Sodexo’s talent acquisition team is an undeniable powerhouse in using social media to recruit – and they’ve got the awards to prove it. The SNCR Excellence Award recognized Sodexo for creative use of Twitter to identify and recruit talent; and ERE named them the 2010 Recruiting Department of the Year for using social media to reduce recruitment advertising costs by $300,000 annually.
Sodexo’s talent network offers endless inspiration for companies who aspire to use social, mobile, and interactive media to recruit from highly-competitive talent pools. The food and facilities management company has overcome hurdles that trip up complex, decentralized organizations and built a rich talent network complete with an informative careers site, blog, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and YouTube presences.
Use these four best practices from Sodexo’s Facebook careers page to succeed in social media recruitment:
- Encourage recruiter involvement. Studies report over half of job seekers follow a company in hopes to land a job and expect to get answers about employment on social networks. Responding to questions with a human touch is crucial to build relationships with candidates online, and Sodexo’s mastered it. Rather than posting all fan replies as the corporate brand, Sodexo staff interacts with candidates one-on-one. Doing so fosters authenticity within Sodexo’s employment brand and allows recruiters to connect personally with candidates within their talent network.
- Create branded profiles. When recruiters are actively representing a company on Facebook – or any social network – it’s important that their profile indicates they are an official representative of the company. The two easiest places to state your affiliation is in the profile picture or bio text. Active members of Sodexo’s talent acquisition team include the company logo at the bottom of their profile picture. This Sodexo Sr. Recruiter lists her job title and employer within her bio and leaves her wall open to the public so job seekers can engage with her career-related content. Each staffer who represents your recruitment brand on social networks should establish their own privacy settings to separate work activity from personal updates on Facebook.
- Solicit user-generated content. Posting unique, valuable content tailored to your candidate fan base is essential in social media recruitment, but balance that by asking the network to posts for you. Motivating users to contribute is more art than science, but it always requires a bit of creativity. In one great example, Sodexo asked their fans and employees to share fun photos featuring the company name. The simple request resulted in dozens of awesome photos – including one fan who found Sodexo in their Cheerios and a great shot of a Sodexo employee team before a whitewater rafting trip.
- Leverage multimedia. On average, adding video to job advertisements results in 12% more views - a tactic Sodexo has certainly not overlooked. Along with posting videos on their wall, Sodexo integrates all the rich content from the company’s YouTube channel into a dedicated video tab on their Facebook careers page. Upgrades like this may seem tricky, but it’s as easy as choosing a name and adding the app. The small details make all the difference to help your employment brand stand out online.
What other companies are effectively using social networks to recruit talent and strengthen employment brand? Name them in the comments!
Photo: Sodexo Facebook Careers page
Author: Mandy Cornish
Mandy Cornish graduated with a degree in journalism and when that didn’t pan out (surprise, surprise), she found a new home in social media marketing. She also works to create unique events throughout Chicago with her company, Booth25. Connect with Mandy on Twitter @setsko or at linkedin.com/in/amandacornish.
[...] create free, authentic content for your brand – often posting photos and videos that help your company stand [...]
Those are great tips once talent lands on your career page, but I wonder why SEO wasn’t considered in their social talent acquisition strategy. When a potential applicant searches “Sodexo” on Facebook they get 100′s of pages including a “community page”, “places”, and an anti-Sodexo page. All are indexed exponentially higher than their careers page.
Hi Jessica-
We’ve looked into this for you and wanted to provide some insight. When it comes to Facebook, pages are not indexed according to SEO. Each user receives results based on their connections and behaviors. For example, we spoke with Anthony who is the Senior Director of Talent Acquisition at Sodexo, and his results were much different than yours. He probably visits the page frequently and also has several connections affiliated with the page, so the Sodexo careers page shows up at the top of his search. This is not an ideal situation for organizations using social media for recruitment, but including social icons in email signatures and on the corporate careers page will help candidates get there quicker.
Hope this helps!
Great tips for sure. Since employers are increasingly using Facebook and its vast tools to source job candidates of interest and relevance, its good to have discussions about optimizing the site and how to best take advantage of it. Most intriguing is that companies are turning to Facebook recruitment because they want to tap into the younger demographics, which don’t engage much with Linked In or other static recruiting platforms. Social recruiting platforms, such as http://www.employers.identified.com, provide professional search capabilities to companies seeking job candidates from Facebook. Providing recruiters with ranked and relevant professional information about job seekers is becoming the priority of social recruiting sites such as identified.
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