The Australasian Talent Conference: Social Media- A Recruitment Revolution

On Thursday 3rd December, I was fortunate enough to attend the ATC on Social Media: A Recruitment Revolution which was held on Collins Street in Melbourne.

Earlier this year I first met Michael Specht at the HR Futures Conference and since this time, I’ve been enthralled about the possibilities that Social Media has for us folks in the world of HR. The best thing about these conferences is listening to the case studies presented by those who been there and done it and meeting people like you, that are interested in using social media in HR.

A few mentions from the conference schedule include futurist Mark Pesce who spoke about how social media is changing Australian organisations, Joris Luijke of Atlassian about adding to your candidate attraction toolkit and Martin Warren around creating a social media community.

One of the biggest take outs for me though was from Margie Kwan of Ernst and Young.

Now if you haven’t checked out their facebook page- you should. They have over 34,500 fans who interact and engage with E&Y on the site.

Margie introduced herself to us, and explained that she had worked at E&Y for about two and a half years. Previously, Margie had roles in Marketing and brand management and went there to head up the Graduate Recruitment Team. She actually doesn’t have a recruitment background but was hired for the role because they realised that graduate recruitment was a lot about developing a marketing strategy and differentiating the brand- and they wanted someone with that particular skill set.

They wanted someone who could take a different approach to recruitment and give them the competitive edge.

One of the main tasks was to ensure that their branding and communication really reflected the reality of what it’s like to work at EY- and they wanted to attract more of the right candidates to the firm- and have these people self-selecting to the their process. Another part of their job was to look at the way they differentiate their employment offering and building a facebook presence was one of the ways they did this.

Margie believes that candidate attraction is much the same as consumer attraction so the key is to think like a marketer.

E&Y recruit up to 1000 grads each year- and aside from last year they had witnessed increased competition year on year with more organisations entering the market for grads. E&Y has a particular challenge in that their brand is so strong in the accounting space- but they look to hire grads in all different areas such as HR, IT, Science and engineering etc. However many candidates aren’t aware of this.

Why did they do it?

Margie says most people have slick websites these days, glossy brochures and advertise on the same websites so the aim was to be heard above the noise. They were looking for an alternative avenue for the students to engage with E&Y. They wanted it to be relevant to candidates, exciting, and make a real statement about who they are. And they wanted to move away from traditional one way communication- they wanted to show they were willing to have a two way dialogue.

Most of their target audience was already on facebook and comfortable with using it as a medium to communicate (as opposed to direct emails). She also mentioned that Facebook allows you to deliver specific messages to targeted segments of the audience. For instance people can be targeted by age group, geographic locations or whether they are in high school or university. Facebook provides students with the opportunity to experience life at the firm through interactive videos and other content.

Margie asserted that “It allows us to apply experiential marketing techniques to provide a flavour of the people and the culture inside the firm in a manner that is more powerful than previously possible.”

She also talked about viral marketing- one of the best things about facebook. When a user sees that there friend has joined a group, become a fan of a page or liked something- what better than a recommendation from a friend?

I really enjoyed listening to Margie speak, and its inspiring to really think about what is possible in this space. It was duly noted that this came from someone with a marketing background however- and what I take from that is- in our job as HR Professionals we can’t always play with the same cap on. Some days we need to be a lawyer, a strategist, an internal comms officer and even a marketer. The ones who do the best work in HR will be flexible enough to move within these roles with the respect of people in the business.