Millennials. They’re the ones zombie-marching with eyes and hands on their phones, tablets in their bags and 140-character thoughts flashing through their heads.
They’re also the ones companies are trying to recruit because of the up-to-date technology and work-style skills they contribute to a workplace. That’s why some organizations are hitting them where they live — on social media — to get their attention.
Monster Jobs’ director of digital communications and social media, Patrick Gillooly, talked to Chief Learning Officer about how the job site uses social media to bring talent into its own workforce as well as help clients fill positions in their own companies. Edited excerpts follow.
Explain how you’ve used social recruiting to hire candidates.
It’s now part of the Monster DNA. We are focused on two particular areas where we can use these channels: As a branding tool for those who want to work at Monster and to help connect and discover the best talent through social — whether they are actively job seeking or not.
When it comes to our employer branding, we … market Monster as a company on Twitter, Instagram, Glassdoor and LinkedIn — highlighting our culture, benefits, people and offices. On the technology side, that’s our bread and butter. TalentBin by Monster is a social profile aggregator, which lets us discover all the little talent information that candidates have left as breadcrumbs across the social web and pull it all together to paint a cohesive picture. Monster Social Job Ads allow us to take TalentBin by Monster data, Monster resume data and Twitter data to create highly targeted recruitment advertising on Twitter.
Utilizing all of these tools has allowed us to expand our social marketing footprint, build more efficient pipelines for talent and decrease our overall spends.
What was the process when putting these tools into practice?
We have really transformed our social marketing and product efforts in the last two years. Within six months of my arrival in August 2013, we had implemented Hootsuite and Brandwatch for marketing, engagement and listening; built out a social media center as part of our move to a new global headquarters to centrally house that activity; and acquired and developed two companies that form the backbone of our TalentBin by Monster and Monster Social Job Ads products.
Social is at the heart of everything we do, from marketing to product to human resources and beyond. It’s physically at the heart too. In our global headquarters in Boston, there are giant monitors streaming social data in real time. With this data, we’re looking at how we can be hyper-efficient on these platforms and we’re constantly looking to see where else we can insert ourselves into the conversation. For example, we’re looking into extending our presence on Reddit, Snapchat and Instagram.
Our global growth strategy is also aggressive. We have counterparts to our U.S. team in nearly 40 countries who are doing regional marketing work in very similar ways. As the program evolves, we’re looking for ways to continue scaling our one-to-one engagement strategy, while maintaining our personalized messaging and being hyper-aware of where these conversations are happening.
What benefits have you seen?
At a time in which many major brands are seeing diminishing organic returns on their social activities, at Monster, we are not. For example, in the last three months of 2013 versus the last three months of 2014, the Monster brand saw 262 percent growth in Twitter RTs and a 300-plus percent increase in mentions. Those numbers have continued to grow significantly into 2015.
We’ve been able to see some very tangible business benefits and outcomes since starting this program. We spend 80 percent less time and resources producing content and results. In addition to increasing our overall brand presence, we’ve also seen a 25 percent growth in followers to our talent brand social communities. We’re proving this strategy works, putting us in a place to allocate more resources to this program in the future.
How do you think this space will change in years to come?
While a lot of our discussion has been focused on the organic side of social marketing, the next big frontier is social advertising; we’re heavily pursuing both as Monster’s brand and on behalf of our customers through products such as Monster Social Job Ads. We're continuing to look at ad technology and how we can see the kind of scale, efficiency and, ultimately, human voice that we have brought to the organic side.
