4 HR leaders share their talent acquisition and social recruiting lessons and success—an EMBARC Recap [Video]

It’s August, friends! Which means we’re just two months away from the first virtual event in a series of EMBARC® Talent Talks. And in case you’re thinking, “EMBARC, whodat?”—we’re talking virtual events loaded with high-impact, no-fluff social recruiting, employer brand, and talent acquisition content. You’ll be hearing from thought leaders like Bryan Adams of Ph.Creative, Karen Viera of Church’s Chicken, Nirali Matalia of Saama Technologies, and Jody Ordioni of Brandemix—to name just a few.

And as a sample of what this type of content will look like, here’s an excerpt from a panel from our previous EMBARC. In this panel, you’ll hear from Kerry Noone of CVS Health, Summer Baruth of Compass Group, Jon Thurmond of Team Fishel, and Craig Barnes of City of Plano as they share their social recruiting and talent acquisition successes and lessons from 2019.

How CVS Health uses social media to improve candidate experience

For a giant company like CVS Health, candidate experience can be a real challenge. Their talent pool consists of 7 million career site visits per year, 30 million page views, and 4.5 million contacts in their database. And that’s growing by about 15,000 per month on average. Simply put?

For every 2 million applicants, they hire around 130.

And with so many applicants getting turned away, ensuring that those candidates remain loyal to their brand and interested in applying again for a different position is hugely important.

Social media provides a unique opportunity for them to connect with candidates. One of the core talent acquisition beliefs at CVS Health is that recruitment is a never-ending funnel that feeds back into itself—from promotion, attraction, and engagement through to retention and referral, and back to promotion. Social media allows them to interact with their candidates and employees at different stages of the process to improve candidate experience at every opportunity.

And, as the image below shows, it’s working.

Psst: Concerned about your own candidate experience? Check out our State of the candidate experience study here.

How Compass Group uses CareerArc to transform their brand awareness

Never heard of Compass Group? Summer Baruth, Digital and Insights Director at Compass Group, wouldn’t be surprised. Though they’re a parent company of some of the most famous brands in the food service and support service industries, for a long time, Compass Group has been an invisible presence. Which makes for quite the challenge: how are they supposed to attract candidates to a company that no one knows anything about?

And it’s not just an issue of awareness. The culture at Compass Group is different to other companies. Being a parent company to so many different brands, it’s entirely normal for employees to spend much of their career transitioning from one job to another within the same company. And that’s a hard thing to explain to candidates who don’t even understand who Compass Group is.

CareerArc helped them start changing things. With CareerArc, they were able to automate posts, share jobs from their recruiters’ social accounts, and improve the overall quality of their social content so their posts don’t look spammy. In particular, they found that sharing employee stories has been really meaningful to their candidates, and CareerArc was a huge part of making that happen.

And the numbers show. In 2019-2020, they saw a 39% increase in applicants and a 78% increase in job views.

Of course, it wasn’t without challenges. One of the first things Summer had to navigate was getting executive buy-in. And with a company of that size, that’s a lot of executives. What she found was clearly explaining the benefits with real parameters helped make the case. And, over time, they started trusting her. In Summer’s words:

“I was telling someone earlier, one of my proudest moments when we were talking about that piece would be the fact that none of our executives had social media presence in 2016 and now 80% of them do and are actively posting and they’re creating their own content, which is amazing because they are having their people create their own content.”

Looking for some tips on brand awareness? Check out this post on brand awareness 101, this post on how to stand out in a crowded field, and this article on how CareerArc can help you with building brand awareness.

How Team Fishel uses CareerArc to find applicants in a historically difficult industry

When Team Fishel first began with social recruiting, they knew they were fighting an uphill battle. They’re a construction company that not too many people have heard of, and construction isn’t a field that traditionally attracts that many candidates. And they knew that they would be speaking to a young, less experienced, and altogether different demographic than the one they were familiar with.

But what they did have was a great story. They’re a family-owned business that’s been in the industry for over 80 years. They knew that if they could just find a way to tell that story the right way, people would listen.

That’s where CareerArc came in. With CareerArc, they’ve seen a roughly 20% year-over-year increase in terms of applicant activity, and a roughly 47% increase in headcount in the past few years. Jon Thurmond attributes it to a few factors:

• Automating their posting, allowing them to scale their social media presence
• Using Facebook to promote open house events for prospective candidates (about 50% of their candidate pool in those open houses comes through Facebook)
• Using Twitter to work with trade schools to find new talent
• Pairing their social media with their job maps

In particular, Jon likes to say that success on social media is as much art as it is science. They’ve had a lot of success with building comprehensive veteran programs. They’ve also found that going to high schools to get future candidates interested from an earlier stage has been very successful.

Further reading: How one company tackled its construction labor shortage with CareerArc

How City of Plano uses CareerArc to find applicants through employee spotlights

When engineers, administrators, CPAs, and so on look for a job, they don’t often consider municipal government. City of Plano wants to change that. They want their candidates to know that government is more than just police, fire, parks, and libraries. But in developing their EVP to share with the world, they discovered they had a more important question to ask:

Why had their employees chosen them?

To City of Plano, their candidates and employees don’t just work for them. They’re investing in them. And understanding what type of candidate chose to invest in them was central to finding the story they needed to tell.

They began by asking their employees to share their stories on social media. In keeping it authentic, City of Plano made sure to only use actual images of their employees—no stock. In the words of Craig Barnes:

“Simon Sinek, author of Find Your Why, I know he’s done some other great interning and intrinsic and fundamental books. He says, “If you hire people just because they can do a job, they’ll work for your money. But if you hire people who believe what you believe, they’ll work for you with blood, sweat, and tears. . . . Not why work for us, but why invest in us?”

Since partnering with CareerArc, Craig has seen a huge shift in the effects of their social recruiting. With CareerArc, they’re able to launch multiple successful social campaigns on multiple platforms to share their employees’ stories with the world. And the results show. As they say, a picture is worth a thousand words, so:

Looking for some ideas on how to spotlight your employees? Check out this article on How to Create Employee Spotlights that Increase Engagement and Connection