CASE STUDIES

for Social Media in Recruitment

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linkhumans
CONTENTS

Case Study 1: pages 3 –10

Case Study 2: pages 11 – 18

Case Study 3: pages 19 - 27

Case Study 4: pages 28 - 37

Case Study 5: pages 38 - 42

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CASE STUDY 1
Sodexo is the leading provider of integrated food and facilities management services in the US, Canada and Mexico and
the 21st largest employer worldwide. They have 120,000 employees in the US and they serve up 9.3 million meals to
hungry customers every day.

The company's trailblazing efforts in social recruiting are very impressive and successful; is a real inspiration for anyone
who is trying to use social media for recruitment and employer branding in innovative ways.

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The Sodexo Strategy
Sodexo has developed a strong employer
brand by creating a real community around
the brand and its employment values.

As a company that operates in a B2B

(business-to-business) environment, the
challenge was even bigger: how do you
create a community and build a
strong employer brand around that?
Sodexo have chosen to focus on their
greatest asset; their people.

The human side is really highlighted:

who are the people behind the jobs,
what they do, what their stories are.

Sodexo’s career site is a big recruiting hub: the

talent community is a good way for talent to stay
informed of the company's opportunities.
In addition to having a solid career site, Sodexo is also present through a career blog and on social media.

The career blog is about engaging with people, and creating both internal and external content, such as posts giving interview tips
for job seekers or photo contests for anyone to participate in. The objective here is to keep people active and interested.

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Facebook Strategy
The Sodexo Career page on Facebook, Sodexo
Careers – Past, Present & Future is a key meeting
point of all of Sodexo's values.

"So innovative, so creative, so personal, so different,

so Sodexo": the idea here is to gather people who
worked, are working and will work for Sodexo.

The social aspect is very important: an opinion is

more credible if shared by a person rather than
by a corporate organisation. Moreover, honesty
and authenticity are key points to developing
successful communications on Facebook.

All the Sodexo sub-pages are reachable from the page,

including: Sodexo, Sodexo Diversity and Inclusion,
Sodexo Foundation, and Sodexo Sustainability.

The company does a great job showcasing their commitment

charity work, equality and environmental issues.

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Video is always an easy and fun way to spread an idea. The Career Blog is directly integrated into the Facebook
Showing a very happy and motivated workforce, Sodexo page. That way all the content is centered on one the same
has a very active YouTube channel. They communicate platform. Sodexo has chosen to keep their career blog along
about what is going on for the people at Sodexo: the idea with its Facebook career page: the blog is therefore still
here is to be creative and innovative. Some of the most updated regularly. Again, it's really oriented towards the people
viewed videos are: Making everyday a better day themselves, giving advice on job hunting, human resources,
(35,422 views) and Spirit of Mentoring Video (13,408 and recruiting. Contests are also organised to keep people
views). creative around the brand's name (a photo contest for
example).

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Sodexo Community
The company seems to be like a big
family: people are proud to be in the
community and help is really often
given through donations, charity
work and life quality improvment.

The idea is also to give each

employee the opportunity to learn
and advance in their careers.

Sodexo has built its image

as a "Good Place to Work"
and a "Good Place to Give".

The community shares the stories of

the company and its achievements.

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Twitter Strategy
Sodexo also has a career Twitter account: it's the perfect way to share information and drive traffic to the website. The account is part of
the strategy as a whole, reflecting the brand's image. Still very human with a picture of a marketing manager along with the logo.
They share content related to Sodexo and recruitment, but most importantly they directly communicate with people, whether they are
candidates or not. It's a place where questions are exchanged and answers given, not just another boring feed of vacancies.

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LinkedIn Strategy
Sodexo has a company page followed by 25,890 people. The page has several features, such as a careers tab, and the list of employees on
LinkedIn. Most of Sodexo's hires will be non-professionals and this is why LinkedIn is not a focal point for their social recruiting.

Having said that, the company has got a Sodexo USA Careers group on LinkedIn: with 6,179 members, and a week over
week growth rate of 72%, conversations are exchanged and relevant topics discussed. It's a good place to start engaging
with recruiters if you're a potential candidate, and get to know the latest opportunities at Sodexo.

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Results
In terms of tangible results, Sodexo has built a big community online: the Facebook Career Page has 7,355 fans, and the
Twitter account 7,206 followers. All recruitment properties online are connected (including mobile), the company has built a
talent community of 300,000 people to date.

On the recruitment side, more than 45% of Sodexo candidates have used one or more of Sodexo's social platforms in
their job searches. Moreover, recruitment advertising costs have been reduced by $300,000 annually.

Candidate traffic visiting the Sodexo website has grown 530% which is attributed to their social media and digital
strategy. Hiring manager satisfaction has increased year over year, it’s currently 4.63 on a 5 point scale (it was under 4
when they started measuring). Also, time-to-hire at Sodexo has decreased by 8 whole days from 2007.

What we can learn from it

• Employees are the face of your employer brand: highlighting the human side of your company is an authentic and
honest way to build a strong community
• Gathering people to build a "family" spirit creates a reliable community that will share happy contributions
• A great social media strategy starts long before technology, if you are doing things right within the business it will reflect
well on social media and any other communications channel

The success of the social recruiting strategy in the US has prompted Sodexo to roll out the same in other markets,
including France which is Sodexo's homeland.

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CASE STUDY 2
Did you know that the Netherlands is one of the most advanced countries in terms of social networking? The Twitter
and LinkedIn penetration is one the highest in the world: almost every professional is on Linkedin or uses Twitter when
considering the total work force. Consulting company Deloitte in the Netherlands has around 4,600 employees and a hiring
target for 2010/2011 of 1,000 people.

Problem?
The labour market in Holland is quite a difficult one for employers with approximately only 10% of the workforce looking for
a new job (this includes people both with and without jobs). This makes recruitment a priority challenge for the business.

Which strategy for Deloitte?

For Deloitte, recruitment is shifting more towards internet marketing, content management and measuring traffic to the
career site. Their goals?

• Help to fill the roles at Deloitte and reach the target of 1,000 new hires in 2010/2011
• Develop a strong employer brand which attracts the "right" candidates for Deloitte
• Drive traffic to their career website to create a funnel of candidates and supports the employer brand

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A great career website
A solid strategy on the internet
starts with a great career website.

And that is what Deloitte did, they

built a career website by themselves
in November 2009 called “Werken
bij Deloitte” (Working at Deloitte).

This website independent to

Deloitte’s corporate website.

Putting their career website at the

centre; you can tell they invested a
lot of time, energy and money in it.

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1) They categorised the
website in 3 categories:
Students, Young
professional and
Professional. They address
different questions and
provide different content
depending on who you are. It
is interesting to note that
they target students long
before they have graduated.

2) The career website is very

dynamic, not so many pictures
or videos though a dynamic site with animation on the
homepage. The design is quite simple and on all pages,
they also have testimonials from current employees.

3) A real sense of human feeling: in touch with the

recruiters. Recruitment staff created their own profiles on the
social media sites to help them create communities which
will communicate with potential employees of the future.

Being part of the Deloitte NL community means end users gain a

better understanding and connection with the company and ultimately feel it is an organisation that they would like to be a part of.
On the website, each recruiter has a profile, a short bio and even more unusual, you can tell when they are online or offline
if you want to have a live chat with them. It also displays their direct phone numbers and email addresses.

4) Content and contact are king. The most impressive part is the integration with Social Media and the use of content. The first thing
you see is the latest article from the blog, and the content is key in their strategy. They produce, manage and use content at the heart of

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their career website. The content is either produced by the recruitment team or by employees from Deloitte. They successfully
managed to recruit 12 employees as blog writers.

In all the pages you navigate through, you will find this small icon, which contains all the contacts of the recruiters and profiles, the
social networks where they are, a general email address. They are easy to find and you can put a face on a name.

In the vacancy section, they have introduced something quite original: you can see on a map where the jobs are, geolocation
on a Google map.

A simple website with a lot of fresh and original content (good for SEO) and where the contacts are easy to make and
personal, with a fully integrated social media strategy.

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Employer Branding & Social Media
The company really engaged with employees through social media to generate content and good word-of-mouth marketing.
Two examples:

1) The first one is the blogging side where they look for bloggers within Deloitte to write about what they do or what they
feel like. They look also for employees of Deloitte on Twitter and ask them if they can have their Twitter flow displayed on
Deloitte career website. The uptake on both of these initiatives has been very good.

2) The second example comes from a contest they ran with the employees on social media. They asked employees to
support their new campaign for employer branding aimed at students.

Rules:
• Photo with theme "spot the green spot" (relates to Deloitte logo that has a green spot)
• Upload via mobypicture.com
• Use the hashtag #beginneersthier
• Winner needs 1.000 views or more and shows creativity
• Prize: iPhone

Results:
• 55 photos uploaded and 15.500 views within 5 weeks
• They leveraged their social media activities, engaged with internal employees and
generated some buzz
• They posted the contest on Facebook, Twitter and communicated about it

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What about their presence on the
"normal" social media platforms?
The role of their career website is so important in their
strategy and the content they produce, that what exactly they
did on Facebook, Hyves (the Dutch equivalent for
Facebook), Twitter and LinkedIn is less worth dwelling on.

Overall they engage a lot and put their content out...

Basically:
• Twitter is used to post jobs and events and alert people to
new blog posts. The strength of their Twitter presence lies
in the fact that all recruiters have a Twitter account...
And tweet as well.
• Facebook focuses on potential candidates. The company is
making contact with passive candidates this way by sharing
knowledge, building a relationship and keeping them informed.
The Facebook page has something that I found really good is
the big thumb up. Mimicking the image of the "Like" button.
• LinkedIn is used to source more senior candidates. The
recruitment team can search for professionals by looking
at their network and recommendations. It also posts
vacancies on LinkedIn.
• You Tube is used as a way to communicate their
employees’ testimonials... Good but nothing particular,
video is not an are they have really focused on.

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Results
For Deloitte the challenge was to prove that you
can measure results, and they did it.

They simply used Google analytics and they integrated it

with their ATS to measure where their candidates are
coming from, how much money it takes, the conversion rate
between traffic/applications and jobs. First the traffic, the
figures speak for themselves.

They built this new website from scratch and now it

largely outstrips the old Deloitte corporate website in
term of traffic.

Now where did the traffic come from? There is 234% more
traffic coming from social media than from the other
sources, mainly job boards.

And what about the costs of recruitment? And the cost for
using recruitment agencies has dropped significantly
even though they are hiring around 1,000 and likewise for
the money invested in job boards… There is a clear switch.

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What we can learn from it
• By getting away from the corporate website, they managed to really do what they wanted with the career website.
• Content is king in their strategy... A lot of content generated by employees: they can broadcast it afterwards all across
their social media channels.
• They created a real human feeling with personal bios, photos and easy ways to contact and connect
with them. It is the humanisation of the recruitment process.
• They did some fun and interactive actions like the employer branding campaign or the geolocation map to find where
the jobs are exactly.
• Direct hires through Social Media represent only 2% of their hires but the indirect benefits of Social Media are
much better (traffic, engagement, employer branding etc).

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CASE STUDY 3
UPS tracks packages…

But UPS also tracks its recruitment strategy.

Last year UPS won its seat among the Top 50
recruiters on Twitter and different awards in
the recruitment industry for its innovative
approach to recruiting.

Here is the story of UPS and how they

switched from 90% of their budget in print
media in 2005, to 97% of their budget in
Social Media in 2010.

In 2005, UPS decided to change their recruitment

strategy and started to move aggressively to online
recruitment and the people behind this strategy are
Matt Lavery, talent acquisition manager at UPS
and Mike Vangel, Account Director at TMP.

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Goals & strategy
If we look at the basics and strip down the goals and strategy of UPS, here is what we found:

• Being able to address their high hiring volume, seasonal and part time hiring needs at a reduced cost
• Improving UPS employer brand with a cutting-edge recruiting strategy aligned with the technological image of UPS
• The strategy has changed over time and they have adapted it accordingly but the whole idea was to start redirecting all
their efforts from offline to online
• A campaign aiming at driving traffic to their newly created careers website, UPSjobs, mainly using videos, text
message, online ads, SEO and SEM
• Creation of a whole social media strategy linking to the careers page
• Being able to measure up the results precisely with simple tools

The first step of the strategy: a careers page

They created a simple careers page with a picture at the centre showing the benefits of working for UPS. But the most important
feature is the videos of employees, you can click on them on the right hand side, but also if you click on the banner at the centre of
the page. Here is where you get (picture). Videos of employees along with the benefits for working at UPS are all across the website.

However this website doesn’t seem optimised in terms of graphic design. Even if it’s simple, it lacks usability and ease
of access to information.

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Driving traffic & engagement to their website
They created a campaign called "UPSjobs-Problem
Solved" with their careers website at the centre.

The campaign started in 2008 with TMP going around in the US

and filming employees at their workplace, and the result is
quite good in terms of video. In one month during the UPS
Peak 2008 hiring season from Oct 20, 2008 to November 20,
2008 over 1,000,000 people viewed the online videos!

They drove traffic to the website by using print ads at

the very beginning, then used mobile and text
messages. In subsequent print and outdoor ads for the
handler jobs, readers were offered the choice of going
to the UPS hiring website at www.UPSjobs.com/print or
texting a short code “UPSjobs” to 95495.

It was a mixture of old, new tools and technologies. Mike Vangel

explained that they were really surprised by the results they got.

Even though the target audience is drivers and package handlers, they were keen on using technology. That had
previously proven difficult with recruitment campaigns run through traditional media such as print, radio and cable TV. But by
adding a mobile channel to those ads, TMP was able to give UPS a better picture of how its hiring efforts were succeeding.

The most impressive result is the average time spent on the website by each visitor which reached the enormous
time of 3 minutes, thanks to the videos of the campaign, they drove engagement and traffic.

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Facebook careers page
UPS launched a Facebook page for careers in
October of 2009. They grew their fan base by 1,885
fans by the end of 2009 without spending any
money. It cost them around $7,500 to do this
Facebook page.

One of the biggest benefit for using Facebook for UPS

was to get demographic information about their fans,
such as that 78% of its audience was 18-44 and 55% of
them are male and 93% live in the U.S. This set of data
showed them that they were on the right track.
They share information about sponsorships, employees,
charity events or even give advice to candidates on
where to find the right information to apply for jobs.

They also use Facebook to drive traffic to their

blog written by employees from UPS (although I
could not see any driver of package handler in the
writers team, only managers).

However, on this Facebook page, there is no direct

link to the careers page (you need to copy and paste
the UPS jobs link to get there), and likewise the
number of interactions is limited. You need to go the
reviews page to get a real feeling of what people think.

Their Facebook page generated 18,485 page views for the

UPS job-application’s landing page from October 1, 2009 to
August 27, 2010. The average time viewed was 3 minutes,
28 seconds.
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Using Twitter to hire
The Twitter account UPS jobs was created in
April 2009 (before the Facebook page) and now
has more than 5,000 followers.

They use the account not just to blast out jobs but
to provide interesting business information,
sometimes on UPS philanthropic work or other topics.

They even have a bit of interaction with

candidates who mentioned that they had an
interview with UPS (see the tweet "good luck").

Now what about LinkedIn?

Their presence on LinkedIn is very limited, they have a company page but a very simple careers page displaying jobs only.
They don't use groups officially but which I think does make sense as their primary target is drivers and package handlers
who are not on LinkedIn. They use LinkedIn when they want to hire senior level candidates.

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Mobile Applications
From the very beginning, UPS used mobile
technology to reach out to their target
audience. And it has proved very successful.

As Mike Vangel explains:

"The comfort with performing non-voice functions over
the phone is a particular cultural phenomenon among
the age group TMP was trying to reach for UPS.
The primary demographic we’re reaching for is
between 18 and 35, and they have a real comfort
with cell phone technology. That coupled with the
process itself is what has made this work.”

People are more engaged when they’re texting you than

they might be with just reading a print ad, then finding a
computer or a fax machine. Those response methods
imposed a disconnect. There’s an immediacy with SMS
campaigns. Within seconds, they had a response to their
initial text message and were able to advance to
the next level. That grows candidate relationships much faster than the old ways.

In other words, to reach out their target audience (young male between 18 and 35) text messages proved to be very
personable, engaging and efficient.

And since August 2010, they have a mobile application where candidates can apply direct (www.UPSjobs.mobi)
averaging 5,400 visits weekly. It generated four hires in a couple of weeks and 10 so far overall.

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Measuring: a key point for UPS
Measuring and tracking is part of the DNA of UPS and they have applied it to the recruitment world and especially in their strategy.
They track each of the applicants and especially where they are coming from (and not using the question: where did you hear about us?).

On Twitter the link directing to the careers page is www.upsjobs.../twitter, on Facebook www.upsjobs.../facebook...and so on.
With a simple Google analytics tool and their own ATS, they are able to track everything precisely.

But what UPS is tracking is the last media used. In other words, the stimulus. Let’s say I’ve been a fan of UPS on Facebook
for a year. But I finally decide to apply for a job after seeing a Tweet asking me to send a text message. In that case I will be
counted as coming from the text message source...The last source is the one that counts!

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Results
If we have a look at this table, the results
are quite impressive.

• The number of hires of all the different

channels has risen dramatically but
there is even more...
• They hire more and more on these
channels, from 12 in 2009 to 226 on
Facebook the following year
• The quality of the hires is better as the
conversion ratio of created applications to
hires from Facebook and Twitter compared
to all other online media is much higher
• The interview/hire ratio is 2:1
• The cost of hire went from $600/700
to $60/70 per hire
• Time to hire was reduced especially for seasonal staff and during on peak times (Christmas, Thanksgiving etc)

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What we can learn from it
UPS had clear goals (go where their audience is and cut their costs and time to hire), and knew precisely their target
audience (American males between 18 and 35 at entry level mainly handling packaging or driving trucks).

• They adapted their strategy along the way, they created a Facebook page and a Twitter account only 2 years ago.
• They tried different tools and learned by doing (lately they have been using the tweetmyjobs services on a trial basis,
they will measure up the results and will decide accordingly).
• Finally, they measured and they tracked applicants all the time.

UPS is today one of the leading companies in using social media in their recruitment strategy.

The conclusion comes from Matt Lavery who said:

"UPS does not want to just broadcast jobs through already-created channels. It is going to have more people work on
Social Media recruiting, making it more interactive, more of a conversation, less one way. It will make more videos and
have more ways for candidates to interact with current employees"

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CASE STUDY 4
What CH2M HILL did with Social Media to find talent and recruit is really impressive. It is a good example of a big
corporation using Social Media and especially LinkedIn to engage with candidates and develop new ways of hiring.

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CH2M HILL, an international company with recruitment issues
David Mason of the company explains that as an engineering and consulting company in the construction industry, CH2M
HILL has to recruit globally. But when posting ads on job boards or using recruitment agencies, they realised that they
were flooded with candidates, coming from all over the world. The quality of the average candidate used to be really low.

So the big challenge for CH2M HILL was to generate less volume (less work) and more quality.

To do this, his team focuses its efforts on social media, internet networking, developing its own website and research-based
techniques. CH2M HILL is an employee-owned company with 25,000 employees across the global and they only have 70
internal recruiters so they had to be efficient as well!

David Mason: "Job boards generate too much noise, social media allows us to target and source the right people".
The other idea was to reduce the cost per hire by reducing the number of assignments to agencies and address
directly the task of finding highly critical roles (structural engineers for instance).

The initial recruitment strategy

1) Harness social media to attract candidates: test and try different social media platforms
2) Targeting candidates effectively: using the right tools and ways to target candidates
3) Using social media to attract new geographical audiences: local candidates vs expatriates and develop a diversified pool of talents

But over time, the strategy slightly changed as we will see later on.

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The key to success: a great landing & career page
The first step in the strategy was that
they created an efficient and well-
designed careers page.

The main goal is to enhance and

maximise the candidate experience
with no time wasted. Other cues were:

1) Entertaining pages with videos and

pictures. Great design, neat and clear

2) Simple: there are no banners

or distracting gimmicks

3) They integrated the social media

buttons directly on the vacancy page

The site is an easy and quick way for an

applicant to find a job and to apply: they
just needed to drive traffic and
applicants to this website.

And they started using social media

platforms.... With varying results.

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Twitter = inefficient?
For CH2M HILL, Twitter is, so far, the least
efficient network. They have been using it as a CH2M HILL & Facebook
way to push their jobs forward, but no interactions
As a direct recruiting tool, Facebook did not work so well (which means
whatsoever.
just posting jobs and having good quality applicants), however as a
Twitter is a conversation tool but probably not community building tool, Facebook seems to be one of the best
suited for a company like CH2M HILL. options.

If you look at the Facebook page for CH2M HILL, there are a couple of
interactions between members sharing pictures and mentioning awards
and specific projects that employees do (charity projects etc) or develop.

And this page is "liked" by 2,049 people which is the biggest

community on social networks for CH2M HILL.

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The LinkedIn strategy, the one that worked better!
They have had significant success with LinkedIn as a direct recruitment tool but also as a way to raise their employer
brand and engage with specific targets. They used a wide spectrum of tools and tactics on LinkedIn.

1) LinkedIn corporate recruitment solutions

They bought licenses for the recruitment solutions and so they have access to the over 150 million members of LinkedIn
with 50 InMails per month and per license. As David Mason explained, because of the access to all the profiles on
LinkedIn, they can solve their recruitment issues quicker.

He gave a specific example of when they needed to hire a very specialised civil engineering post in Korea. They had had no
luck using the normal routes but with LinkedIn they were able to produce a long list of 100 targets in 30 minutes. This was
soon pared down to make a short list of 10 candidates. They then entered into conversation with these 10 and were able to
match one of them to the post – all without the use of an expensive agency or third party.

2) Company profile on LinkedIn & Careers page

The company profile on LinkedIn is fully customised with banners on the side driving traffic to the careers page of the
corporate website but there is also a video of employees presenting the company.

The careers page on LinkedIn goes a step further as there is a huge banner at the top redirecting to the careers page on the website.
And they have a widget integrated with their careers site that allows searching of their ATS for jobs within LinkedIn.

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With a LinkedIn career page, when members come to the page they are only given information relevant to their profile.
Which means that if you’re in engineering or marketing, the information displayed on the career page will be tailored to your profile.

And finally they seed all the jobs they posted on LinkedIn on their company page, careers page (customised according to
your location and profile) and to their followers. With the recruitment solutions, they have a number of postings per month and
CH2M HILL is clearly maximising the number of the job board option, they currently have 22 jobs posted on LinkedIn.

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3) Groups and the way they use it
The groups is probably one of the weak points of their
strategy on LinkedIn. They currently have 3 groups on
LinkedIn: CH2M HILL Alumni (1,013 members), CH2M
Alumni association (285) and CH2M HILL Jobs (317).

Obviously these numbers don't reflect the size of the

company neither the interactions and on the jobs group,
there are not many interactions. But once again community
building on LinkedIn is still a grey area and a difficult topic,
and clearly CH2M HILL has not overcome the obstacles.

4) Customised ads on every CH2M HILL

employee LinkedIn profile
The service is quite impressive, on Lacy Sinner’s profile you
can see a banner for CH2M HILL and it is the case for all
the profiles of CH2M HILL employees on LinkedIn. This is a
great way to drive traffic to your careers website; it‘s all
qualified traffic, friends or contacts of your employees!

Part of strategy and part of the LinkedIn service, CH2M

HILL used campaigns with very targeted adverts as the ones you can see on the right side of the screen.

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5) Recruiter profiles
Here is another weak point of the strategy of CH2M HILL. A couple of profiles look alike but over all it is more a patchwork.
You can argue that they want to keep the personality of each profile but there is not so much coherence. For example David
Mason kept the slides of his ex job on his profile (when he was at AXA). OK it shows that they want their recruiters to be
autonomous and free to manage their LinkedIn profiles. But if they use LinkedIn heavily, I really think that they should be a
little bit more coherent and consistent especially in the summary of the profiles and as another way to drive traffic to their
careers website (with customised URLs for example).

Why CH2M HILL succeeded on LinkedIn & had mixed results elsewhere
• They discovered that the demographic of the user base on LinkedIn is aligned with the current type of professionals
they target, i.e. 43 years old and the level of qualifications they look for
• They put their careers page on the corporate website at the centre of their strategy with many banners coming from
LinkedIn careers page and all the employees profiles directing to the website
• They experimented and learnt on the job, clearly realising that Facebook and Twitter were not the ideal tools to recruit directly
• They focused on the candidate experience by using a great design, customising career pages, and exchanging as
much personal information as they could (videos, career paths, pictures, usability)
• They always tried to provide content and exchange with current employees and candidates; they did real efforts to
engage even if the results were mixed
• This is a great company to work for as they have received awards and their strong selling point is that it is employee-owned,
with 14,000 of the company’s 25,000 employees owning shares that are not tradable outside the company. If you provide a bad
experience to your employees, social media won't change anything - and employees won't participate in any social media activity.

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Results
• 98% of hires in the US are directly sourced
• 95% of all hires outside of the US are also the result of direct recruitment activities
• They significantly reduced the cost and time to hire
• It is one of the only construction companies to be among the 100 best companies to work for

What we can learn from it

• LinkedIn leveraged their global strategy by providing a professional image, enhancing their reputation and driving traffic
to their careers page
• LinkedIn is the best tool for direct recruitment for CH2M HILL
• Facebook seems to be better for nurturing a community and employer branding
• You need to know your target and where they are to be sure to use the proper platform (Twitter has yet to prove its
efficiency for CH2M HILL)

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CASE STUDY 5
“We don’t use social media as something we should be doing because other companies are doing it, we see it as here, now
and today – it is an integrated, integral part of our recruitment strategy”. Adam Templeman.

RWE npower is a leading integrated UK energy company and is part of the German RWE Group, one of Europe’s leading
electricity and gas companies. The company is using social media in its recruiting and employer branding processes and
have had a great success story doing it.

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Career page
Npower’s career website is
the main hub from which
visitors can connect with the
company, search for jobs and
get the latest news from the
career blog.

It is from the career website

that the strategy starts in
terms of online recruitment
and employer branding.

All positions available are posted

on the website, and as npower is
organising interesting challenges
for their communities, the blog is
also an important part of the
strategy.

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Facebook & YouTube
The company chose to use
Facebook as an important part of
its attraction strategy. Targeted
Facebook adverts have been set up
and the “Future Leaders Challenge”
is promoted on it as well.

Npower are offering the

opportunity for students to win a
dog sledding trip to the North
Pole. Inspirational stories from
previous adventures are
available in picture and video.

The challenge for the students is to find and manage a project that will get people in their community to live more sustainably.
The finalists (8 teams of 4 students) are then asked to put their projects into practice and the winning team goes on an Arctic expedition!
The Facebook page is the hub they use to coordinate, promote and engage with everyone wanting to be involved in the project.

Having run the project before, the YouTube channel is also an important strategic point in the strategy: videos of previous
winning teams are of course available. Lots of categories can be found on the channel, from adverts to careers and how
tos, it’s all very well organised.

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Twitter: not a job board
Though the “Job of the Week” is tweeted
from the account, npower doesn’t use
Twitter as a job board.

This channel is used to share content,

support the employer brand awareness
and drive traffic to the career hub.

Recruiters use it as a unique channel and

it’s a main direct communication tool for
the company.

It seems important to differentiate Twitter

from a job board: content relevant to
candidates and the industry are good
examples of what npower share here.

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LinkedIn
Hiring managers share vacancies on their LinkedIn networks. Once again, consistency is important in terms of content shared.
As LinkedIn is a more professional network, it is a great platform to check jobs, and put a face on the recruiters’ names.

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Results
npower’s journey on social media is a success story in terms of numbers, engagement and brand awareness:

• Career hub traffic has increased: from 18,000 visits to 45,000

• 33% returning visitors
• Higher level of engagement
• Direct hiring has increased
• npower developed a more integrated social media presence
• 1st quarter saving of £630k

What we can learn from it

• Take social recruiting in bite sized chucks
• Get the business to invest in other areas and piggy back
• Don’t rely on it too heavily
• Use your own staff as ambassadors, use their networks
• Ask what the users want!
• Use it to support integrated recruitment channels, not in isolation
• Remember, social media is trend led, we can’t influence the trend

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LinkHumans is a Social Media consulting and training company for recruitment and HR

We help clients with

• Using Social Media for Recruitment
• Employer and Recruiter Branding Online
• LinkedIn Strategy and Training
• More information at What We Do

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