end Social Recruitment Campaign on Twitter - HCL Technologies [PDF]

World’s first ever end-to-end Social Recruitment Campaign on Twitter

HCL TECHNOLOGIES

World’s first ever end-toend Social Recruitment Campaign on Twitter Application for Forrester Social Reach Award

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Executive Summary:.............................................................................................................................. 3

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Social Media Reach opportunity analysis: ............................................................................................ 3

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Challenges ............................................................................................................................................. 4

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Objectives.............................................................................................................................................. 5

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Campaign’s Process:.............................................................................................................................. 5 A. Ideation: ............................................................................................................................................ 5 B. Channel Research .............................................................................................................................. 5 C. The Interview Process ....................................................................................................................... 6 D. Job Profiles: ....................................................................................................................................... 7

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Campaign Strategy: ............................................................................................................................... 9 A.

Awareness Phase: Curiosity Build-up................................................................................................ 9

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Interest and Desire Phase: Detailing ............................................................................................... 10

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Action Phase: Launch ...................................................................................................................... 13

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Selected Media Coverage: .................................................................................................................. 18

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Major Outcomes ................................................................................................................................. 25

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Executive Summary:

While organizations have been using social media as a platform for hiring through job postings and background checks, there has never been an end-to-end recruitment process on a single social media platform. #CoolestInterviewEver is a unique reach campaign launched by global IT major, HCL Tech that leverages Twitter to create a complete recruitment engagement while amplifying “Employer Value Proposition” reach. For the first time, hiring became a two way conversation on a social platform. Total engagement from prospective job seekers was 250 K, 5 candidates shortlisted via twitter interviews conducted, all over 15 days of rich conversation with candidates from over 60 countries. While the total spend on this initiative was equal to the average spend on recruiting one full time employee, it ranks as one of the most impactful outreaches in social media history having already been covered by more than 60 international publications . It has resulted in HCL Tech enjoying a refreshed and strengthened employer brand and more followers on Twitter than any other IT Services organization in the world.

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Social Media Reach opportunity analysis:

In the last 5 years, social media has grown to immeasurable heights and has changed the way people drive political, social and economic change. It has developed itself from a medium where information that was earlier sent and consumed, to a platform where content is being created, shared, reused, changed and forwarded. There are approximately 1.7 Bn active social media users today that make it 1/4th of the world’s population. LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter are undoubtedly the key players in the race with an active member base of 250, 500, 200 million respectively. Due to the growing popularity of these platforms, they have started influencing the way recruitment was done a few years back. Where on one hand, the evolution in this space has equipped the best candidates out there looking for the jobs with tons of information at their fingertips; on the other hand, it has compelled the recruiters looking for high quality talent take a marketer’s approach and shift their focus towards building their own virtual talent pool and appealing to candidates’ individual inclinations to find and cultivate top talent. As per a study conducted by Jobvite1, it has been observed that 94% of the recruiters use or plan to use social media in the recruiting efforts. This is 21% more than the usage in the year 2008. There has also been a jump of 33% in the time to hire, 49% in the quality of candidates and 43% in their quantity. All this has made digital media the number one channel for recruiting followed by referrals and recruitment consultancies. This reflected in a study conducted by CEB that showed 82% of the organizations are forecasting an increase in their social media usage over the next 12 months. IT industry has grown tremendously in the world making its own mark. These companies have become the growth engine of the economy and are driven by a generation that we call “Gen Y”. The Gen Y (people belonging to age group of 19-30 years) is full of zeal and wants to work with an organization, which gives free reign to its entrepreneurial capabilities. A place where its voice is 3


heard and ideas implemented- thereby allowing it to make a real difference. This generation grew up with the Internet and is used to having everything readily available and being savvy users of the social media, it is technologically empowered. The Gen Y constitutes 45% of the total HCL work force and hence social media recruitment becomes all the more crucial. HCL has therefore aggressively started investing in the digital/Social media recruitment interventions which has led to an increase in the non-digital to digital recruitment ratio from 32% in the FY 12 to 51% in FY 13. Though some of the organizations including HCL have started leveraging social media for hiring but the world of End-to-End social media recruitment remains largely unexplored. The genesis of #Coolestinterviewever evolved from the understanding of the untapped opportunity. The initiative was ideated as a unique recruitment process to hire end-to-end from Twitter for a project at HCL. 1

Social Recruiting: Survey Results

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Challenges 1)

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Post the global economic slowdown that originated in the US in the year 2009 several countries experienced rapid shrinkage in their GDP, rising unemployment levels and an overall slowdown.Indian economy being fuelled by the growth in the technology sector, is dependent on the “outsourcing” or “off shoring” of key business processes by large global organizations. the growth rate of IT sector halved in 2013 ever since the global recession (from 30% to 15%). A large slice of revenues for Indian IT sector being derived from the US based clients, the impact of the slowdown in the US had a deep impact on the Indian IT sector. Changing economic conditions have adversely influenced the employer brand. Due to lesser vacancies, it becomes very important to explore new age channels for talent acquisition. The targeted economies have well established local job platforms, while there was no channel that could go across the boundaries and was more economical at the same time. IT sector has been losing its sheen because of factors like low promotions, low salary increments and uncertainty. Thus, an intervention was needed to build the recruitment brand for the company. A big portion of the allocated budget for recruitment have always been leveraged for sourcing requirements, leaving substantially lower budget for recruitment marketing initiatives. The challenge was to create a world class recruitment campaign using the amount of the annual salary of an average employee. The reach of the social media platforms using the traditional recruitment marketing interventions at HCL is 60k for Linkedin and 3k for Facebook which could not yield the targeted hiring numbers. The challenge was to increase the reach by multifold.

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Objectives 1. To quickly create a preferred employer brand amongst the 32 countries where HCL operates. 2. Achieve engagement of more than 200K through this campaign across digital channels. 3. Establish Leadership position in terms of reach & engagement on Twitter vis-à-vis competition. 4. Introducing HCL as a “Digital Disrupter” by creating a “First-In-Class” initiative which establishes HCLT as progressive Gen Y organization utilizing new age media in recruitment process. 5. To further HCL’s perception as preferred global employer for Gen Y with spend not exceeding the average cost of hiring an on-site employee

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Campaign’s Process: Process included ideation, selection of the channel, social media strategy, selecting the job profiles, the interviewing process

A. Ideation: The requirement was to establish HCL Technologies as the “First-in- Class” & “Digital Disrupter” in the IT Recruitment Industry. Instead of using traditional platforms of erecruiting i.e. job portals or social apps or the website, the team decided to leverage the new channels for end-to-end recruitment drive.

B. Channel Research a) Selecting the best platform for the social recruitment campaign launch After detailed research on the platform, Twitter was selected as preferred platform because 1) Twitter is a multi-faceted real-time conversational content based platform which allows users to create connections, network and hand-pick candidates. Twitter sees about 175 million tweets and about 300,000 new visitors on a daily basis and thus, is emerging as a major platform for recruitment branding & recruiters. Further to this as per the study conducted by Gozaik & ComScore –      

6.7 Mn Tweeters plan to change their jobs in next 12 months 5 Mn Tweeters have used career search service in last 6 months More than 500,000 social job announcements are released on Twitter each month 39% of all job seekers are on Twitter By the close of 2014, total job announcements will reach more than 2M per month Of the top 50 positions posted on Twitter, IT and sales comprise more than 24% of posted positions.

2) The platform’s structure of replying in 140 characters increases the challenge for candidates to provide their answers succinctly and cleverly. The one-liner mode of 5


conversation on Twitter marks its superiority over other platforms for conducting social interviews and hence, Twitter. 3) HCL already had a strong follower base of 175k+ on twitter, the team had a captive audience to initiate the campaign.

b) Mobile Responsive Website As per the recent survey conducted by Glassdoor.com, it was found that 43 percent of job candidates’ research their prospective employer and read the job description on their mobile device. As per another independent survey conducted by Snagajob2, 68% Job seekers consider their mobile as an important job search tool. Thus, the first step for the team was to create a website which was mobile responsive and multi–device friendly. The landing page as well as the website was designed to ensure that we did not miss out on audience coming through mobile or tablets.

C. The Interview Process The interview process was divided in 3 Rounds, as described below:

Pre-launch Phase

Fig 1 – Interview Process

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Round 1: The selection would be basis correct answers to 6 consecutive questions on IQ, OQ (operational quotient) and FQ (functional quotient). There is no validation being done and this is similar to the practice being current followed by recruiters when they do telephonic interviews. At the end of the first round, only 100 candidates are getting shortlisted- globally. Round 2: Tweet Chat: HCL Leaders interacting with 100 shortlists to the answer their queries about HCLT culture & domain requirements. Domain Specific Q&A: Inviting the 100 short-listed candidates to submit their LinkedIn profiles and. All 100 will also be asked to sign in a terms and conditions + authentication document which will carry their digital signature. Round 3 - Finals: In the final round, 5 short-listed participants will be evaluated by HCL Leaders through an interaction on Twitter and 1 candidate will be handpicked from amongst them.

D. Job Profiles: After doing a thorough Google search volume analysis and Social Listening analysis, on different domains in the IT sector, we chose 5 high search volume work profiles and created in opportunity in them, so that, we could reach out to maximum job-seekers through the campaign. All the selected profiles were mapped to HCL’s senior leadership & it was decided that the finally selected candidate will shadow the leader in their respective field. Big Data Guru is the Data Analysis Consulting Profile. The candidate is supposed to stay abreast with numbers and understand Data Analysis as a domain. The candidate will be mentored by Matteo Colombo, VP, Business Analytics Services. Fig 2 – Job Profile (Big Data Guru)

Hacker-In-Chief is the champion software coder profile. (S)He is supposed to know various computer languages and would be aligned with delivery teams of HCL. The candidate will be mentored by Kalyan Kumar, Sr. VP and Chief Technologist, HCL.

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Fig 3 – Job Profile (Hacker In Chief)

Digital Trotter will work as a Digital Marketing Consultant to HCL Technologies and will explore how HCL leverages digital to reach out to target audience. The candidate will be mentored by Kiran Somalwar, VP, Enterprise Transformation Services.

Fig 4 – Job Profile (Digital Trotter)

The Ideapreneurship Evangelist is the business & IT consulting profile. The candidate is expected to be aligned with the company’s culture of Ideapreneurship and will be working closely with Dharmender Kapoor, VP, BITS and will explore HCL culture.

Fig 5 – Job Profile (Ideapreneurship Evangelist)

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Womenspiration will be a consultant for HCL Technologies in the field of diversity. The candidate will further improve how diversity is implemented in the company and would work closely with Srimathi Shivashankar, Associate VP, Diversity and Sustainability.

Fig 6 – Job Profile (Womenspiration)

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Campaign Strategy: Since the digital channels these days are flooded with information; it was required to launch the campaign in a subtle phased manner.

Phase (AIDA)

Awareness

Interest & Desire

Action

Theme

Curiosity Build-up

Detailing

Launch

Period

23/12/2013 to 20/01/2014

20/01/2014 to 10/02/2014

10/02/2014 onwards

Details

• No details provided but the name of the campaign • Subtle hints about the idea were provided

• Details about the campaign were provided • Captured audience base created • Buzz created on Twitter and other channels

• Questions themselves created a lot of buzz • Buddy Concept for enhancing the campaign • Tweet Chat to let the candidates communicate directly with the leaders

Collaterals

1 single page microsite and 3 Teaser videos

A full-fledged tabbed website + 2 full length videos

The website + The Twitter hashtag

Table 1 – Campaign Strategy

A. Awareness Phase: Curiosity Build-up The campaign was kick-started in the second last week of December 2013 with the launch of a microsite and 3 Teaser videos. The microsite was just a landing page with minimal information 9


and a single Call-To-Action where the interested candidates could enter their e-mail IDs to be the first one to know about the campaign. Neither the content nor the 3 embedded teaser videos were meant to reveal the campaign details.

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Prior to the launch of the website, A/B testing was done for two versions of the single-page microsite. In one version, the text on the website was the main attraction while on the other one the videos were the central collateral. The website performing best towards our goal was used for this phase. The website was made Search Engine Optimized. Since, the website did not have too much of text, we used both on-page as well as off-page methods for optimization, like link building, XML site mapping, meta-tags, etc. In the first 20 days of launch, the website reached among top 5 search results on Google globally which generally happens in 2-3 months post launch. Since, a large part of our target audience accesses internet through mobile devices, the website created was mobile responsive and had great UX on multiple devices. The website also had social sharing enabled with customized messages for each platform.

Fig 7 – CoolestInterviewEver Microsite

B. Interest and Desire Phase: Detailing

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Three weeks prior to the campaign launch, the full-fledged website was launched with the objective of providing the interested candidates the complete information about the campaign. This website also had two new videos which explained the campaign up to a certain extent.

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In order to cater to the UX needs of our target audience, this website was also mobile responsive and had no scroll on the pages. Instead of a single page website, this website was made tabbed which helped us from the SEO perspective.

Fig 8 – CoolestInterviewEver Main site

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As quite a few people knew about the #CoolestInterviewEver, the focus of the new version of website was shifted from getting new registrations to creating buzz around it. Thus, the new website had a Call-To-Action that said “Start Tweeting Now”. Through this, the interested candidates could share the text “I am giving the coolest interview ever. Are you? www.coolestinterviewever.com #CoolestInterviewEver” on Twitter. Soon, we started getting a lot of engagement on the Twitter hashtag. 11


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The website www.coolestinterviewever.com reached search rank 1st on Google within 7 days of the new website launch for the keyword “Coolest Interview Ever”. In the process, the website overtook authoritative websites like www.theguardian.com, www.inc.com, www.today.com, etc for the search term “ coolest interview ever” Email Marketing: Mailers were sent to the database of 200,000 job applicants from the previous year owned by HCL. Also, mailers were sent to the students of 67 Major B-schools in India, 6 B-schools in US and 6 B-schools in UK about the campaign.

The website has received tremendous response from 102 countries with 95,000+ page during the campaign. This was enabled by promoting it organically on all official social media properties of HCL Technologies which included LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus. The communication about #CoolestInterviewEver received whooping response from our captive audience on our Social Media Channels. Not only this, the 5 videos received 80,000+ views during the campaign.

Promotion: Paid Media:  Social Channels: A minimum amount of promoted tweets and promoted cards were used on Twitter to reach out to the Target audience by targeting the Twitter handles of major job search sites.  Campus outreach: In order to have an integrated outreach around the campaign, physical banners were also sent to B-schools and interaction sessions were carried out. Owned Media:  Internal Outreach: HCL Technologies realized its major potential within. We reached out to our 75k+ employees through our internal channels like intranet, physical interactions, floor walks, webinars and individual emails, told them about the campaign and got them talking about it and sharing it in their social networks.  HCLtech.com visitors and Job Seekers: In order to Leverage the hcltech.com visitors and regular job seekers, the corporate website was aligned to the campaign and the career section was updated with information about the campaign along with a clickable banner which led to the campaign site. Earned Media:  Social Channels: The website and the videos were organically shared with our captured audience on various social media channels. The queries from the interested individuals were regularly responded to.  Influencer Outreach: Considering the importance of Influencer Marketing, we reached out to influencers individually and shared the concept with them. As a response we got them (profile of some influencers who engaged with the campaign shown below) talking about us on Twitter.

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Name of Influencer

Influencer Profile

Gautam Ghosh

Represents Philips, a Global 500 company, on social media, Featured as a Social Media thought leader on Forbes & Guest Blogger, Social Business News (14,500+ Twitter Followers) 144,000+ Twitter followers; Public Relations & Digital @UST Global, Wikipedia Admin, Social Media Enthusiast, Frmr PR & Exec Com member @ WikimediaIndia Chief Learning Officer, Reliance (A 73Bn dollar company) A major Twitter influencer with 26,200+ Twitter followers, CEO & Founder of @YouTern, which works in the field of recruitment B2B partner and brand advocate at Twitter

Tinu Cherian Abraham Anand Pillai Mark Babbitt Sebastian Turner

Table 2: Influencer Profiles

C. Action Phase: Launch The campaign was launched on 10th of February with the team actively engaging with the participants.  

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For daily reporting, industry standard analytics tools, namely Simply Measured and Oracle SRM were used. A daily status update was sent to the team and the other internal stakeholders to get their inputs on further optimization. HCL’s world class social command center was leveraged to track engagement 24 x 7. The social command center played the following roles: o Engaging o Listening o Reporting o Shortlisting o Optimizing The engagement commenced 3 days prior to the launch of the campaign with the team actively responding to the queries around #CoolestInterviewEver. The tone used in engagement was extremely personal. The candidates felt as if they are interacting with a brand personified. The 3 tenets of HCL Brand – a) trust, transparency & flexibility b) value centricity c) Employee first customer second(EFCS) where exemplified in every tweet. The rising excitement could be felt in the participant’s tweets.

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In order to make sure that the information shared gets registered in the minds of prospective candidates, a creative led approach was taken, and even the FAQs were converted into creative.

An Interesting Fan site During the course of the campaign, an anonymous admirer of the campaign created a fan site on the lines of our main site. The site was named as www.coolestintervieweeever.com. (Screenshot below)

Fig 9 – Fan Site

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The website featured the Live Questions, the previous questions, HCL Tech’s Twitter Handle and #CoolestInterviewEver search results. A nice piece of work, indeed.

Interesting responses: A few interesting tweets were obtained during the course of the campaign:

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Innovative response:

Fig 10 – Innovative Response

As we were trending… The website went down!!! Due to the amount of interaction being generated by the ones following #CoolestInterviewEver, we trended in 19 cities across the nation for 4 different days. Due to the amount of sudden traffic on the website due to trending, the website went down for a brief while before order was restored and the website made live again.

Fig 11 – Website went down because of massive traffic

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Selected Media Coverage: Redmond.com: HCL Technologies turns to Twitter for employee recruitment

http://www.redmond-reporter.com/business/246018091.html BLOOMBERG BUSINESSWEEK: HCL to conduct job interviews on Twitter

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[SOURCE: http://investing.businessweek.com/research/markets/news/article.asp?docKey=600201402120349KRTRIB__BUSNEWS_3184_63404-1 ]

RECRUITER: HCL Technologies launches Twitter recruitment campaign

[Source: http://www.recruiter.co.uk/news/2014/02/hcl-technologies-launches-twitterrecruitment-campaign/]

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YAHOO FINANCE: HCL Technologies Launches First Ever Global Twitter Recruitment Campaign

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TECHGIG.COM: HCL Attempts To Hire Candidates With #CoolestInterviewEver Campaign On Twitter

[SOURCE: http://www.techgig.com/readnews.php?category=Other+Technology+news&tgnews_link=http%3A%2F %2Ffeedproxy.google.com%2F~r%2Fwatblog%2FAfck%2F~3%2FltbDtenZgfc%2F&tg_type=rss&tgnews_i d=45556 ]

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HERALDONLINE.COM: HCL Technologies Launches First Ever Global Twitter Recruitment Campaign

[SOURCE: http://www.heraldonline.com/2014/02/10/5662800/hcl-technologies-launches-first.html ]

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FORT MILL TIMES: HCL Technologies Launches First Ever Global Twitter Recruitment Campaign

[SOURCE: http://www.fortmilltimes.com/2014/02/10/3276823/hcl-technologies-launches-first.html ]

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Reuters.com: HCL Technologies Launches First Ever Global Twitter Recruitment Campaign

Source: http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/02/10/ca-hcl-technologiesidUSnBw106296a+100+BSW20140210

Fig 12 - Viral

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Major Outcomes   

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With participants from more than 60 countries across the globe & media coverage from more than 50 international and national media worth USD 500 K, HCL has furthered its position as an employer of choice. The total engagement exceeded more than 250K, there was an overachievement by 25% in terms of engagement. By the end of this campaign, HCL is leading the IT industry in reach on twitter with more than 201K followers ahead of global companies like IBM, Accenture and Indian Players like TCS, Infosys, and Wipro etc. The campaign has enabled HCL to organically gain the highest number of followers during the campaign month. With trending across 19 cities & across the nation for 4 different days, the #CoolestInterviewEver campaign is an extension of HCL’s employee-centric culture, designed to uncover new talent in the IT field while strengthening its position as a progressive organization utilizing new age media to refresh the recruitment process. The total campaign cost did not exceed average spend on recruiting one full time employee by utilizing mix of organic & inorganic reach through different online & offline channels. 25k+ increase in the number of followers in 2 months 83% increase in follower rate in the last two months as compared to the last 10 months Lowest Cost per engagement among the marketing channels

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