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Not Just LinkedIn. Social Media in the HR Professional's Work
How can you effectively find candidates among your customers by leveraging the synergy between marketing and recruitment activities? In earlier posts we focused on “outbound” marketing: email and phone campaigns, and creative use of the company career site or physical locations. This time we'll devote more attention to social media and interaction with the candidate.
98% of recruiters use social media when looking for job candidates. This number essentially matches the percentage of headhunters using LinkedIn (97%). While this data is hardly surprising, the fact that only 12% of them use all three of the most popular networks at once (LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter) does give pause for thought. These figures concern the United States. In Poland the situation is very similar, with two significant exceptions. According to the latest Lee Hecht Harrison DBM report “Social media in recruitment”, the homegrown GoldenLine network remains an important source of candidates in our country (indicated by 77% of surveyed recruiters). Twitter is much weaker than across the Atlantic — only 3% of respondents use it in their recruitment processes. This means that HR departments have an undiscovered social media continent ahead of them, and one densely populated with candidates. According to Megapanel PBI/Gemius research, by September 2015 as many as 20 million Poles already had Facebook accounts. Twitter has 3.2 million users. In the realities of a candidate-driven market, toward which we are heading ever more clearly, most people in this mass will be, at best, passive candidates. To draw their attention to our brand, we must offer them a distinctive Employer Value Proposition (EVP) expressed in engaging content published on the social media channels they like to visit. It can be compared to the marketing Unique Selling Proposition (USP), which brands communicate insistently, making it their key sales differentiator. In other words, the EVP serves to position a brand on the labor market. Of course, choosing a place of employment is a more complex matter than deciding on a particular product or service. It is rather a whole bundle of factors that decides here, and it would be difficult to single out one leading factor. But that is no argument for abandoning attempts to stand out from other employers' offers. On the contrary — for a potential employee to even want to look into the terms of employment at our organization, we must first make them want to notice it.
Unlike most corporate career sites, employer fan pages appeal to emotional rather than tangible benefits. They focus on values, vision, and the engagement of employees and stakeholders. On the one hand, this shouldn't surprise anyone. According to research conducted by EBI (the institute founded by Brett Minchington, the man who coined the term “EVP”), nearly one-third of employees said that above all else, work has to be “interesting”. Career development opportunities come second. This encourages brands to emphasize what is extraordinary, festive, and easily distinguishable in the narrative about their workplace. The daily duties and realities of a given position rarely break through into the potential candidate's awareness. An interesting cautionary tale in this respect is the case of the German retail chain Aldi. Looking for candidates for the position of Regional Sales Manager — a crucial role for this organization — the company focused its message on high salaries, attractive benefits, and broad development opportunities within the corporate structure. Aldi's campaign resembled the idealized image of products and services known from traditional advertising. The problem is that in employer branding, greater care is needed to preserve the balance between the promotional and the informational layers. Otherwise, a company may struggle with difficulties similar to those of the German enterprise: plenty of CVs, plenty of satisfying applications, filled vacancies and… a record number of Regional Sales Managers who quit before the end of their probationary period. The candidates who came to interviews lacked awareness of what the daily tasks and duties of the position actually looked like. The realities of working in a store did not meet their expectations, inflated by the attractive advertising message, and they were unable to perform the duties associated with the position.
A quick look at Aldi's Careers fan page reveals how fundamentally the company has changed its strategy. Today its messages are characterized by minimalism and modesty. When the autonomy enjoyed by managers is mentioned, words about responsibility immediately follow. When someone from the company's HR department speaks, they point first to the experience and skills a candidate must have, and only later to salary and benefits. All of this, however, takes place in an atmosphere extremely friendly to the potential candidate. The people running the Careers fan page readily reply to questions about working at Aldi in general as well as in specific positions. They give advice, dispel doubts, and post useful links. They never forget “thank you”, “please”, and “you're welcome”.
Of course, if a company has the opportunity (and real grounds) to present itself as an interesting employer, it shouldn't act overly passive out of fear that it won't keep the promise made by the brand. Looking at the Travel Planet Careers fan page, it's not hard to believe that this company's employees sometimes do interesting things and, above all, that they are interesting people themselves. We see them speeding through Havana in a convertible, conquering mountain peaks, and even giving an interview to Indonesian television. We can also read about their participation in the Wrocław Business Run (3rd place for the relay team), and even browse the private blog of one of the employees (about travel, of course), to which her employer's fan page gladly links. All of this makes us feel more motivated to answer the call: “join #EkipaTravelPlanet”.
It turns out, by the way, that it's not only full-time employees who don't want to be bored at the office. Interns are becoming increasingly demanding too. To meet their expectations, Wyborowa Pernod Ricard has devoted a sizable portion of its Facebook communication to this group of candidates. They can learn, among other things, about the tasks awaiting them during the internship, the skills they will develop, and the internal competitions they can enter. Quite a few posts cover how to do well in a job interview, how to prepare a CV, and how to take care of your LinkedIn profile. The practical information is interspersed with photos from team events and profiles of standout interns. On the fan page you can also find more entertaining content, e.g. a photo of Robert Lewandowski captured celebrating qualification for the European Championship with Pernod Ricard brand champagne in hand.
Organizations should also not forget that the ultimate goal of online promotion is to move the relationship with the candidate into the real world as much as possible. EY eagerly provides opportunities to get acquainted. The company's Careers fan page is dominated by all kinds of events. To give a few examples: a meeting with Polish students studying at British universities, an invitation to the Club for Girls Full of Energy aimed at female students of technical programs, or a meeting with the president of a football club talking about the financial side of football. The company deftly oscillates between entertainment (case study: “What if there were taxes in Tolkien's world?” at the University of Warsaw Student Government Hall) and solid knowledge (lecture: “VAT fraud and due diligence” at the Supreme Administrative Court). And where events are announced, (photo) reports of course follow. Content to enrich the fan page then practically creates itself.
The second of the most popular social networks proves that 140 characters are enough to craft an engaging employer branding message. If that much space is enough for marketers to promote products, why shouldn't recruiters draw attention to job offers the same way? Especially if they have catchy hashtags at their disposal and a devoted community around their brand that will gladly click “like”, “follow”, and “share”.
One of the more interesting cases Twitter provides is Disney's Careers page. The owners of, among others, Mickey Mouse and Star Wars know their audience — and their candidates — well. What could intrigue a 3D artist more than a short behind-the-scenes look at the creative process at Disney? Browsing posts tagged #DisneyTech, we can learn, among other things, how to create a convincing snow animation. Fans of “asynchronous contact mechanics” and “topological vectorization” will find something for themselves too. All of this gives a strong sense that by taking a job at this organization, a young artist will be able to learn a great deal. Those looking for lighter content may be curious which Disney characters inspire individual employees and why. A lot of space is also devoted to scenes from company life and history. Disney also makes use of situational marketing. When the feminist hashtag #ILookLikeAnEngineer was gaining popularity, Disney posted photos of its female IT employees on its Twitter tagged exactly that way. It thus expressed full solidarity with the cause of equal opportunities for women in IT. This translates into obvious image benefits and, at the same time, helps attract the attention of women who are no strangers to coding.
The Condé Nast Careers profile shows, in turn, that a careers page on social media can also be well managed at the level of an entire capital group. The media giant treats this account as a kind of aggregator of content, job offers, scenes from daily life, and trivia relating to all the brands it holds. And there's plenty to choose from: one moment we're invited to a meeting with a “New Yorker” journalist, then we admire “Vogue” columnists at a fashion show, then we're offered an article from the latest issue of “Wired”. There are days “dedicated” to a chosen title. Some time ago it was “Allure Magazine”. In the morning we met the head of the design department and her studio (above the photo, the rhetorical question: “who wouldn't want to work with her?”). In the afternoon, a piece was linked about the awards received by “Allure” employees. And for the evening — #JobAlert. The magazine is looking for Sales Assistants. Condé Nast doesn't limit itself to recruitment, though. The Twitter profile is also used for onboarding. New employees are tagged in a post under which they can receive congratulations. It's an extremely simple, yet pleasant form of welcome for someone starting a new career path. It's also a signal to all potential candidates that the company knows how to build a good work atmosphere and cares about its team.
I won't hide that when I was gathering material for this piece, my attention was immediately drawn to Accenture in the US. It turns out that this company eagerly uses Twitter to source referrals. Successive job posts emphasize precisely the recommendation aspect (“do you know someone who…?”, “could you refer someone for…?”). The whole strategy looks very coherent — from employee retweets, through promoting posts about their successes at work, to sharing experiences in dedicated mentoring sessions.
