareness : How many people discover your employer brand through social media, content marketing, or search engine results linked to your careers pages ?
• Consideration : How many visitors explore your career content, job descriptions, or culture pages, and how long do they stay online ?
• Conversion : What percentage of visitors start or complete an application test, skills test, or full application form ?
• Quality : Among those who apply, how many pass your skills assessment or marketing test, and how many become high performers after hiring ?

By integrating these digital marketing style metrics into people analytics, you move from simple volume reporting to a deeper understanding key patterns in your talent funnel. You can see where candidates drop off, which content attracts the right profiles, and which marketing campaigns or channels bring the best long term hires.

Key digital metrics every CHRO should track

You do not need to replicate every metric used in digital marketing. Focus on a core set that clearly connects to HR outcomes and CHRO skills.

• Source quality : Combine marketing analytics with HR data to see which channels (job boards, social media, email marketing, referral campaigns, online events) bring candidates who pass your tests, stay longer, and perform better.
• Content effectiveness : Use basic seo and google search data to see which employer brand articles, videos, or job posts drive qualified traffic. Link this to application and hire rates.
• Engagement with HR content : Track views, clicks, and time on page for HR related content marketing such as career blogs, culture stories, or learning path pages. Connect this to applications and internal mobility.
• Conversion rates by step : Measure how many people move from viewing a job ad to starting an application, completing a skills test, passing an assessment, and accepting an offer.
• Cost per quality hire : Borrow from digital marketing efforts and calculate cost per hire by channel, but adjust for performance and retention, not just volume.

These metrics help you treat your talent pipeline with the same discipline that marketing applies to customer acquisition and commerce funnels. Over time, this becomes a core CHRO skill set, not a side project.

Linking digital marketing data with HR systems

To make this work, you need to connect digital data sources with your HR platforms. That means building bridges between tools used for digital marketing and your applicant tracking system, HRIS, and learning platforms.

Typical data sources include :

• Google analytics or similar tools for traffic, behavior, and conversions on career and employer brand pages.
• Social media and media dashboards for reach, engagement, and click through on HR related posts.
• Email marketing platforms for open rates, click rates, and responses to talent newsletters or campaign messages.
• Marketing assessment and marketing test tools used in creating digital campaigns that can also support candidate skills test or pre hire assessments.

When these are integrated with HR data, you can answer questions such as :

• Which online campaigns bring candidates who pass our assessments and stay beyond one year ?
• Which search engine keywords or seo strategies attract the profiles we need for critical roles ?
• How does engagement with internal content and learning path communications correlate with promotion rates or internal mobility ?

This is where the CHRO role becomes more data fluent. You are not just reading dashboards ; you are shaping marketing strategy for talent, together with marketing and IT.

Using analytics to refine talent strategies and skills development

Once digital marketing metrics are embedded in people analytics, you can use them to refine both external and internal strategies.

• Targeted sourcing : Use data to focus your marketing efforts on the channels and audiences that bring the right candidates, not just more candidates.
• Better assessments : Analyse which skills assessment formats, tests, or case studies best predict on the job performance for different roles.
• Learning path design : Track how employees interact with online learning content, internal social media communities, and knowledge platforms, then adjust learning paths based on real behavior.
• Brand and culture alignment : Monitor how your employer brand is perceived across online channels, and connect this perception to engagement, retention, and internal survey data.

Over time, this creates a feedback loop : marketing data informs HR decisions, HR outcomes inform future marketing campaigns, and the CHRO builds stronger marketing skills as part of the leadership profile.

Building CHRO confidence with digital and marketing analytics

Integrating digital marketing metrics into people analytics is not about becoming a technical specialist. It is about building enough fluency to ask the right questions, challenge assumptions, and guide the organisation’s talent and brand strategies.

By working with marketing and IT on a shared marketing assessment and analytics framework, you develop a practical, data informed view of how your brand performs in the talent market and how your internal workforce responds to digital initiatives. This combination of people insight and online data is becoming a core capability for future CHROs, especially in organisations where digital marketing, commerce, and talent competition are tightly linked.

Collaborating with marketing and it through a shared assessment framework

Building a shared language around digital performance

For many chief human resources officers, the biggest barrier to working effectively with marketing and IT is not intent, it is vocabulary. A structured digital marketing assessment gives everyone a shared language about performance, skills and priorities.

When you use the same assessment framework as the marketing manager and IT leaders, you can talk about:

• Online presence in terms of traffic, search engine visibility and conversion, not just “brand awareness”.
• Marketing efforts through clear metrics from tools like Google Analytics, marketing analytics platforms and social media dashboards.
• Content performance by looking at how blog posts, email marketing and social media campaigns attract candidates and potential employees.

This shared language matters when you discuss employer branding, recruitment campaigns or internal communication strategies. Instead of debating opinions, you can review the same data, the same tests and the same marketing assessment results.

Aligning HR, marketing and IT around measurable goals

A digital marketing assessment is not only a test of marketing skills. Used well, it becomes a cross functional tool to align HR, marketing and IT around measurable goals that affect both customers and candidates.

As CHRO, you can work with marketing and IT to define a small set of shared indicators that matter for people decisions, for example :

• Candidate journey metrics : click through rates on career content, application completion rates, time on page for job descriptions.
• Employer brand visibility : seo rankings for career related keywords, search engine impressions for your brand plus “jobs” or “careers”.
• Engagement on social media : reactions, comments and shares on posts about culture, learning path opportunities and internal mobility.
• Email marketing performance : open and response rates for talent newsletters, talent pool campaigns and onboarding sequences.

IT supports the data collection and integration, marketing designs the strategies and content, and HR interprets the impact on attraction, retention and development. The assessment becomes the neutral reference point to review what works and what does not.

Using assessment results to design joint initiatives

Once you have a common framework, the next step is to use assessment results to design joint initiatives. This is where collaboration becomes concrete.

Examples of initiatives that often emerge from a structured marketing assessment and skills assessment approach :

• Improving career site content based on seo and content marketing insights, so that candidates find clearer information about roles, culture and benefits.
• Creating digital campaigns that combine customer and candidate messages, especially for roles close to commerce, customer service or digital product teams.
• Refining social media strategies to balance product, brand and people stories, using analytics to test different formats and messages.
• Designing skills test and skills assessment journeys that feel consistent with the brand, using online tests and marketing test style experiences that are mobile friendly and easy to complete.

Here, the CHRO role is to ensure that every marketing campaign or online initiative that touches candidates or employees is also a fair, inclusive and respectful experience. The same data that marketing uses to optimise conversion can help HR check for bias, drop off points or confusing steps in the process.

Embedding HR needs into digital and data architecture

Collaboration with IT becomes much easier when you can point to specific metrics and assessment gaps. A digital marketing assessment highlights where data is missing or fragmented, for example when you cannot link a social media campaign to actual applications or hires.

With that evidence, you can work with IT to :

• Connect applicant tracking systems with marketing analytics tools such as Google Analytics.
• Ensure that consent, privacy and compliance are respected while still allowing useful reporting.
• Standardise tags, events and tracking so that HR, marketing and IT all see the same numbers.

This is not about turning HR into a technical team. It is about understanding key data flows well enough to ask the right questions and to participate in decisions about platforms, integrations and reporting. Over time, this shared framework supports more advanced people analytics and more precise marketing strategy decisions.

Co developing digital skills and learning paths

A final benefit of a shared assessment framework is the ability to co develop digital skills across functions. When marketing, HR and IT look at the same assessment results, they can identify common gaps in digital marketing, analytics or content creation.

From there, you can :

• Build joint learning paths that cover marketing analytics, social media basics, content marketing and data literacy for HR teams.
• Invite marketing experts to run internal workshops on marketing strategy, online presence and brand storytelling for recruiters and HR business partners.
• Use internal or external marketing tests and online skills tests to measure progress over time.

This approach strengthens collaboration because people learn together, using the same vocabulary and tools. It also prepares HR professionals to participate more actively in discussions about digital marketing campaigns, marketing efforts and the overall brand, both for customers and for candidates.

Sources :

• CIPD Profession Map on people analytics and business acumen
• SHRM Body of Competency and Knowledge on business and technology
• McKinsey research on HR and cross functional collaboration

Developing future chro capabilities through ongoing digital assessment

From one-off assessment to continuous learning loop

For many chief human resources officers, a digital marketing assessment starts as a one-time test to understand the organisation’s marketing skills. The real value, though, comes when you turn these tests into a continuous learning loop that shapes future CHRO capabilities.

Instead of treating a marketing assessment as a project, treat it as an ongoing skills assessment that feeds your leadership agenda. Each new assessment cycle reveals gaps in digital literacy, analytics fluency, and understanding of online customer behaviour. Those insights should directly inform your own learning path as CHRO, as well as the development paths of your HR leadership team.

Over time, you are not just measuring marketing efforts. You are building a culture where HR leaders are comfortable reading data, interpreting marketing analytics, and challenging assumptions about brand, candidates, and employees with evidence rather than intuition.

Core digital capabilities every future CHRO should grow

Future ready CHROs will not need to be full time marketing manager profiles, but they will need a solid grasp of several digital marketing domains. A structured marketing test or skills test can help you benchmark where you stand today and where you need to grow.

• Digital and data literacy
  Understanding how online marketing campaigns generate data, how analytics tools work, and what “good” looks like in dashboards. Being able to read a google analytics report, ask the right questions, and connect those insights to talent, performance, and engagement.
• Search and content awareness
  Knowing the basics of seo, search engine visibility, and content marketing. This is essential when you think about how your brand appears to candidates and employees in google results, on social media, and across other online presence touchpoints.
• Social and media fluency
  Understanding how social media and other media channels shape perceptions of your organisation. This includes reading marketing analytics from social platforms, recognising which strategies work for different audiences, and aligning them with your people narrative.
• Customer and candidate journey thinking
  Translating customer journey logic from commerce and online sales into the candidate and employee journey. The same mindset that optimises a marketing strategy can optimise recruitment funnels, onboarding flows, and internal communication.
• Channel strategy understanding
  Knowing the role of email marketing, content hubs, social media, and other channels in a coherent marketing strategy. This helps you design HR communication that feels consistent with the external brand and supports both candidates and employees.

Using structured assessment tools, you can periodically run a skills assessment on your HR leadership team in these areas. The goal is not to turn HR into marketing, but to ensure HR leaders can speak the same language as marketing and IT, and can participate meaningfully in decisions about creating digital experiences.

Designing a learning path based on marketing assessment insights

Once you have baseline results from a marketing assessment or marketing test, you can design a targeted learning path for yourself and your team. The most effective paths are practical and anchored in real marketing campaigns and HR use cases.

• Start with understanding key metrics
  Use google analytics or similar tools to learn the fundamentals of marketing analytics. Focus on understanding key indicators such as traffic sources, conversion rates, and engagement. Then translate those concepts into HR metrics, such as application conversion, career site performance, and internal content engagement.
• Link content and brand to talent outcomes
  Study how content marketing works in digital marketing. Look at how content shapes brand perception and behaviour in commerce. Then apply the same thinking to your employer content, from job descriptions to leadership messages, and test different approaches.
• Practice with real campaigns
  Partner with marketing to co design small marketing campaigns aimed at candidates or employees. For example, a targeted email marketing sequence for internal mobility, or a social media series about career stories. Use these as live laboratories to build your skills in analytics, segmentation, and experimentation.
• Use recurring skills tests
  Repeat the skills test or assessment every year to track progress. Treat the results as you would any leadership competency review. Where you see persistent gaps, adjust your learning path and development resources.

This approach turns digital marketing knowledge into a structured capability building program, rather than a one off training event.

Embedding digital marketing thinking into HR leadership routines

Future CHRO capabilities will be defined not only by what you know, but by how you work. The way you use digital data, interpret marketing analytics, and challenge assumptions will influence the entire HR function.

• Regular review of online presence
  Make periodic reviews of your organisation’s online presence part of your leadership agenda. Look at how your brand appears in search engine results, on social media, and in content platforms. Compare this with what you know from your marketing assessment and from employee feedback.
• Joint HR marketing analytics sessions
  Schedule recurring sessions with marketing to review marketing analytics and HR metrics together. Discuss how marketing efforts aimed at candidates or employees are performing, and what that means for your people strategies. This habit strengthens your analytical skill set and reinforces shared accountability.
• Experimentation mindset
  Borrow the experimentation culture from digital marketing. Encourage small tests in HR communication, career site design, or internal content. Use simple A/B tests and track outcomes with analytics. Over time, this builds confidence in using data to refine both HR and marketing strategy.

By embedding these routines, you move from occasional exposure to digital marketing concepts to a sustained practice that shapes your leadership style.

Preparing the next generation of HR leaders

Finally, ongoing digital assessment should not stop with the CHRO. It can become a core element of how you prepare the next generation of HR leaders.

• Include marketing skills and basic digital marketing literacy in your leadership competency models.
• Use structured skills assessment tools to evaluate emerging leaders on their comfort with analytics, social media, and online brand management.
• Offer rotational assignments where HR leaders work closely with marketing on marketing campaigns that target candidates or employees.
• Encourage leaders to complete a periodic marketing test or assessment focused on google analytics, content marketing, and email marketing basics.

When you treat digital marketing understanding as a core leadership capability, supported by ongoing assessment and a clear learning path, you equip future CHROs to navigate a world where creating digital experiences for employees and candidates is inseparable from overall business and people strategy.