Social Media for Recruitment

USING SOCIAL MEDIA FOR EFFECTIVE RECRUITMENT

How recruitment using social media for niche roles saved time, reduced costs and improved relevancy of candidate profiles to 41.3%

Executive Summary

The client, one of the biggest brands in the real estate industry, with operations around the world was faced with a challenge of recruitment. This was particularly true for hiring Quality Assurance (QA), Quality Control (QC) and Quality Inspection (QI) engineers for India and overseas projects. The conventional job portals, classifieds and consultants were not yielding the required quality or quantity of applicants. Solving this talent availability problem was the need of the hour.

The brand wanted to use digital media to communicate with the potential applicants directly and create a new source of applicants for the niche QA, QC and QI engineers. Social media opened a new channel for recruitment which helped them reduce recruitment costs while improving candidate profiles relevancy to 41%.

The Brand

The brand is one of the biggest in the real estate industry, headquartered in India, with operations around the world. It provides turnkey end to end solutions to set up power generation plants, fully integrated rail and metro systems, commercial buildings, airports and so on. The brand has around 5000 employees.

The company is driven to deliver projects `On-Time’ using world-class project management techniques and has uncompromising standards of safety and sustainability.

Situation analysis and Challenge

QA, QC and QI engineers are responsible for all aspects related to project quality. For a reputed construction company, hiring the best of resources for those roles is extremely critical. The talent acquisition team was having a hard time hiring those resources through conventional means like recruitment portals, classifieds, and consultants. They needed a new channel that will help them get through to the right talent.

Our Approach

A seven-step approach was used to create a solution for the brand

A one-day workshop with the brand’s Recruitment and Training team to understand the job role, the “ideal candidate” profile, the likely companies where they could be found, what certifications they would hold and what pedigree would be best suited
A highly targeted campaign on Facebook was created where the factors above were translated into targeting parameters
Search terms candidates were most likely to use were narrowed down to a keyword list that was implemented in SEM campaign
Ad communications that captured the imagination of the applicant were finalized. Reasons for why the current employees joined the brand were understood.
Multiple ad-sets were created with different communication ideas. Some experimental variants for A/B testing were also created
A CRM was set up to capture, filter, categorize applications and they were passed in real time
A resume filtering application was created mid-way through the campaign to increase efficiency

Targeting buckets used

Google AdWords and display ad keywords related to job seekers and a broader set of technical search-es which would be performed by people in the following functions: QA, QC and QI.