Expansion is an exciting and triumphant time, a marker of success communicating to the world that your company is experiencing such impressive returns at existing locales that it must now do what’s natural—grow into new territories to conquer. This is supposed to be the best of times.
But growth also brings challenges. Bar Louie Restaurants is one of the fastest-growing restaurant brands in the nation opening about twelve to fifteen corporate locations each year. This year alone, they expect to hire workers at a volume that equals the size of its current workforce.
To face this demand, Bar Louie leveraged social media to solve some of the most persistent hiring challenges brought about by rapid expansion. They produced such exemplary results that we dedicated a case study to their winning strategy and execution.
From that study we share just a few headline results to help you learn from their lead. Here are the 3 Ways Social Recruiting Helps You Survive Your Own Growth:
- Social Recruiting Increases Quality Candidate Flow
Hiring the right people is difficult enough, but having to recruit an entire staff in new, unfamiliar locales adds significant weight to the challenge.
Luckily, Bar Louie owned one of the most powerful assets when it comes to using social media to recruit culture-fit hires–a bold employer brand. This is best illustrated by Jennifer Scott, Vice President of Human Resources at Bar Louie, who shared what kind of hires they look for:
“We search for folks that are happy to express themselves and be who they are. We are not looking for robotic, corporate types: tattoos are welcome, stuffed shirts are not.”
Bar Louie knew that by leveraging its distinct company culture, it could raise its employer brand and easily distinguish itself from other organizations competing for top talent. The company does this though a multi-channel, multi-media approach that gives job seekers several opportunities to engage with the Bar Louie brand.
An example of this is Bar Louie’s Facebook Page which houses a dedicated Careers Tab powered by TweetMyJobs. Here candidates can experience the Bar Louie brand, get a feel for company culture, as well as apply to and share open jobs.
Result: “Growing our candidate pool was our ultimate goal,” said Scott. “And in this regard, social recruiting absolutely expanded our horizons.”
Social Recruiting Best Practice: If you have a bold employer brand, flaunt it. Social media tends to reward the daring.
- Social Recruiting Decreases Time-to-Fill
Finding the right people in new locales during an aggressive growth period is like aiming at a moving target from a race car: move too fast, aim too wide, and you are bound to miss out on a great hire.
Scott explained, “We had a choice: find a better way to tap a continuous flow of quality candidates in new territories, or risk costly disruptions to our launch schedule that could domino into delays for multiple locations.”
What Bar Louie needed was a reliable medium that could communicate the company’s culture, attract talent that strongly identified with the brand’s values, and immediately embolden those candidates to apply.
One way Bar Louie continued to engage and attract the right hires was through the use of the TMJ Job Map, which displays up-to-date job openings across all Bar Louie corporate locations. Having boosted online engagement and return visitors, the map now acts as the default starting point for anyone who wishes to apply for a position directly from the Bar Louie site.
Result: “TweetMyJobs drove a continuous surge of traffic to our career site and pulled in larger candidate pools than ever before, helping us significantly cut our time-to-fill.”
Social Recruiting Best Practice: Recruiting on social media pushes employers to be more inventive and engaging when reaching out and interacting with job seekers. Experiment with multiple platforms and reinvest in the ones that promise the most reach and return.
- Social Recruiting Boosts Employee Retention
Bar Louie emphasizes a culture of retention and internal promotion across all levels of the organization, which is why they have instituted the Bar Louie Internal Promote program that strives to fill at least 50% of all management positions by hiring from within—a goal TweetMyJobs continues to help meet.
When Bar Louie tracked hires sourced from social recruiting initiatives managed by TweetMyJobs, Bar Louie discovered that the greatest ROI TweetMyJobs had delivered was one that followed far beyond the initial hire.
Result: “We’ve seen a major surge in internally-promoted managers who were initially sourced through social channels as hourly hires,” reports Scott. “[TweetMyJobs has] proven their recruiting solution can, in the long-term, impact retention—our highest measurement of recruitment ROI.”
Social Recruiting Best Practice: Track your social hires—from hourly to salary—to discover your complete ROI.
Beyond the Extremes of Expansion:
Bringing Social Recruiting Best Practices Home
If you reread the 3 Ways Social Recruiting Helps You Survive Your Growth, you will find that these three ways could just as easily be titled “3 Ways Social Recruiting Helps you Target, Recruit, and Retain Great Hires, Any Day of the Week.”
Bar Louie shows us how social recruiting—when expertly managed and optimized through innovative solutions—can bend, adapt, and scale to extreme situations like hyper growth. 
However, the results we listed—increased quality candidate flow, decreased time-to-fill, and increased quality-of-hire and employee retention—are benefits we see our clients achieve daily.
To learn more about how you can apply these lessons to your campaign today, download the Bar Louie Case Study to get the full story on strategy, solution, and success.
