This document was originally made for a workshop in Employer Branding for Tele2 Shared Service Center.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.

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?

Naturally, candidates can use the same tools to screen you and,  just like you, if they don’t like what they see, they move on. They start on:

1. Google
   So if you don’t have a Google Alert set for both your name and your company’s name, stop right now and sign up.
   Google alerts are free.  But when it comes to keeping you informed about what others are saying on the web, they are priceless. Even if you have an alert set, though, it’s still a best practice to Google yourself and your business every few weeks to see what’s ranking high in the results.  Since prospects are obviously searching for you on Google, you want to be hyper-aware of what they’re finding. http://alert.google.se
2. Facebook
   While Facebook can certainly be considered the most social of all social media sites, your business should still be here as well. If you’re not convinced Facebook is the place for social media recruiting after our meeting, consider the most basic rule of marketing, i.e., Fish where the Fish are!
   When it comes to college students, you will find them on Facebook. The question is: Will they find you?
   To get started, simply set up a page for your company and post industry updates, events, photos and so on, and do so a minimum of every 2-3 days. Once you have a pretty lively page going, it’s worth testing a few ads on Facebook that specifically target the demographic/ schools/ age/ knowledge you’re trying to reach. Assuming you have a compelling message and photo, Facebook ads can really drive traffic to your homepage and make it easier for potential hires to find you!
3. LinkedIn
   The first rule with LinkedIn is to actually have a presence on the site. If you don’t know where to start, see what your competitors and they´re recruiting agencies are doing…then top it.
4. Instagram
   Instagram is a dark horse when it come to social media. First the marketing value. Few knows about the auto-add / likes robots linked to GPS destinations and hashtags. Even fewer understands how they can be strategically used to build brand awareness.
5. Blogging
   Blogging is a great way to give your company a voice in the marketplace today. In fact, with the right content and design, it should become the center stone of your marketing strategy online, because we all want to pull back the curtain on our favorite companies and a blog is a perfect format for this.
   So develop and embrace a company blog and use it as a way to distinguish yourself from the competition. As you can see, it’s smart to turn the tables and take a hard look at your own web presence once in a while, particularly from the standpoint of a valuable potential hire.

But there is some problems.

No, you won’t ever have 100% control of the message and that’s okay.

The benefits of putting Tele2 Shared System Center “out there” and having a positive, online message far outweigh the negatives. In other words, Pandora is out of the box and she’s not looking back. Neither should you.

Most direct sourcing and candidate development activities seem predicated around: “Fish where the fish are”. That’s why it’s not surprising that recruitment industry was an early adopter of social networks. Recruiting has always been social, but interactions have primarily taken place in person and over the phone. Social media only enables a third way to communicate: online.

Facebook page – Volume vs Quality

While many businesses already have a fan site on Facebook, many approach these pages as a simple extension of an employment brand or career site.

Maintaining a branded presence on Facebook generally suffices to attract “fans.” While many companies adjudicate quantity within the context of metrics analysis, attracting fans falls flat without dedicated content and a platform-specific engagement strategy.

According to Facebook’s own internal statistics, business related sites constitute just over half of the approximately 3 million fan pages within Facebook, generating an astounding 20 million fans per day; the site estimates pages have created 5.3 billion fans with users joining three fan pages a month.

Better to have 2000 friends then 200 000 fans.

The sheer volume of these pages reinforces the notion that there’s little inherent meaning in having “fans” to the recruiting process, essentially undeveloped candidates unlikely to match just-in-time HR requirements for open positions that constitute the majority of most career-related fan site postings.

Fans do, however, have significant value as active seekers; like all applicants, it’s incumbent on employers to qualify and develop those applicants into a state of potential candidate worth additional due diligence. In the Facebook parlance, these constitute “friends.”

Again: “fishing where the fish are” only works if the “fish” are the loyal audience necessary to spread the word you want about your employment brand, corporate culture and job openings.

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