Last week I attended the social media in graduate recruitment conference, organised by Mike Roberts. The event was highly informative and full of ideas regarding how an organisation can use social media as an attraction tool for potential graduate applicants. Here are the highlights.
1) Content is King, Engagement is Key
Rate My Placements Lizzie Brock and Alex Field presented the results from their survey on the use of social media in graduate recruitment. The results can be distilled down to the hashtaggable, pithy and provocative kingkey, as in Content is king, Engagement is Key. The phrase content is king is de rigueur in web marketing speak. It essentially means that production of great content will attract people to your business. Great content is the narrative around your product, service or business function??in this instance the recruitment of new graduate talent. Great content tells your story. It could be a blog post about your company values, a video providing an overview of your graduate recruitment process, or a cool infographic on Pinterest of the results of last years application cycle.
2) Video is the untapped resource
94% of students interact with YouTube. This presents and unbridled opportunity for graduate recruiters to engage potential future employees. Jo Denye of Teach First spoke about how they have received nearly 30,000 views for the video below. It is easy to see why video is so powerful in transmitting your corporate message and enthusing graduates about working for your organisation.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fI5EULnShOA
Sarah Murray of Allen & Overy spoke of the importance of consistent usage and having a plan on how best to utilise social media. Allen and Overy concentrate primarily on Twitter and Facebook, as these are the platforms they feel offer the most benefits. Each member of their graduate recruitment team takes turns in managing the networks for one day a week.
Each of these days is assigned a theme, and the team produces tweets and Facebook posts in keeping with the theme of the day. The firm uses Hootsuite to schedule their posts, and find that Top 5 content is amongst the most popular content they produce??like this post.
4) Snapchat??the new kid on the block
Vicki Spindler of Tesco presented how the supermarket giant used Snapchat to great effect. Snapchat is certainly the new kid on the block, and organisations are grappling with how they are going to use the platform with any great commercial effect. Tesco used Snapchat as part of their Snap it, Scan it, Win it campaign.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YH5En2DKIuw
The take home message is this:??Snapchat is best used in conjunction with an interesting activity and plenty of encouragement. The activity needs to be interesting enough that people will want to take pictures of it, and you should explicitly encourage the sharing of the photograph on Snapchat.
Microsofts graduate recruitment and internship arm falls under the brand Be Your Future. Ula Dolska, Microsofts uni recruiter, spoke about how the tech giant uses blogging extensively to help in candidate attraction and provision of information regarding their early stage career opportunities. Their blog is run by their interns. This provides the blog with a distinct voice, and allows the content to resonate with its target audience??the students. The content serves to provide a great insight into the company culture, creates an excitement around careers at Microsoft and allows students to find information about the recruitment process and what a career at Microsoft is like.
They also produce videos, with the following being a fantastic example.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lpaawc70K5c
And finally
Want to read more about the specific platforms and how best to use them? Try this post https://kldl.co/cf.
