This document was originally made for a workshop in Employer Branding for Tele2 Shared Service Center. They needed to make the students of Riga university aware of the job opportunities available at the Tele2 Shared Service Center.

Employee branding with Social Media

Fishing where the fish are – recruiting and building brand awareness via Social Media

Many companies are questioning the appropriateness of giving their employees access to social media at work. But the debate a gray area. The fact is, much of the social networking that occupies employees’ online time can bring competitive advantages to the company. Many companies ask their employees to be brand evangelists, promoting the company and its products and services to friends and family. Those friends and family are now as easily engaged, if not more so, online than face-to-face.

Your employees online represent the new front line of public relations, marketing and customer service.

Employees can:

• surface complaints or issues raised by members of the online communities in which they participate.
• hear ideas and gather intelligence that will enable the company to solve problems, improve customer satisfaction and adapt nimbly to changing customer needs and desires.
• understand and come up with innovative ideas to market tele2.

Ex of companies which that encourage employees to be ambassadors online:

• Zappos(largest e-commerce on shoes) encourages his employees to spend time on Twitter to the extent that he offers classes in the micro-blogging platform.
• Serena(software developer), requires his employees to spend at least an hour a week on Facebook.
• Siemens have established a Facebook group for employees worldwide so employees can network with one another and retrieve important company messages wherever and whenever the mood (or the need) strikes.

What is the top driver for worker engagement, satisfaction, and employee retention?

Numerous studies show that an employee’s relationship with their immediate manager is key. A Monster poll revealed that even in today’s tight job market, fully 60% of responders would leave their companies because of a bad boss, while 21% cite good brand awareness as the single most important element of their loyalty to their current employer (only 6% less than those driven primarily by employee compensation).

And screening that a candidate is organizational fit for the company has traditionally fallen into the realm of pre-employment screenings and interviewing. But the time has changed to today’s highly selective, the employerdriven market often favors pipeline building and profile based recruiting over traditional on a minute / right in time methods.

Create a social media recruiting toolbox.

The methods that recruiters use to source, develop and engage with candidates and customers are only one piece of the recruiting 3.0 tool box. Recruiting using social media offers a competitive advantage, both in how to present a qualified candidate to an HR manager and in how to prepare a candidate for an interview. Both are critical components of the job recruitment process. This is the social media keystones:

Create a Job-Specific Blog:

Successful job searches start with successful job descriptions, but creating a comprehensive, targeting job posting strategy should involve more than simply repurposing the same position over and over again.

Using a free service like Google’s blogger or WordPress, you can set up a basic blog for each of your searches in minutes. It doesn’t have to be visually complex; just enough to create a hub for your other job posting efforts and social recruiting activities.

By setting up a simple blog for each job, you’ll organically boost SEO to your careers site as well as other platforms, like Monster, where your job is posted. Most importantly, it provides a format where recruiters (and HR managers) can provide perspective on a job while engaging candidates.

Make your HR Manager an ambassador

While a good job description is often an important starting point, one of the most important (but often neglected) step in the hiring process is a three-way “kick-off” meeting with the HR manager, recruiter and HR partner to discuss the current employment situation. This will allow you to build a profile of what a successful candidate might look like and review the anticipated challenges and opportunities for the job search.

Critical to this meeting is the opportunity for both the hiring Business Partner and the HR manager to provide perspective on the HR manager’s professional history, leadership style, and management philosophy.

Rather than simply use these notes as background material, however, streaming video technologies make it easy to record this information and possibly use it as recruitment advertising collateral during the search process.

For example, at a relatively low cost, talent organizations can purchase a shared FlipCam to bring to these ‘kick off meetings,’ capturing the HR manager in their office, conference room or other meeting space where the interview is likely to take place, sending important visual clues about things like company culture and managerial style that can’t be conveyed in a typical job description.

First, be sure to have the HR manager’s consent to do the film. If everyone agrees, you can record a few quick clips of them discussing their philosophy and the job position.

Creating content

1. Describe what it takes to be successful in this role
2. Look for in a candidate during an interview?

Once approved, you can post these videos on a company careers site, job blog or YouTube channel, along with a link to the written job posting.

This content can provide great insight (and differentiation) for potential candidates while augmenting your current online employer brand presence, giving greater transparency to the company’s culture.It’ll also give candidates a better idea of what to expect when they come to an interview and allow them to assess how their values stack up against potential managers. Naturally, such information is also invaluable data to screen candidates against when assessing corporate and departmental culture fit.

At a minimum, you can have this footage readily accessible when executing a candidate search, creating a digital record that’s easily shared among recruiters or for reference on future searches. It also can come in handy to help recalibrate and refocus priorities in the event the search takes longer than expected or requires a change in approach.

Source for similarities and connections:

A shared philanthropy or membership in the same professional organization can often help turn an applicant into a candidate and create an instant connection that often provides the foundation for a successful interview. Not to mention, a happy HR manager. And that’s what it’s all about.

Ever heard of or experienced a good social media cautionary tale. You know, the one where Potential Employer A searches for Candidate B online, only to be confronted with an image of him mooning a crowd during Spring Break or holding an arsenal of weapons? (Both of these are true by the way.)

There are a million stories and articles out there about how companies are using social media to screen candidates, and as the business owner or HR manager, you may feel like you have all of the control, right?

Next part will be posted tomorrow! Take care!

/ Rikard Lindholm,  Semantiko – Making The Web A Better Place – Sweden AB