Candid hiring: Using social media for graduate recruitment

 

Key takeaway points:

1. Enhance your employer brand through social media by demonstrating an open culture and a willingness to engage with applicants.

2. Use social media as an opportunity to be innovative and to underscore your firm’s culture and global credentials.

3. Integrate your recruitment communication strategy with a coherent social media policy, collaborating with marketing, risk and IT teams.

4. Learn to use an informal style of communication and be prepared for open debate.

5. Remember that there is a constant need to keep content relevant. Responses need to be regularly monitored and replied to.

6. Ensure someone is the assigned guardian of your social media communications.

7. Set up and communicate clear viewing/posting permissions and access rights.

 

“If Facebook were a country, it would be the world’s fourth largest between the USA and Indonesia.”

In 2009, this statistic made me sit up and think. Up until that moment I had, if I’m honest, been rather cautious, if not sceptical, about the use of social media at work, especially in professional services.

As an HR director, I considered myself a custodian of Linklaters’ reputation and its employer brand. I also had responsibility for the privacy of employees and of potential recruits. And, as a self-confessed ‘baby boomer’, I was personally more comfortable with email than with Facebook ?or Twitter.

But the statistics told a compelling story. Universities ?were starting to discontinue using email to communicate ?with students, who considered it passé, and 96 per cent ?of generation-Y students in the UK were members of a ?social network.

I started to appreciate that social media was not just a fad; it was a fundamental shift in communication. Consequently, the question became less about mitigating the risks of using social media in graduate recruitment, and more about the potential impact on our brand and on applicant numbers if we did not embrace it.

As I explored the possibilities further with my team, it became clear that social media was becoming one of the most important channels through which to understand and develop the employer brand. Given its interactive and viral nature, it could become an excellent vehicle to engage with alumni, current employees and future recruits.

The medium had the potential to create a community for future employees to interact with the recruitment team, with people already at the firm and with each other – regardless of where they were in the world.

I became convinced that, provided we put the appropriate controls in place and educated ourselves about how best to use social media, it would not just enhance our brand but could give us a real competitive advantage.

My view was reinforced by research by TMP Worldwide and TARGETjobs that suggested that firms risked going under the radar of the best graduates if they didn’t adopt robust social networking strategies. Their study of penultimate and final year UK university students at the time showed that eight out of ten agreed that firms that were active on Facebook and Twitter were positively perceived.

The research also showed how students actively used social media to research firms and validate whether the corporate messages in the recruitment brochure and on the firm’s website lived up to the reality. Almost half of the students questioned were using social media sites to chat with peers about firms and their recruitment processes, while a further 30 per cent were chatting with current employees to check whether their expectations were met after joining the firm.

Having seen how the possibilities and opportunities would undoubtedly outweigh the risks, we decided to put a strategy and action plan in place. The recruitment team worked closely with the marketing team and with risk. The firm already had a social media policy for employees and was developing its use of the media with clients.

We learnt from these experiences and shared ideas on how best to integrate social media with our recruitment approach. Having younger members of the team who were active on social media sites themselves and understood how students were using them was invaluable.

Social approach

We decided to pilot an approach in the UK and Asia initially, as there was clear evidence of demand for social media channels of communication from recruits in these regions.

We also decided to use three key tools – Facebook, Twitter and YouTube – for graduate recruitment, and LinkedIn for experienced hires.

We set up a Linklaters authorised fan page and group on Facebook and encouraged members of the firm to go to the page, to ‘like’ it and to share it with their friends.

We started with a bank of relevant stories of news around the firm, and set up a schedule to ensure recruitment and other events were announced on the page from different offices, reinforcing the global nature of the firm.

We learnt that we needed to take a different approach in our style of communication, become much more informal and in the moment, and avoid the use of ‘corporate speak’. We also had to make sure that students knew they had the opportunity to join in and ask whatever they really wanted to know about.

To raise the profile of our Facebook page, we provided links to it on email communications with potential recruits and encouraged members of the recruiting team (including fee earners involved in meeting and interviewing candidates) to use it actively. By the end of the first six months of the pilot, we had over 300 followers.

The Linklaters Facebook page quickly became a way of setting up discussion forums where we could actively engage with students. We also set up a Linklaters Twitter feed as a way of keeping in touch with those who had received or accepted an offer from the firm but not yet joined.

For both media, we identified an assigned guardian who was responsible for keeping the content up to date, responding to feedback and questions, and ensuring that the appropriate permissions and access rights were being adhered to.

YouTube is now the second most used search engine ?after Google. It has become commonplace for jobseekers to search for an employer on YouTube as part of their pre-application research.

We therefore decided to set up an authorised presence on YouTube through a dedicated channel. This allowed us to post our own video content and to upload any new video content, irrespective of its source, as and when it was available.

The process involved tagging our video content to ensure that it showed up in search results against keywords. This enabled us to channel applicants to the material we wanted them to access and to reinforce our brand.

As we gained more experience, we found that demand to use the tools increased, with many offices that were initially reluctant to participate joining in and establishing their own presence on the global Facebook page.

Managing the risks

There are of course potential pitfalls and risks in using social media in recruitment, but our experience was that these could be managed and were far outweighed by the opportunities that were opened up.

Clearly, the content needs to be updated regularly and questions posted in discussion forums need to be answered promptly and openly. While this sounds time consuming, in fact our experience was that the time each member of the recruitment team spent answering individual questions by email was reduced, as students increasingly read the discussion forum posts and found answers to their questions.

A firm needs to have a clear policy on accessing Facebook accounts for checking up on applicants. At Linklaters, we were explicit with candidates joining our pages as fans that it was not our policy to do this. We created a ‘how to’ guide to show them how to adjust their profile settings so that we could not see any personal information. This goes a long way to building trust with applicants and makes a statement about the firm’s culture and values.

The other major risk is that the instant nature of social networking means that negative candidate experience, especially during recruitment and on-boarding, can quickly be communicated between peers, with a potentially damaging effect on the employer’s brand. At Linklaters, we took the ?view that this risk was manageable, and that in fact it helped ?us to focus on maintaining the very highest standards of candidate care.

Measuring results

Linklaters’ Facebook pages now have over 2,200 ‘likes’, with around half of these on the UK page. The levels of interactivity are increasing all the time and, so far, the firm has not received any negative feedback from students.

The firm’s UK Twitter page has been active for 18 months. It has made 300 tweets and gained 837 followers – not quite up to Lady Gaga numbers, but a clear sign that students do want to use this type of communication channel with prospective employers.

In addition, the firm currently has 14 videoed interviews with partners and staff posted on YouTube, which have collectively been viewed more than 8,600 times.

It will be interesting to see how the media develops and to monitor the impact of these new communication channels on retention rates in future. For now, I remain convinced that social media is here to stay and that it is a positive benefit to sourcing those candidates who really will thrive at the firm.

As a final thought, it has often struck me that recruitment is very similar to dating – matching likeminded people for a (hopefully) long-term relationship. As more and more people date online, it is interesting that, in 2008, one in eight couples in the US met via social media. Most recruiters I know would be more than happy with that sort of hit rate!

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