TWTRCON DC 09 case study presentation about how to use Twitter for recruitment and branding. Created by Jessica Lee, Senior Employment Manager, APCO Worldwide (@jessica_lee | @APCOjobs) and
Kerry Noone, Marketing Communications Manager, Sodexo USA, Talent Acquisition Group (@SodexoCareers)
4. Case StudyTwitter and Recruiting Jessica Lee, Senior Employment Manager, APCO Worldwide | @jessica_lee| @APCOjobs Kerry Noone, Marketing Communications Manager, Sodexo USA, Talent Acquisition Group | @SodexoCareers
5. to recruit + hire @jessica_lee @APCOjobs @sodexocareers
6. Jessica Lee - @jessica_lee, @APCOjobs senior employment manager - APCO Worldwide editor - Fistful of Talent Kerry Noone - @SodexoCareers Marketing Communications Manager - Sodexo USA
7. three ways to use twitter for hiring: 1) employment branding. 2) candidate engagement/ relationship building. 3) find + source candidates.
8. “The qualities that make Twitter seem inane and half-baked are what makes it so powerful” – Jonathan Zittrain, Harvard law professor and Internet expert
11. "I'm used to automatic responses. Just to have someone who replies and is generally interested in helping is huge.” – Sodexo Candidate
12. wordymusic: @SodexoCareers lol hi there. Are you a bot? SodexoCareers: @wordymusic - no I'm a real person! wordymusic: @SodexoCareers Oh, cool. Hi real person! What’s up?
29. SodexoCareers Kerry Noone “Facebook is to 2007 as Twitter is to 2009. It’s the most open communication platform out there“ – Roger Kondrat, social media consultant
30. SodexoCareers Kerry Noone “Twitter lets me hear from a lot of people in a very short period of time.” – Robert Scoble, blogger
31. but why twitter? because it’s cheap and easy. it’s the great equalizer.
Are there any HR or recruiting people here? I am Jessica Lee…And I am Kerry Noone. I was hired into Sodexo’s Talent Acquisition Team 2 years ago to help my Senior Director Anthony Scarpino – who is sitting in the audience right now with our VP of Talent Acquisition, Arie Ball, strengthen Sodexo USA’s employment branding and create positive experiences for our candidates. Twitter is one of the social media tools that we are using to help us achieve our goals.
Jessica – Kerry and I are going to talk today about three ways we are using Twitter…Kerry – I wrote a blog post last week about how Twitter has helped my writing become more concise because with just 140 characters you have to be. Since Jessica and I only have 15 minutes to talk to you all today I am going to try to exercise this conciseness (if that’s even a word) today too.
Kerry – A little background on Sodexo I’ll bet you didn’t know. Sodexo’s product is our people. We are the 16th largest company worldwide in 80 countries and 120,000 US employees but… not much brand recognition which translates easily to not much employment brand recognition. This requires in Talent Acquisition to get creative. Employment branding and candidate experience goes hand in hand. Twitter helps us drive traffic to all of our social spaces where we “talk” about our culture and what it is like to work at Sodexo. It personalizes the message. Social media takes candidates much further than the “About Us” page on our careers site. Twitter helps us audit our brand and take charge of our online presence. The conversations are taking place anyway – why not be aware – why not participate? Tools like Twitter allow us to do this.
Jessica – Unlike Sodexo, APCO is a much smaller organization with 600 employees but employment branding is no less important… Bring people to you. Best recruiting method is to have a solid employment brand. Disclaimer! Gotta have the goods to back it up though. if you’re not a great place to work, twitter won’t save you.
Jessica - We’ll get into specifics of things you can actually tweet about in a bit… but another reason to use Twitter for hiring – and it overlaps a little bit with the first reason because employment branding and candidate experience go hand in hand.Puts a face on the organization. I haven’t seen candidates using Twitter to ask the status of their resume or post-interview. Mostly just letting me know they applied and that they are excited. Impact of being accessible is what really matters.
Kerry - There is no reason for the black hole these days. At Sodexo we make it easy for a candidate to find a person in the black hole with all of our online spaces and even on our careers site with a network with us page. We have 90 plus recruiters on our team at Sodexo and 60 plus of them are actively using our social networking sites to communicate with our candidates. As a team we try very hard to answer every single tweet, wall post, discussion question. We want our past, present and future employees to know we care and we are here to help them with their career goals. What the candidate chooses to do with these resources is the bigger picture of social media marketing. We respond to every wall post or discussion question because we want potential candidates to know there are real people ready to help.
Kerry – People want to communicate with people. I have a good example to share. A few months ago “wordymusic” tweeted about how the Sodexo Chef in his college cafeteria was serving sushi and it was so good that he couldn’t stop “pigging out” on it. I retweeted this. He wanted to know if I was a bot. So what’s the message? Be consistent, be honest, be genuine and, most importantly, and above all be responsive. Make the experience for the candidate a personal one.
authentic. show personality.
Jessica find tweeters based on their tweets, bio content or locationbut once you find would-be candidates… what do you do? finding them and following them isn’t enough…story about how I met my last boyfriend because of twitter – and if you can meet a BF, you can turn a tweeter into a candidate for a job.
Kerry - Like Jessica we are using tools to find candidates and Build our networks. Our recruiters are building their networks based on the disciplines of our company. For example, Sodexo is the largest private employer of registered dietitians in the US. Our clinical recruiters are using Tweetdeck, Twellow, Twitter searches to find people who tweet about their work as a registered dietitian. In fact right now they are attending the American Dietetics Association annual meeting and in the weeks leading up to this event we reached out to people who were tweeting about attending the event with a message like – hey, while you’re at the event stop by the booth number 572 and say hello to senior recruiter Susan Laramee and we’d include Susan’s Twitter “handle.” We’d use the official hashtag for that event and others following that hashtag would see the tweet and know that Sodexo is attending the event and we are hiring. The message here is to brand yourself – make the most of your bio and make it easy for candidates to find you and don’t be afraid to reach out.
Kerry – How do you measure success? It’s the million dollar question. If there is a number to be tracked we track it. Members, followers, friends, viewers, click throughs, etc. After we started using social media marketing we more than tripled traffic to our career site and other online spaces. If you know about the Sodexo Careers Facebook page, you’ll see we are talking to candidates every day. The real measure of success for me? Is how all of our recruiters have embraced social media in their jobs as recruiters. Without them we would not be having conversations with candidates.Jessica – do you want to talk about how you measure success?
Closings: Kerry then JessicaKerry - Look around the room - Twitter is multi-generational. Once you break the code of how to find people – and understand the value – the amount of information that will flow across your desk – it’s not hard to understand how Twitter can be addictive. Our recruiters to find people we may never have had access to who are talking about their jobs/careers that we are hiring for. If you attending TWRTCON you’re probably already using Twitter. What Jessica and I have been talking about today is being creative with how you use this tool. If there is one thing I hope you take away with you today is be creative with how you use this tool. Jessica – your closing here.
This where we can talk about the tools – twellow, tweekdeck etc.
There is a Dale Carnegie principal that says, "Cooperate with the inevitable." I’ve changed this up a bit and I say it all of the time… “embrace the inevitable.” Look around the room - Twitter is multi-generational. If you attending TWRTCON you’re probably already using Twitter. What Jessica and I have been talking about today is being creative with how you use this tool.
What’s next? It’s the question we all get, right? At the moment, Twitter is ‘the thing’. How long that lasts is irrelevant. The point is we are harnessing its power right here, right now.
Employment branding and candidate experience goes hand in hand. Through tools like It allows our recruiters to find people we may never have had access to who are talking about their jobs/careers that we are hiring for. Audit your brand. The conversations are taking place anyway – why not be aware – why not participate? Take charge of your online presence. What are your former, current and future employees saying about you?
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