You are probably already using social media for finding and engaging with talent. But do you get cold sweats when it comes to discussing results with management? You’re not alone – proving ROI for social sourcing and employer branding is tricky, to say the least.
We recently sat down with Dalhia Rodriguez, Employer Brand and Social Media lead at Dell, to discuss how she got strategic about engaging with prospects on social media and tracking results.
Define Objectives Early
The biggest challenge I faced when I started in employer branding was that I felt our efforts were just a ‘nice to have’ because we couldn’t convey how this resulted in attracting the candidate that Dell was interested in and couldn’t tie our content strategy to actual hires. I felt like we were trying to solve a Rubik’s cube.”
– Dalhia Rodriguez, Employer Brand and Social Media lead, Dell
When Dalhia sat down to identify her team’s objectives, she decided on specific goals that would drive her efforts forward, and satisfy management’s questions.
This led Dell to set out two main objectives:
1) Demonstrate how branding efforts on social media increase visibility of Employer Value Proposition, within the themes Diversity, University Relations and Work Culture.
2) Show how this visibility translated into candidate conversation
We focus on what our hiring leaders care most about, which is the amount of candidates we’re able to attract via our branding efforts, in order to become a critical part of the recruitment strategy.”
– Dalhia Rodriguez, Employer Brand and Social Media lead, Dell
Social Sourcing Metrics- What Really Matters?
Making the objectives measurable and identifying the right metrics for her activities has been crucial to get the buy-in and resources needed. Dalhia has found that you can’t just show regular social media analytics:
I tied our metrics back to what our leaders want to know. With Avature, we now know the amount of applicants we get from social media. We show our management the engagement metrics from internal and external audiences…”
– Dalhia Rodriguez, Employer Brand and Social Media lead, Dell
By using Avature, Dell is able to:
- create trackable URL’s for each of their landing pages, or community talent portals
- post directly to their social media accounts from the Avature platform
- track the engagement activity such as unique visitors, number of clicks associated to each URL
Dalhia shared how one of their event campaigns achieved an organic (non-paid) reach of 2.6 million people in a two-month span and as a result received 112 new candidates into their talent pool in Avature. Using the event hashtag and targeted content for this specific audience of engineers really helped them increase the reach of the posts and encourage people to apply to Dell. Furthermore, the quality of hire increased since recruiters were able to pre-qualify talent that registered for the event, and schedule interviews with hiring managers at the event.
Because of these results we have formalized a process for our upcoming diversity conferences in the US and it’s also being replicated in other regions.”
– Dalhia Rodriguez, Employer Brand and Social Media lead, Dell
Authentic Campaigns – Know Your Audience
- For the North American initiatives, Dell launched various campaigns targeting a range of diverse audiences to attract prospects and boost their employer brand. For each audience, Dalhia stressed the importance of creating authentic, audience-specific content, such as the ongoing ‘Vets at Dell’ campaign that showcases employee stories of transitioning from the military to Dell. This campaign even caught Michael Dell’s attention, CEO of Dell, and he actively joined the conversation on Facebook.
While creating authentic content has been key to successfully showcasing Dell’s work culture and life at Dell, tracking their social media campaign activity in Avature is what really provided Dalhia’s team with a clearer view of what works and what doesn’t for each segment.
Localized Content is Better
Dell decided to focus on a localized content strategy to raise brand awareness and engagement for key markets in Latin America such as Panama and Brazil. This was made possible with help from Dalhia’s interns, that create authentic content and post 3-4 times per week for each market (in Spanish and Portuguese), covering the Employer Value Proposition themes.
They’ve done an outstanding job in elevating our employer brand in those markets and have been able to capture the essence of our work culture. They create content for their own peers — that’s part of our success…The traffic from Facebook to our website in Brazil, increased by 1661% — right there we knew we had to continue to leverage our local resources. ”
– Dalhia Rodriguez, Employer Brand and Social Media lead, Dell
What Was Crucial to Dell’s Social Sourcing Success?
The results speak for themselves. With zero budget, Dell has organically reached millions of people on social media and tracked their apply clicks for each campaign and market that they’ve targeted.
Here are two of Dalhia’s key learning points for solving the “Rubik’s cube”:
Show impact of your branding efforts to get leadership buy-in
Being able to prove results to management is absolutely key, so use metrics that they care about. Focus on how many applicants you were able to get.
In 2017 so far, we’ve attracted 500 applicants via social media and hired 25 – in Brazil alone. In Latin America for Q2 we received 153% increase in apply clicks… Those are the tangible results that leaders care about, and we are delivering largely because of Avature.”
– Dalhia Rodriguez, Employer Brand and Social Media lead, Dell
Social media content in local languages is key
Quality content is key, making sure we are capturing the true work culture and finding new ways to engage with the audience. Local content beats global content. We will continue with that effort.”
– Dalhia Rodriguez, Employer Brand and Social Media lead, Dell
To discover more about Avature, feel free to check out the resources below.
