Employer Branding Summit 15

On Friday, September 25, 2015, Glassdoor hosted its second annual employer branding summit. For those unable to attend the event, Glassdoor offered a live stream which was recorded. Videos of the presentations are available on YouTube and the presentation materials have been posted on SlideShare. Below is a recap of presentations 4 – 6. Future posts will recap the remaining presentations.

 

Glassdoor for Employers YouTube main link
Glassdoor for Employers SlideShare main link
Twitter hashtag: #GDSummit

 

 

 

An Ecosystem Approach to Close More Passive Talent

Jennifer Johnston, Senior Director Marketing and Communications, Salesforce
(Video – 25:50) (SlideShare)

“In the war for talent, scarcity is the new reality.” “Power is continuing to shift to the candidate.”

Salesforce developed a recruiting ecosystem to focus on engaging and enabling everyone in the company to sell the EVP (employer value proposition) across the recruiting lifecycle.

The five steps of this approach were:

  1. Targeted Lead Generation

Define your audience and drive leads through referrals, advertising, and research.

Referrals: Programs created to get information to employees about the referral process / information on the company’s hiring needs. They will even help employees go through their contacts to determine potential referrals.

Advertising: Since their candidates are in a narrow market, they must target where they focus.  Use contests and games to attract / engage candidates.

Research: 8 referral leads vs. 154 non-referral leads to get a hire. Used data to disrupt the perceptions of hiring managers on what skills and traits are needed for certain roles. Developed a profile of the best candidate.

 

  1. Qualifying and Mapping

If do not meet profile, let them go nicely because there is a low probability they will be hired. No need to string them along.

If do meet the profile, they are put into nurturing activities if there are no current roles available. If a role is available, then they are fed right into the process.

 

  1. Prequalified Prospect Nurturing

Build relationships to move people from prospect to candidate using three key nurturing tactics.

Look at media coverage, corporate, and employee created content and package it into:

Snackables – tidbits that are sharable

eBlasts – Best of the best content is sent to potential candidates in an email. Marketing then collects data on who opened, links clicked, etc. to help better focus the conversation.

Events – Most popular is to piggy back on customer events. Invite prospects and then allow them to mingle with Salesforce employees. This allows for an assessment of fit on both sides. Goal is have candidates think of you when they are ready to make a move.

 

  1. Amazing Candidate Experience

Weakest link at Salesforce right now. Goal is to close more candidates by engaging hiring managers since they can better assess fit and sell the opportunity.

Three tactics:

EVP Certification – managers trained / coached to better communicate the EVP.

Competencies Interviewing – helps deepen the line of questioning in interviews.

Candidate Journey – how best communicate with candidate along their journey.

Pre-interview team briefings so prepared for the candidate

Send tips and closers on day of interview

Pre-emptive thank you to the candidate after the interview

Ask for the sale at offer

Offer personal congrats and welcome communication at signing

Keep candidate engaged prior to start date using a pre-boarding journey

 

  1. Engaging Employee Experience

Referrals are #1 source of hires at Salesforce

Culture – greatest asset so make sure everyone can speak about the culture.

Hire for fit, immerse quickly, and live the culture every day – inside and outside of the company.

 

How measure success?

Enthusiastic shares on social media, blogs, etc.

Fair reviews on sites such as Glassdoor

Regular employee referrals to maintain potential candidate pipeline

 

 

 

Using Glassdoor to Build Candidate Trust & Employee Engagement

Christopher Hannegan, EVP Employee Engagement, Edelman PR
Jennifer Newbill, Senior Manager of Global Talent, Dell
(Video – 30:24) (SlideShare)

Mr. Hannegan began by talking about today’s trust landscape. Edelman trustbarometer, the largest global study of trust. Focused on two bits of data in the study

“Company experts, “person like yourself” most trusted.”

Percentage of people considered credible when wanting information about a company:
67% – technical experts
63% – person like yourself
49% – employee
43% – CEO

Who is most trusted based on a specific topic?  Looked at engagement, integrity, products, purpose, and operations. Most compelling were in:

Engagement: Treat employees and customers well. Credibility – 41% employee to 21% CEO
Integrity: ethical business practices. Credibility – highest was 34% employee.

Opportunities:
How can we elevate and amplify the technical expert and employee voices?  Label your people as experts.
How do we build trust with our workforce as a starting point to build trust with customers and potential talent? Has to start internally.
How can a company keep engaging via Glassdoor and other sites throughout the talent lifecycle? Mine data from these sites to enhance employee engagement strategies.

Mr. Hannegan turned the presentation over to Jennifer Newbill. Ms. Newbill walked through a Dell case study.

Transparency is a core founding belief at Dell.
Certify employees to me social media advocates though Social Media and Communities University

A recruiter received feedback from a candidate about a negative experience.  The candidate said that 1) he was not interested in Dell; 2) he would not refer anyone; and 3) he would never be a customer. That jolted Dell to understand that candidates are customers. What’s worse, that candidate went on to a role in which he was responsible for $2 billion of technology procurement.

Candidate experience program was created that made specific commitments to candidates and those commitments were posted online to ensure accountability.

How (and why) Dell embraced Glassdoor – 6 steps:
Step 1 – Making the case (within our own recruiting team) – getting buy-in from the right people
Step 2 – Assessing our Glassdoor presence
Step 3 – Branding our page
Step 4 – Monitoring the sentiment and trends – review “Advice to Sr. Management”
Step 5 – Achieving buy-in from our Senior HR Executives
Step 6 – Roadshow – make Glassdoor part of the conversation within the company

Candidates as consumers:
Monitor and respond to reviews in a timely matter.
Educate stakeholders and team on an on-going basis.
Create a philosophy around soliciting reviews.

 

 

 

Employer Brand Strategies to Attract and Retain Millennials

Carolyn Eiseman, Enterprise Holdings
(Video – 20:11) (SlideShare)

Discussed Enterprise Holdings brands:

Global presence in 70 counties / 9000 retail locations
Privately held.
Decentralized operating structure – operating groups to manage clusters of retail locations.
200+ recruiters to hire for local operating groups.

Enterprise management training program  hires 8500 (millennials) each year. They are trained and developed to run branches and provide customer service.

Retail locations are the talent pipeline to senior leadership (promote from within). In an effort to show not tell, they added a ticker on their career site that provides a running count of the number of internal promotions each year. By the end of 2015, that count should be at 13K.

Engage where candidates are: Instagram, Twitter, and Glassdoor. Not only engaging with individuals but with their networks as well.

Strengths:
Strong employee referral program – incentives vary by operating group.  30-35% of hires come through referrals each year.
Why Care? Why Share? Approach. If employees care enough to share, then it’s important. Sometimes employee content can be repurposed / redeveloped for a corporate branding opportunity.
National internal meetings provide a broader focus than just the operating group with which they associate. They have the opportunity to meet and talk to senior leaders. For this last meeting, they created an app to encourage engagement prior to those meetings, during the meetings, and to keep in touch after the meetings. This became a good source of content for national promotions.

In 2015, they began to provide recruiters with content in order to be consistent in messaging. Over time, they’ve learned how to better engage potential candidates by posted certain types of information on specific channels, i.e. brand or local. For instance, career tips posts by recruiters yield 5-6X more engagement than the same post on from a brand channel.

 

 

 

 

What are your thoughts on these presentations? What was your key takeaway from each presentation? Stay tuned for part 3 of 4.

 

 

Let’s Engage!

I’m Agent in Engagement Simpson…Gregory F Simpson.

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