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Meeting of the mind series,
brought to you by Reclaim Policy and RH here at OPM.
Today we have a very fun and informative session with Sodexo.
For some of the people in the field
that registered before April 16,
you probably got all the giveaways.
We got really fun sun glasses and some cookies,
so hopefully you're participating
in the fun that we are having today.
I want to introduce our speakers today.
Arie Ball is the vice president
of Talent and Acquisition at Sodexo,
the leader in quality of daily life solutions
with more than 120,000 employees in the US,
and serving more than ten million customers daily.
Building on a career of Operational Management,
Arie assumed a leadership role within Human Resources in 2004.
In this role, she leads the company's first ever
centrally managed cross-divisional
recruitment organization that focuses on sourcing,
attracting, and recruiting top talent to Sodexo.
Sodexo Talent Acquisition Group has been widely recognized
for innovative approaches to attracting, recruiting,
and promoting top talent, and that is the reason why
they're here at OPM today to share their effective
practices with the federal government.
Their practices using an integrated online presence
including the use of Social Media properties
and Web 2.0 tools that has been recognized
as best in class by organizations such as
the Society of New Communications Research,
Human Capital Institute, Corporate Executive Board
and so many other organizations,
the Wall Street Journal, Business Week,
Forbes Magazine and more.
They have also received numerous awards by organizations such as
Innovative College Recruiting
and Diversity Recruitment and Retention.
So Arie also is on the board
for the Multicultural Food and Hospitality Association,
Executive Advisory Board of the Human Capital Institute,
and previously on Nation's Restaurant
News Spirit Award Advisory Board.
As you can see, she has a wealth
of institutional knowledge at Sodexo
and also in other fields as well.
Arie received her BS in Hotel and Restaurant Management
at the University of Massachusetts
and an MBA at Bryant University.
Also with us today is Kerry Noone.
Kerry is the senior marketing manager
at Sodexo Talent Acquisition group in the US.
She has more than 17 years of experience
in organizational brand research.
She specializes in developing internal
and external digital marketing strategies for B2B and B2C,
and I guess they will tell you what that means.
In November 2007, she added recruiting marketing
and employer branding to her profile.
Kerry graduated with a Bachelors of Arts
in Corporate Communications and an MA in Publication Design
from the University of Baltimore.
And we also have on the phone, Anne Scott.
She is the Training Program Developer,
Talent Acquisition team.
So she's behind the scenes running the show.
So join me in welcoming Anne and Kerry and Arie.
Thanks. - Thank you.
Thank you, we are thrilled to be here.
Before we get started, I wanted to just check in with Anne.
She's the women behind the screen,
sort like ours, you know.
Do we have any messages we wanted to give out
in terms of some links, Anne?
- Absolutely.
So if you are on a webcam,
and you would like to participate in the webinar,
where we're gonna be doing some polling
and a little bit of video and a little bit of everything today,
feel free to join us.
We are at bit.ly/coolgov.
And that will bring you right into WebEx.
If you need a password,
it's Talent, with a capital "T."
- All right, thank you.
- And I just wanted to add, we're using the hashtag CoolGov
and we encourage tweeting and Facebook,
so don't put your phones away,
definitely get them out and use the hashtag.
You can see Arie Ball's Twitter handle
and mine is under SodexoCareers,
so feel free to use those as well.
- And we hope you remember every screen,
every screen has the hashtag
in our handles on, in case you forget.
So thank you very much for inviting Kerry and I
to come here and share some of the approaches
that we use at Sodexo to attract and recruit top talent.
I am very excited to be here and feel it's a real honor
to be able to share some of our effective practices
with our colleagues in HR in the federal government.
You know, the more I thought about it,
the more I was struck by the similarities
between our organizations.
In terms of size, geographic scope, the decentralization,
and the fact that in both organizations,
people are at the heart of our success.
And, you know, back in 2004,
when we started up our Talent Acquisition Group,
we made a lot of process changes and structural changes,
but most of all, we wanted our candidates
and our potential candidates
to get that insider view of our company culture.
We wanted them to know how cool it is
to work in our organization.
And this is not unlike what president Obama has done
with the Hiring Reform Act in wanting people to know
how cool it is to work for the government.
Hence we came up with the title, you know,
the tag line that we're using of CoolGov
and we wanted to share that with you.
You have your shades and I don't know if the people here
in the room have tried them out, but they are very cool.
[Laughing]
If we at some point have everybody wearing their shades,
I've been told the cameras might show
everybody with them on.
Um, our cookies.
And I know some of the folks
who are remote may not have gotten the packages.
If you signed up before last Tuesday,
you would have gotten packages in the mail,
but just so that you see them,
I think this is the way we're gonna do it.
Just so you know it's coming,
there's a cookie, there's a Twitter cookie
and there's a Facebook cookie.
Does that work?
And the Facebook cookie says
"Our CoolGov is hire," H-I-R-E, "minded."
And then there is the thumb up, the Facebook thumb up,
that says "Sodexo and 300 million others like this."
And then the Twitter, and the tweet says
"Serving the American people
"is at the heart of everything they do.
CoolGov."
So that's what's coming if you haven't received it yet.
Um, okay.
Before, when we were first asked to present here,
we wanted to make sure we hit the mark
and we brought value to you,
and we presented on what you wanted to hear.
So we did do a survey, it was on the website.
We got, you know, a pretty good response rate.
Twenty six people.
Now I know that's not scientific
but it gave us some good data to go by
in preparing for our presentation.
And what we learned is a good number of you are already on
at least one or two of the platforms
that we'll talk about today.
We learned that...
We learned how often you get onto the platform
and that many of you are already using it for recruitment,
so that's really great.
What we found is that 21 percent of people
are using it every day,
25 percent of people are using a platform,
one of the platforms, 25 percent are using it weekly,
3 percent are using it monthly,
and 47 percent who have profiles set up are using it
less than once a month or never.
So we've got a good range of people in what, you know,
what they're using, the different platforms,
how often they are using it, the frequency,
and then why people want to use social media for recruiting.
And the top three reasons that you want to use social media
for recruiting is employment branding,
relationship building and then building talent communities.
Through that survey, we also got a lot of written in comments
and any of the written in comments
that have something to do with social media
we incorporated into our presentation.
So we hope we hit the mark with you.
If there was a written in comment
that had nothing to do with social media,
we just don't have the time to adjust that today.
So, based on the feedback we got,
the major areas, the four major areas
that we're gonna talk about with you today is up on the screen.
We're gonna start off by talking about
how you develop a social media strategy framework.
And the framework is what you would use to guide
your day to day decisions with your online presence,
and the framework can easily be modified
and scaled depending on your needs and your resources.
We'll talk about how you integrate
your social media presence with your overall
comprehensive recruitment strategy
and the different elements that would
go into the goals and the actions.
We'll talk about how you effectively
manage your people resources, how you help your recruiters
and your brand ambassadors to embrace innovation.
And when Kerry speaks, she'll give you some concrete examples
of how we went about doing this with our team.
And then of course we'll talk about different ways
that you can go about measuring results.
Because I'm gonna use a lot of examples about Sodexo,
I want to just give you a little bit of perspective
of who we are and what we do.
We are the leading provider of quality of life services.
We are in 80 countries around the world.
We have 380,000 employees,
we're the 21st largest employer in the world.
In the US, which is what we're gonna be talking about,
what we're doing here in the US,
we have 110,000 employees,
and we're located in 6,000 client sites.
So again, very dispersed organization.
The services we provide
include food services, facilities management,
business strategy, and motivation solutions.
Some of the set client segments that we are in,
hospitals, colleges, the military.
We're the provider for food services for the marine corp.
And the federal government.
Some of the agencies we're involved with include the USDA,
the FDA, FBI, lot of acronyms, we use lot of acronyms too,
department of transportation, and many many others.
And then corporate environment,
in many different corporate environments.
So in the US, we are, our Talent Acquisition Group is doing
the recruiting for almost 5,000 managers
and professionals each year.
Our hourly staff is all recruited and
recruited locally at our local client location.
So what we'll be talking about is the exempt staff, and as
was mentioned earlier, our Talent Acquisition Group
was formed in 2004.
Prior to that time we were a decentralized function
and had been outsourced.
So most of what you're gonna be seeing today
has been put into place in the last seven years.
Many organizations say that
people are their most important asset,
but at Sodexo it really is true because as a service company,
it's our people who are delivering
our services to our clients.
So our ability to attract and recruit the very best talent
is pivotal to our company's success.
Okay, for any of you who have been to the London underground,
I'm sure this sign is familiar to you.
It reminds passengers to mind the gap,
mind that space between the platform and the train,
so as not to fall through.
What it has come to refer to over time is,
you know, not missing the train or,
you know, falling between the cracks
or, you know, not planning ahead,
and for me it's the perfect analogy for what is coming,
what's looming, what's coming down the talent landscape.
First, the long term demographic trends are still valid.
The trends in terms of
the ageing and the shrinking labor market,
the multi generations in the labor force,
even with the downturn in the economy,
all of that which is looming, is still out there,
the dates have just been pushed out.
The increased demand of highly educated talent.
In the US, more than 75 percent of new job creation requires
a post high school degree,
a post high school or college degree.
Yet, less than 30 percent of our Gen Y, as those in college,
of the college age,
less than 30 percent are graduating from college,
more than 20 percent are graduating from high school.
There's also a scarcity of skilled talent.
You know, even with the high unemployment rates,
the folks who are unemployed, do they have the skills
that we're looking to recruit for, and if they have the skills
that we're looking to recruit for, do they have the skills,
do we need them now?
If we don't need them now, what are we doing
to build relationships with them
so that when we're ready to hire them, when we do need them,
they're gonna want to come to work for our organization?
So with all of this, intense competition for talent.
Progressive organizations
including Sodexo really need to
take a look at all these conditions
and build them into their strategy
so that we're prepared for our future.
And, you know, using social media
and talent communities is a relatively easy,
inexpensive way to go about doing this.
So I talked a lot about kind of the future
but those of us in recruiting know
that even now the challenges with recruiting
are much greater than what most people realize.
You know, we do have high unemployment rates
but the labor markets are very fragmented
and you can see from this graph that
the difference between those with and without an education,
and that fragmentation is growing,
it's growing over time.
So that's the concern, and at the same time we have people
who because of the uncertainties have become...
are more unwilling to change jobs.
Again, putting a lot of pressure onto the recruiters.
So okay, we did this real high level view,
I wanna now take it to the agency view,
how does that impact us?
'Cause we're here to talk about social recruiting,
which, I want to just do a poll,
just to get a sense of where we are here in the room
and then also with our colleagues that are virtual.
So I'm gonna ask the poll questions, in the room,
I'm just gonna ask you to raise your hands in the poll
and those on the webinar
will actually do a poll through the webinar.
So the question is,
which is true regarding your agency's
use of social media for recruitment?
A, "Not currently using
social media for attracting talent."
We have like two or three.
"Social media is a small part of overall
talent acquisition strategy."
Two or three or four.
"Social media is a large part of overall
talent acquisition strategy."
The couple.
And then, "Social media is
our overall talent acquisition strategy."
Zero! Okay! Let me ask Anne what we have for the overall,
for those who are on the webinar.
Do we have the results yet?
- Sure, they're still coming in,
but it looks like right now
we have about 20 percent are not using it at all.
About 12 percent are saying
that it's a small part of what they do.
And about 6 percent are saying
it's a large part of what they do.
And then again none are saying that it is their
talent acquisition strategy.
- [Laughing] That's good. I'm so happy to hear that.
So, you know, it's pretty similar I think what you see
with both groups, but probably also with the private sector.
So, you know why, here we're talking about social...
Why is social media so important to recruiting?
Obviously, it's because we wanna be where the people are.
And you can see from the screen here,
you know, this is where the people are.
And how we're accessing, how people are accessing
the different platforms is also changing.
And you can see here that we are,
our society is moving more and more towards mobile.
We'll be talking about that
because we wanna stay on top of that trend as well.
All right, so given all the changes,
these demographic changes,
a few years ago Sodexo took a multi-pronged,
multi-generational approach to our recruitment strategy.
And social media is not a separate part of the strategy,
it's an added dimension to all the different aspects
that we're already doing, all the aspects on the screen,
I have to remember they can't see me.
So all the different aspects on the screen,
they help us to build relationships
and so that we're able to...
We build the relationship
so that we're not just identifying talent
but we're building relationships with that talent.
And even though we talk a lot about technology
and technology is truly transforming,
the way we recruit,
all the traditional means are still valid.
We're still getting on the phone and doing live networking,
because given the vast number of people that we're hiring,
the geography, the scope, the different experience levels,
the different disciplines, the different types of people,
we need to use a lot of different dimensions
in order to attract what we need to and hire
what we need to hire.
Okay, so here again you can see that the social media is a part,
it's an added dimension, it's not really separate.
This is what our recruitment looked like
about four years ago, five years ago,
in the way the candidates could connect with us.
You know, we had our career center,
we were doing back then some tactical advertising,
you know, job boards, we'd go to a career fair,
college, to do some hiring and that was how,
that was the options our candidates had.
This is the options they have today.
Literally dozens of ways that they can connect with us,
and each one of those is interrelated.
Now, it can look overwhelming,
and we talk just say three things about it.
1. It took five years for us to get there.
2. It really isn't as complex as it looks.
You know, I think the website, I mean, the spider web makes it
look more overwhelming than it is.
And the third piece is you can pick
and choose which aspects are right for you.
So this is what I call our back of the house.
And now our front of the house
is what the candidate sees and at the hub of it is our website.
And if you go to one of the pages on our career's website,
you'll see our Network With Us page
and here candidates can very easily connect with us
on the platform or the community
that they want to connect with us.
And we're able to pull candidates.
In many cases, they are into our talent community.
Right now our talent community is grown
to 260,000 that we're building relationships with.
So what we're gonna talk about now is
how you might go about building
a social media strategy framework.
The first thing that... Well, I should say
that the strategy framework, you know, is helpful to,
help you make those day to day decisions
and also can be used to educate
and enlist some of the supporters within your agency.
The first thing you wanna do is audit your brand.
You know, why do you wanna do that?
Because you wanna know what people are saying,
what potential candidates
and others are saying about your organization
before you jump in on a conversation.
We're gonna talk about setting goals, you know, why,
what are you trying to achieve, why are you doing this?
Who is your target audience?
We'll talk about defining the actions to meet the goals
and this is where a lot of organizations start.
You know, they, somebody says, "Oh, you gotta be on Facebook
to start recruiting," so you set up a profile,
and start posting jobs on Facebook
and, you know, put some news releases out there
and if this is where you are at, no problem,
it's good you've got some feel for it,
but still recommend that you go back to the very beginning
and audit your brand and identify what your goals are,
and then build all of that into what, you know,
what you learn into what you're doing to continue
building that strategy.
Then you wanna continuously measure
what you're doing so that can continuously refine,
you know, refine your strategy.
So, I've another poll question, and here I'm gonna ask,
what are your former, current, and potentially
future employees saying about your agency?
A. "I have no idea." This is online by the way.
I have no idea.
B. "I know when major issues bubble up."
Okay, about a couple.
"And I am aware of most of the online chatter about my agency."
Half a dozen.
"I am participating
in online conversations about my agency."
We have about another handful.
So again, you know, a good variety here
of how involved people are
in what's already being said online.
And what do have for those who are participating by webinar?
- Let's see, results are still coming in,
but a majority have no idea.
So we have about 20 percent or so that have no idea.
We've got about another 10 percent
who know when the major issues bubble up.
We've got another 10 percent
that are aware of most of the online chatter.
And we've only got about 6 percent, about 4 of the people
on our webinar today that are actively participating
in the online conversation.
- Okay, again, you know, kind of what you would expect
anywhere, you know, a lot of people,
when it becomes big news, we know,
but to do an actual audit is a good first step.
It's a really good first step for you when you're
developing your strategy.
'Cause your employees, your former employees,
your potential employees,
the public, are talking about your agency.
So, you know, why do you want to know,
you know, what they're saying,
because what they're saying will help you
frame up and design the strategy.
It will help you highlight the positives.
You may wanna incorporate that in and if there is,
you may wanna decide whether or not
to address some areas of concern,
but all of that, you know, is helpful to know.
There are some different ways that you can go about
monitoring your brand.
And, you know, couple real simple ways, one is Tweetdeck,
are people familiar with Tweetdeck?
A good half of the people.
So one is Tweetdeck, another is Google Alerts.
Very simple to monitor.
There's other some more complex,
tone measurements and sentiment measurements
that you can do as well.
But we're not gonna talk about the tools,
we're gonna talk about what you want to monitor
and, you know, obviously a good start would be your agency,
the name of your agency, and if there is any related entities
to the agency, you might want to monitor them.
Some of the key people in the agency.
I know in our organization,
one of the people we include is our CEO.
I know many of the people in my team, they include me.
They wanna see what I'm talking about online.
So, some key people, your competitors and by competitors
I mean your talent competitors.
Not necessarily, obviously for you,
your business competitors but you have talent competitors.
For example, we hire a lot of chefs, right?
Our talent competitors for chefs aren't necessarily people who,
companies who do what we do, but it's the restaurants,
you know, grade hotels that we're competing
for really good chefs.
So that's what we're monitoring,
when we're looking for chefs.
And then the industry, so whatever the talent is
that you are trying to recruit,
that they have an industry,
whether it's, you know, we're all HR people,
our industry is HR, you know, you would get
the buzz in HR by monitoring HR
and it goes for every type of position
that we're recruiting for.
You want to be monitoring what's being said.
So the next thing is, you know, once,
you know what's been said online,
you want to determine what your goals are,
you know, why are you doing this, who are,
you know, who is your target audience.
And your goals can be,
you know, anything from something really simple
with little interaction like some branding
goals, implement branding goals
or something with a lot of interaction like pipelining
or more interaction with relationship building
or even more with referrals.
So all of those goals need to be set in place at that point.
Not yet just determining what platforms that you want to use.
And here on the screen are four questions,
that I think are a good easy start to think about
when you're identifying your goals.
You know, go through these and try to figure out
what you want to accomplish.
So, you know, once you have set your goals
then you determine the actions you want to take
and this is, you know, again like I said earlier
is where lot of people actually start.
You know, their friend is on Facebook
so they wanna be on Facebook,
their Boss tweets so they're gonna tweet.
Sometimes the goal might be just to be on social media
for the sake of being on social media,
which is fine as such, you are trying to figure it out.
But if you're trying to recruit top talent, you can,
and you should have goals.
So, you know, so that would be,
once you've identified your goals,
you put those actions in place
and simply an example of a good action might be
if your goal is to drive traffic to your website,
your action might be to put a lot of links on your tweets
that bring candidates back to the website.
Okay, another area, an area I should say that we
I think do a really good job with,
and I'm particularly proud of,
and that is with candidate interaction
and engagement that our recruiters have.
If you go to Sodexo careers' fan page,
you will see lots and lots of interaction every day
with lots of different recruiters
talking to lots of different candidates about jobs,
specific jobs all over the country.
And I think this is really what sets us apart.
If it was Kerry Noone, Sodexo careers,
who was the person that was responding
and talking on Facebook, it wouldn't be the same
as having the actual recruiters doing this.
So part of the action planning
that you wanna take into account is
how you help the recruiters to embrace innovation,
to embrace that social engagement.
And, you know, we did a lot with training
and developing brand ambassadors,
we did a lot with contests, a lot of recognition,
a lot to build some excitement.
When Kerry talks, she'll give you some specific
examples of how we went about doing that.
Okay, I'm now gonna go very briefly, give you
just, you know, a half dozen simple little tips
to think about when you're recruiting
and using your social networking.
First is you wanna choose your friends wisely.
What that means is it's really not about
the number of followers, or the number of friends you have,
it's the relevancy of them.
If you follow social media marketers and realtors,
they're truly of no value to you,
unless you try and hire social media marketers and realtors.
If you want to post a job,
you have, you know, a million people,
random people see a job, then put it on a job board.
If you want to have 200 very specific types
see that job, then you wanna build a community
with that very specific type.
And there are some real simple ways
that you can build a community.
First is you go out and find them
and find them through key words, you find them
through, you know, hashtags, groups that they belong to.
The other way is to have them find you, that's the same thing.
The keywords you use in your profile,
the keywords you use in your updates, it's the groups
you belong to, the hashtags that you belong to,
makes it easy for others to find you.
Actually, I should even say,
I wanna just give you a real quick example.
If I do an update about nutrition trends,
I will invariably get a half a dozen people
who are dieticians or into wellness following me.
If I do an update on sustainability,
I will get the green folks following me.
And both of those are great because we hire dieticians
and we hire people for sustainability
in terms of for that type of a role.
So that's the kind of thing that you wanna be doing
to build that kind of a community.
You also wanna dress for success.
And that is to be aware of your online presence,
you know, the photo that you use,
you know, how you describe yourself,
the language that you use,
all is reflective of not only your personal brand
but also reflects on the agency.
So you wanna be thoughtful of that.
If you're recruiting, you wanna have recruiter
right in your profile, makes it easy for people to find you.
If you're recruiting for a specific type like
you know, recruiter for IT,
you know, that's also a good descriptor
to put into the type, people can find it.
We often recommend that people have a little bit of personal
in their profile and if you go to my profile you'll see,
you know, it has the name of my company
and it has my interests, which include recruitment,
employment branding, diversity, and the Red Sox.
So there's a little bit of personal,
you know, you're not a robot,
there's little personal that's in there
and it actually helps with conversation.
You know, whether you like the Red Sox or not,
I get conversation out of it.
The other piece is, you know,
when you're ready to go on to a platform,
a new platform, you know, take some time to observe.
You know, there's observe and listen and learn
about the conversations that are going on,
there is an etiquette you wanna get a feel for,
each community has its own kind, its own needs,
you wanna know what the needs of the community are.
So, for example, when we thought about Twitter
back a few years ago, Kerry set up a profile
and she observed, you know, checked it out,
you know, looked around, observed,
listened, learned got a feel, and then after couple of months,
came back and we identified an approach
we wanted to take with that.
But it's good to take, there is no problem
in taking the time to figure out what's really going on
and get a feel for the culture.
And then the last piece is, "Silence is not golden."
And what all that means is, you know,
take every opportunity to make it easy for people to find you.
Whether it's in your email signatures,
your websites, your brand ambassadors,
any possible way that you can do it.
So, with that I'm gonna turn it over to Kerry,
and she's gonna share with you some of what we do
with our brand ambassadors.
- And so as Arie mentioned when she first started
her presentation, it's not just Arie Ball,
it's not just Kerry Noone using these tools,
it's our entire department.
So one of the ways if you can't get your own people to engage,
it's really hard to engage the communities
that you want to reach.
So one of the ways that we within talent acquisition,
we take some time each week, we have team calls.
We are a virtual department, so we have team calls
and in bits and pieces, we try and communicate
how to use the tools effectively,
how to use the tools creatively.
And you can see over here,
on this slide, these are some running tweets.
A lot of the people that you see tweeting are team members.
We give them the tools to brand themselves as Sodexo employees.
So you can see that we have profile pictures
with the logo on the bottom, so the part of that,
part of the reasoning behind that is
so when someone comes to a TweetDeck or comes to Twitter,
they can recognize that we are a team,
and we are all from Sodexo's Talent Acquisition team.
So, we, to inspire our team to use the tools,
we created a couple of different programs
we had initially a Tweet of the Week, so we would look
and see how are the recruiters,
how our team members were actually using the tools
and recognize the people who were using the tools
and then identify some who are using it maybe a little bit
more creatively, and able to introduce
those new creative ways of using the tools
to the rest of the team.
That program was Tweet of the Week.
We recently in the last four months or so
created a brand ambassador of the month
and along with that was a series of training
of how to use the different platforms
that we currently are using to reach candidates,
to build their network,
to become branded as a Sodexo employee,
or member of Sodexo's Talent Acquisition team.
Outside our own division, outside of Talent Acquisition,
we communicate what we are doing within our own team
across the company
and so taglines is an internal communications.
So we share some of these innovative ideas
with the rest of the company hoping that
they can also maintain some of the tools
to become more active on these platforms.
It's not just about the program itself,
it's not just about
the brand ambassador of the month,
it's also about recognizing the people
who are actually updating their profile picture,
using the branded tools that we provide,
making sure that they have the keywords
in their descriptions across all of the platforms,
so not only are we able to communicate what we're doing
within the division but then also candidates are allowed
or given the opportunity to find us.
And that's a big part of our approach,
is we want the candidates to find us,
we want them to use the tools to communicate with us
and avoid that so called "black hole"
of the hiring process.
We know that images and video, we're a very visual society,
so images and videos,
they have the numbers of engagement
are a little bit higher, so we take full advantage
of actual photos from our client locations,
actual photos from our team members.
I think also a good point now to make is
we have 50 plus recruiters,
we have maybe about 90 people within the department.
We're all using the tools.
Not all of us are on twitter, not all of us are on Facebook,
we're all using the tools in some way.
And part of that training program
is to raise the comfort levels,
so the person who would be using the tools feels comfortable,
'cause if they're not comfortable
then they're not going to use the tools.
And now, I'm just gonna go through
some of the platforms that we chose.
So in 2007, late in 2007,
we started the process of getting involved
with social media.
A lot of it was seeing what other companies were doing.
Not a lot of recruiters were out there using the tools.
I just read an article, I think it was from "ERE,"
that recruiters are actually
the most social on these platforms.
So good to know that we went
in the right direction with our team.
We certainly have platforms that provide
a little less engagement, more visual,
so we have Facebook and... oh, I'm sorry,
YouTube and Flicker, and these again give a visual
of what it's actually like to work at Sodexo.
Not just telling people how great it is to work for Sodexo,
but actually showing people
how great it is to work at Sodexo.
YouTube, we also use that as a platform to communicate
some of the career growth programs.
So that's something that we want the candidates to know.
We want them to know that once they become
a member of the Sodexo team,
that there's plenty of opportunity for growth.
So we highlight some of those programs on these tools
and show them rather than just tell them about them.
There are other platforms that do encourage more engagement.
Certainly Linkedin, we have a Linkedin careers group,
and then Facebook, and as Arie mentioned,
every single day, we have candidates
who are reaching out to us, who are asking us the questions
about their status.
And the ultimate goal is not for me
as SodexoCareers to answer their questions,
it would be our recruiters, those specific recruiters
to answer those questions.
So if a candidate's going to ask about job number 123,
the recruiter for job number 123
will answer their question.
Also part of the engagement opportunities is to maintain
the authenticity and to be honest and to be responsive.
Being responsive, I think,
is probably the number one key to social media.
We want...if a candidate's gonna reach out,
we want them to get an answer to their question.
This is a good example of how we provide
in our Brand Ambassador of the Month program,
of how we provide them the tools to brand themselves
as Sodexo Talent Acquisition
members or just Sodexo brand ambassador in general.
So we provide the background so they can easily upload
a branded background.
We have branded photos as I mentioned,
we use a QR code that will lead people
to our mobile career site.
We offer some guidance on naming,
Twitter handle naming, as well as good examples of bios,
so people, again, people can find us on these tools.
And we encourage people to use the tools,
and really, once we give that encouragement,
it's really up to the candidate at that point to take advantage
of the access that they have and they really do have access
to all of our recruiters.
So, just some of the components, and this you will see
of all of our team members
using these different components to
twitter for example, using the bio
and actually identifying myself
as a Talent Acquisition team member.
Seeing who people are following SodexoCareers
so we can try and build a targeted network.
Recent tweets, past tweets, hashtags,
again we are using CoolGov today,
and hopefully, people are tweeting.
I have seen some tweets which is very good to see.
So building the profiles, branding the background,
gaining relevant followers, really targeting the networks
that we're building.
Providing opportunities and creative ways
of using these tools.
If we're going to attend an event,
we have kind of a semi team that will promote their booth,
their activity at an event.
So come see us at booth number 22 at NSMH
or, you know, some upcoming event that we're attending.
And again, a lot of what we do,
it's not just talent acquisition in general,
it's really truly building quality networks.
It's not about quantity, Arie mentioned that earlier,
it's not about quantity, it's about quality.
So our clinical recruiters are following and connecting
with registered dieticians so they can potentially
find an opportunity at Sodexo and our recruiters can help them
find the right opportunity at Sodexo.
And this is just a great image of how big that network can be.
So it's not just about our clinical dieticians' network,
it's really about the team as a whole.
Many of you probably have seen, this is a fun slide.
When Twitter first became very popular,
some of the terms, so we like to bring this up
on some of our team calls and identify people as,
you know, occasional users, so these are people
that are only occasionally using Twitter,
and I think there were some other people
identified in our survey today.
Drive by tweeting people who quickly tweet in between tasks.
Certainly there are a lot of people who use Twitter for that
purpose as well.
This is actually an old screen shot
of our careers blog, but we have a careers blog
that we use as an opportunity to communicate real stories
by our real employees.
So it's not... It's really our employees
who are communicating our employer brand.
It's not us saying over and over and over
what Sodexo is all about,
it's our employees who are sharing their stories
and that goes back to being authentic in these spaces.
One of the points that we did just add to our careers blog is
kind of a repository of job search tips.
So if someone is interested in becoming a Sodexo team member,
we give them interviewing tips,
kind of a behind the scenes process,
hiring process information, so they're more aware
of how to better be prepared for submitting their resume,
once they get the resume in there,
they're asked to interview and really using that information
to improve their opportunity with Sodexo.
Also, part of our strategy is to repurpose some of the content,
so you'll see content on our website
that we will then repurpose on Facebook or on Twitter
and then we take all of that information
that we communicate monthly and then repurpose it again
and provide updates.
We send a monthly blog update,
so if you missed our blog post for that month,
you'll get an update kind of recapping it,
which is a nice... people who are limited in time
and still aren't sure how to use the tools,
it gives them just kind of a nice reminder
of what we've been talking about.
We also send a Career Connections newsletter
and that is bi-monthly and that gives us yet another opportunity
to share the culture at Sodexo.
It's really all about touching the candidate
in very targeted ways,
so we send from a general perspective,
we send a holiday e-card that gives us an opportunity
to touch them and give them another link to our job search
so if someone receives that holiday e-card,
hopefully they'll be inspired to go check out and see
what kind of opportunities we have
available currently at Sodexo.
Our recruiters also have tools to communicate
hard to fill or popular job postings, so they can send
to their network in that geography, in that location,
the job that they might be interested in or qualified for.
Certainly, with mobile, we started in 2007
with a mobile career site, so we took our online website
and converted it for mobile because we know that
people are using their mobile devices
to read more and learn more about company culture.
So providing the mobile friendly content.
And then from there, we knew that
that was not sufficient.
We needed to go even further than that,
so we're developing, we're in the process
of developing a mobile app and a lot of the mobile app,
the activity that we are hoping will be an outcome, will be
to connect with us on some of these social media sites,
to actually engage with our recruiters,
take part in the discussion,
learn more about the company culture,
and then ultimately, we also want them to be able to have
a unique experience.
So we have an internal portal compared to an external portal.
We have the ability to search, obviously search open positions
and then our goal is to be able to have them apply
through the mobile app, which is a new specification
that some of the mobile apps, the career site apps
that are out there don't allow for the application process,
so we're hoping to be able to introduce that as well.
That should be out this fall, hopefully.
Some of the stats about mobile, so by the end of this year,
over 100 million users will access the web
and that number is actually
I think even closer to 2 million now, 200 million.
And within three years, by 2013 in fact, we fully expect that
more people are going to be using their smart phones
to connect and search for careers
as opposed to their laptops.
That's an example of all of our communications
are mobile friendly, so that was our Career Connections
e-newsletter that people can actually access and read
through their mobile device.
Here is another aspect to our mobile app
that will be a cross platform, so iPhone, android, iPad,
not just one of the phones
or one of the smart phone technologies.
The big goal is to have candidates be able to apply
for a job through that mobile app.
So really, I know the million dollar question
has always been, what's the ROI?
So are we able to measure the results?
Do we know how our mobile or social media strategy
is affecting our overall recruiting strategy?
And obviously the answer is yes to that.
So we're able to track the number of people
who come in through these different sites,
we can see the growth in our database,
we know that we saw a savings in the traditional,
some of the traditional marketing,
employer branding marketing tools,
certainly increase in career site traffic,
and then just an increase in candidates overall.
This is a great screen shot. You can see January 2008.
There's a nice big jump in numbers,
and it really... we started in November of 2007,
really fully launched publicly in January of 2008,
so you can see we saw a big jump in those numbers
across all of our different sites.
This slide, and I think, Arie, you wanted to
maybe speak a little more to this.
- Yeah, I think this slide here, you know,
it shows this great increase in traffic but at the same time,
we saw this decrease in spend
and these bars across the top
show the different job boards that we used to use.
So back before we started going down this path,
we were using three major job boards
and over time we dropped, we reduced that spend
and now we are just using one.
So we reduced our spend on job boards
by about $300,000 a year, and our traffic increased,
you know, without getting too much into the detail
at the same time, actually the number of jobs
we were posting went down.
So it was really a phenomenal number
when you look at it that way, between the decreased spend,
at the same time having increased traffic.
- Another way that we wanted to track the social media
and how it's affecting our hires,
we did a survey with our new hires.
Actually we did new positions, so it was not only
new hires externally but it was also new hires internally.
Or they wouldn't be new hires internally
but the hires that were internal,
they went into a new position
that was open within the company.
And the data that you see here, really
very similar versus internal and external candidates.
We saw that 47% were actually using these tools
that we provided,
25 percent of the new hires actually use the careers blog
that we use kind of as a hub for all of this content
and all of these platforms that we're trying to connect
with our candidates.
And then of that 15 percent really felt like that blog
was doing what we wanted it to do
and really act as that initial informational source for them.
We also, just breaking down some of the platforms that we use,
Career Connections again is our e-communications,
it's our e-newsletter that we send out bi-monthly.
We saw that 6 percent were using, they were using that tool
to learn more about our culture,
nine percent connecting and really finding all about
career opportunities, 12 percent with Facebook
and the engagement that's really the ultimate goal
on Facebook and Linkedin, and then using
again, 25 percent using the careers blog which
again acts as a hub for all of these different tools.
- We'll get into...
This is a really cool slide.
Just wanted to share it with you
'cause it's really good, it's a good recap of everything
we talked about.
And, you know, we talk a lot about technology
and we don't know where technology's
gonna take us down the road.
We're going to continue to explore technologies
that will help us to build relationships, but in the end,
in recruitment, in HR,
it truly is all about the people in building relationships
and remembering that technology just helps to facilitate that.
So, final slide, we want to thank you very much
for allowing us to present.
We enjoyed it immensely.
From everything we've seen, from our day that we've spent,
we've met so many people,
you're clearly on the road to achieving your goal,
to making...the goal of making, working for the government cool.
And I do have a suggestion for you though,
that I would like to share, and it actually comes from
Tom Peters who is a motivational speaker,
that many of you I know have heard of.
And he says that words matter and in titles
we should include what we aspire to do.
So with that, I would like to suggest that you consider taking
the HR or Personnel out of your title
in favor of...
- [Laughter]
- So, all right. So with that, our presentation is done.
And we're open for Q and A.
- Okay. Yes. - Yes.
- Actually I wrote down a bunch...
- Oh, good. Great.
- I was just wondering,
with your Talent Acquisition, branding,
social media efforts, are you coordinating...is your office,
is your department coordinating your efforts
to the larger Sodexo communications,
branding, marketing efforts?
Is there some coordination there?
- Sure, yeah. Yeah, there's definitely some coordination
in the types of messages, there is
a digital round table that meets regularly that Kerry's a part of
that with the different entities from around the organization.
So a lot of best practice sharing, and, you know,
and looking at new ways of doing things.
Look at the numbers. Yeah.
- Is that a challenge to get that going?
You know, to come from the recruiting side and say,
"Hi, everyone. Can I get in your business?
We want to be a part of what you're doing."
Is there any resistance?
- I think they were very supportive.
We started in 2007.
We were able to establish the communities,
and really see the engagement improve and increase.
So when corporate PR
started to use the tools, they really
try to incorporate their goals into
what was already existing,
rather than trying to reinvent the wheel.
And so that in itself, that coordination
and that willingness to kind of present as one entity,
has been invaluable.
And as we move forward, just to continually building
on the different networks,
sharing the engagement opportunities
is just going to increase for all of us across the board.
- Yeah, in the very, very beginning,
we started off very slowly, we didn't just jump into it,
but we started slowly so that there was comfort,
there was comfort, you know,
'cause it was really different back then.
People were, you know, in 2007, it was a big deal
to be doing this type of a thing.
So, we had... when we launched the blog,
it was closed at first.
So just key people could see what we were doing
and what the content looked like,
they became comfortable.
It was closed for maybe a couple months,
and then it became open.
So, you know, they were comfortable
that we had contingencies, and that we had done our homework.
So that was a piece of it.
- Yes.
- [Inaudible]
- And what we're doing with this?
Yeah, we have within our organization
a Disabilities Network Group
that helps with a lot of the education internally
within the organization which is obviously a big piece of it.
We have...and then there's different organizations
that we partner with.
Different websites that we're, you know,
posting our jobs to and, you know,
we've done, you know, the things to make
our recruitment accessible
for a variety of different disabilities. So...
- That's to try to incorporate those accessibilities
when we can, like on Facebook or on our blog,
you can actually listen to it as opposed to read it
incorporating those tools also into the website,
not only just in the careers section of the website but,
you know, from a corporate US Headquarters
perspective as well.
- Yeah, that's a good point.
Even our newsletters, you know, are set up that way.
- Right. Thank you.
- [Inaudible]
- You know...
- Yeah we encourage.
That's part of the brand ambassador training.
It's not just within our division.
It's not just with the recruiters.
We try and give them the tools to then
help their hiring managers
use the tools to connect with candidates.
- Yeah, I mean, we... Kerry had mentioned earlier
we're working internally to create brand ambassadors
and to provide that kind of training and education for them.
And actually it's a good point. You would ask how we coordinate.
Our Sodexo Global has actually just put together
a social media working group
and the representatives on that global task force include
me from recruitment and our COO
and those are the two from the US,
and there's different representatives.
So it's not just a communications function.
- Just kind of follow-on, looking at the recruiters,
are the recruiters out there managing kind of their own
social media desk related to their clients
and jobs are recruiting for, or is there...
I mean do they get,
is there is some centralized place where,
you know, somebody is managing
TweetDeck and they're saying, "Okay, this goes here,
this goes there," And so they're managing around?
- There is a little bit of that.
So from a Twitter perspective, certainly they're managing
their own network.
From a Linkedin perspective, they're managing
their own network, similar to Facebook.
On our Facebook wall, all of our recruiters
are visiting the site.
We do have... I'm a constant eye on it.
We have another recruiter who has a constant eye on it.
So if there is a question,
responsiveness is a big part of the strategy.
So if there is a question and perhaps that recruiter
hasn't been on to that Facebook page to read it,
we will behind the scenes kind of whet some of the information
and so say, "Hey, you know,
Joe, there is a question specifically about your job."
And we also want to make sure that we communicate.
If the candidate is going to reach out to us on Facebook,
we want to respond on Facebook.
We may have to take their conversation offline
just to move it forward.
So there is a little bit of behind the scenes
kind of monitoring.
But for the most part our recruiters really do manage
and grow and are constantly looking for ways
to expand their network.
- Yeah, and the way our organizers
or recruiters recruit primarily by discipline.
So, you know, a group of recruiters
just recruits for facilities managers or IT or,
you know, culinary.
So based on who they're recruiting for
they're able to develop their own network,
their own community, the community
of those specific types, so because of the way
we're organized that makes it easier for them to do that.
- Sodexo seems to be, I think in the last five years
I know you guys have been ranked
in the top ten for diversity.
Companies... I was wondering how your use of
social media as far as acquiring talent,
how's that impacted diversity?
Like, are you finding there are some communities
that are more online than other communities?
- [Inaudible]
- There are so many ways that it helps
our diversity recruitment with different social media sites.
We'll start with our blog.
We recognize each of the Federal Heritage Months
and we have posts for, you know, from senior leaders
or employees within our divisions
who will blog about the topics.
So if it's, you know, Women's History Month or
you know, Black History Month or whatever
the Federal Heritage Month that's gonna be part of.
So you'll hear stories from our people related to that.
So that's a piece of it. Then our recruiters join groups.
So whether, you know, they join groups
in Facebook or Linkedin or whatever that are,
you know, associated with different, you know,
they are culturally diverse, whether it's, you know,
the Black Engineers or the Women's Foodservice Forum
that type of thing, so they're joining groups.
We also go to events and a big piece of it is
connecting and engaging before, during, and after.
So we're gonna be going to
the National Society of Minorities in Hospitality,
that's a big event for us.
You know, we're connecting, you'll see us on Twitter,
you'll see us on Facebook,
we have a special Facebook page for it.
So we're connecting, building the relationships there.
Then during the event, we are doing
all sorts of engagement that's social media related.
And then we connect and continue to build
those relationships afterward.
The people that we meet come in to our community.
So, you know how hard it is when you go to all these events
to manage that pipeline,
especially if you don't have a job for them at that moment.
So they come into our pipeline or into our community
and we build those relationships with some of, you know,
by keeping in contact with them with some of the tools
that Kerry showed you.
So, you know, that's another aspect of how we manage it.
Then there is some really cool things
like just the demographics of a different talent community,
the different platforms, Asian, women Asian, African American
have higher, stronger demographic presence,
have a stronger presence, than the general population
on Twitter and Facebook.
And Linkedin, stronger demographic presence
on for Asian heritage versus the general population.
So, you know, they're really great places to be
for many, many reasons.
And that's just like the tip of the iceberg.
There's a lot you can do.
Then once they become employees, we have employee network groups.
And all of our network groups through the Office of Diversity
have groups with under umbrella of the Office of Diversity.
So there is, once they're members of the Sodexo team
then they can engage within these different network groups
that you can join, you can join one,
you can join all of them.
It's not regarded a crime to join any.
And then really taking into consideration of going
to where people are spending their time,
for example on Facebook.
So the communities, since we are so
geographically diversed are able to then meet
and have conversations through that Facebook group.
And that goes back to, I think, really Sodexo
being innovative and supportive of the tools.
Certainly there are some challenges and restrictions
but for the most part it is the direction that we're moving
in an innovative new technology,
finding new ways of connecting with talent,
finding new talent, and then really engaging employees
once they're a member of our team.
- Yeah.
- I was wondering what the social media has done
to the workload and balance for your recruiters if it's...
'cause it seems like you can get into...
with people wanting to communicate with you.
- Yeah, I mean, what's interesting is
we don't require the recruiters to use any of the platforms,
everyone is trained and as you heard earlier,
not everybody is under the platform.
People migrate to where they find value.
So if they're working on a platform, if they're
you know, using Linkedin a lot and they don't ever
hire through Linkedin, they're not gonna be there very long.
And it's just the way it works with recruiters.
You can't, you know, it needs to be,
they need to figure out what's right for them.
So they're finding value in it or they wouldn't be doing it.
- Right. - Yeah.
- I was just surprised to hear that
one or two people can monitor, you know,
monitor a site and be able to be responsive
with the number of employees and probably the amount of
recruitments you do every year.
I'm just surprised that maybe one or two people
can handle that workload.
- Well, there are aspects to like Facebook,
so we get alerts, so if someone is going to post
on the wall, we know.
So we don't have to physically go to the Facebook page.
Mobile, huge, you know, I'm sitting at soccer practice,
I can go online and see
what kind of conversations are taking place
and then respond, if I don't have any answer
I'll get them to the right person who can respond.
And then also going back to kind of recruiting out-of-the-box
and having that box, kind of like the Tiffany of boxes.
So within our own department we have Anne Scott,
who's on the call.
She's training, her focus is training.
My role, which is the marketing employer brand.
We have another team member,
Trish Freshwater, her role is communication.
So a lot of content and awards,
so it's really giving, providing an opportunity
for the recruiters to continue to do their job
the way they know and then bringing new ideas,
and again raising their comfort levels.
So we're not just throwing them in there and saying
"You have to use these tools."
We are saying "These are good tools.
"This is the reason why they are good tools.
"Here's how you can, you know, figure out how it works
for your own recruiting strategy."
- I didn't know if we had...
Anne, are there questions coming in over the webinar?
- I have some.
- Oh, cool!
- So one is, "What do you guys see in terms of long term
trends with today's technology?"
And "Is there are anything kind of afoot
"that would make it less difficult for the government
to stay cutting edge for future trends?"
- You know, I think, obviously we talked about mobile,
that's a big trend.
You know, we're gonna be seeing more and more on mobile.
I think another trend that we'll be seeing
is with the geolocation capabilities.
And at least in our business, I see that being really valuable
for hourly recruitment.
That you can pinpoint where you have job openings,
you know, very specific, and you can pinpoint
your communications based on that.
So I think those are two things that we'll be seeing
coming down the pike, fairly rapidly with new technology.
- We can look at our database that we have built from,
I don't know, 50,000 to 290,000
as a result of some of the social media
and the driving traffic.
So we can look at that database,
look at the jobs that we have available
and say, "Okay, we have in Newport, Connecticut..."
I don't know, is it Newport, Connecticut?
- Rhode Island. Close.
- Okay, Rhode Island.
And we know that that's the,
we are hiring, in that particular location
we have the most executive chef positions.
So we can then take that information
in our database, find the people
who have identified themselves as culinary,
interested in culinary, or executive chefs,
and the background that would fit those job specifications
in that particular location and say, "You know,
20 miles from where you live there are three opportunities."
Here is a link directly to that link
in our career center for them to apply.
So we really make that process easy,
so they don't have to dig deep into our, you know,
500 jobs that we have available or 400 jobs
that we have available at any given time.
- Yeah, I think too that technology...
There's been, there's so many different types
of technology that we use in recruitment,
and all of it is separate.
There's going to be more and more technologies
that'll bring it all together and put it, make it more social.
So that, you know, the people will be able to socialize
as they're applying for jobs.
I think we'll be seeing that too shortly.
Anything else, Anne?
- Yeah, I've got a couple more.
One was with the slide that showed
the increase in the number of candidates.
"Was there any looking at whether the increase
"in the number of candidates was desirable quality candidates
or just more candidates in general?"
- Yeah, we believe, that's a hard one to measure
when it's candidates, but we believe that
we were getting more specific targeted candidates.
They weren't as random.
There are some of the job types that we were having
like up to 50 percent,
were not even in the right discipline before,
so that those numbers went down
because again these were pretty targeted based on communities.
So there were more candidates
in the right discipline for sure.
- And more people were able to use the tools to learn
about our culture and what we actually did
from an employer brand and a brand,
overall brand perspective.
It really gave us an opportunity to communicate
who we are and what we do.
We may be, what we might be known for and,
you know, we're a global company.
So we have global IT needs,
we have global marketing needs and, you know,
of course in all of our disciplines as well.
- Yeah, and I think, you know,
with the social piece and having that insider view,
I think some people will self select out
if they are not right for the company.
Another measurement that we do,
do and have done is the quality of hire measure.
And we've been doing that since about the same time
and every time we do that measure,
it's twice a year, it has gone up.
Now social media is not the only thing that plays into.
There's multiple things that have been done
that planted that number,
but that number has continued to increase.
- And then, the last one that came in was
about diversity and social media recruiting,
which I think you addressed a little bit already,
but they also wanted to know,
"What about the digital divide?"
- The digital divide in terms of...
- I think in terms of access to these sites
and access to the internet, in general, for Canada.
- Well, I think, what you'll find is, you know,
as we move more toward mobile, not everybody
has access to the internet through the laptop,
but most, everybody has access via a mobile.
And I think that's one of the reasons
that that's going to become more and more popular,
and why it's moving in that direction.
- We can also look at the days and times of days
where there is more activity on the different sites.
Now that more people are using the social media sites,
they are not just using it to connect with their friends
from high school, they are connecting with colleagues.
So on the weekends they may be on Facebook,
but they also are identifying themselves with groups
that they have, like our chefs or registered dieticians.
They're identifying themselves by group,
because you can really find your niche preferences
on these different sites.
So they may be on there connecting
with their best friend from high school,
but they're also...
It gives us an opportunity to reach them
on Saturday afternoons or, you know, Thursday afternoons,
Friday afternoons, when people are kind of
winding down their day.
- Yeah, if that question was referring
to the digital divide in terms of diversity,
I'm not sure if that's what they were referring to,
but the data, if that is what they were referring to,
that the data is that a lot of...
There's a lot more of our minority population
that has, that utilizes mobile,
than our Caucasian population.
So, you know, given that information,
I think it'll kind of minimize, you know,
as things become more accessible to mobile,
that you won't have the differences
in accessibility to that kind of content.
- Do you have any, I don't know,
if it's preference where, you know,
sense of whether, you know,
as people I think definitely younger people are using
the internet and that's like their first to most, you know,
probably number one means of looking at research,
but that doesn't mean that old timers like ourselves,
can't also use that...
- Work hard and figure it out?
- But, I guess the question is
when looking at social media platforms,
do you find that recruits or potential recruits tend to be
more interested if they're talking
or if they're interacting with someone
who's actually in the job,
or who has gone through that job process,
versus someone who's just, you know,
in charge of recruiter, you know,
you got to go through USA jobs, can't really do anything?
I mean, just in terms of trying to get
people engaged in that way.
- Do you want to take that?
- From a generational standpoint,
we initially thought we would be able to connect more
with the younger generation.
But it didn't take us long to realize that
there are all generations,
and in fact the people that we were connecting with
were not necessarily the younger generation.
Part of the process internally is also we have,
one of our network groups is an intergenerational network group,
and so a large strategy for that group itself
is to educate, you know,
we have a lot of baby boomers within Sodexo.
To educate them and to help raise their comfort level,
so they can communicate with
professionals and on a personal level and...
Did that answer your question?
- No, I guess, the question that I was asking was,
do you see a difference between people
who are using the social media platform in different ways,
it might not be through your particular,
but maybe through a tangential website
or a tangential Facebook page.
I mean, do you think that people are more likely
to want to interact with someone who you have hired
and have gone through that process,
versus a recruiter who can say, you know,
I've talked to five different people today,
and this is the same thing that I'm telling you.
- That's one of the goals too for our social network.
So if we have a comment or a question on the sites,
we want the company as a whole to kind of come back
and give those examples and share their experience.
We had a discussion going on Linkedin,
that was actually started by a former employee that...
The first couple days, we had three comments
and were up to about 70 comments.
And it's employees, not just our team members,
a couple are our team members, but really employees in general,
who are providing their sentiment about Sodexo.
- Yeah, I think that candidates
would absolutely love to talk to hiring managers online.
I mean, they're thrilled right now
to be able to talk to a recruiter.
Because in many of our organizations,
it's you apply for a job online
and know we call it the black hole.
Now there's a way that they can connect
and to be able to connect with the recruiters
is really awesome for most of 'em.
If we could get to, you know,
that next step where we had hiring managers,
or we had operators regularly communicating,
I think, you know, it would just be amazing
and that would certainly be their choice.
We mentioned earlier that we've got the brand ambassador program
that we started initially with the recruiters.
And that's, you know, really where the focus has been
in encouraging that type of interaction and innovation.
We've now started working with some of our operators,
because that would be the holy grail, right,
to have them online.
- Do you have a question?
- [Inaudible]
- Yeah, we have actually done quite a bit
at the high school level to get people interested
in our industry and in our organization.
We don't have that brand recognition
that a consumer facing company has.
It's also an industry that a lot of people
don't think about going into.
You know, one of the jobs that we fill,
that we fill a lot of is in housekeeping
managers in hospitals.
You know, people don't go to college for that typically.
So we, you know, work at the high school level,
we're involved in an organization called ProStart
and that's a program, a high school program,
two-year program, it's got about 80,000 students in it.
We're very involved with their...
With culinary competitions, and involving their local chapters.
We're thrilled, in a recent book,
a text book, that goes out to these 80,000 students,
that we're in it multiple times, so, you know,
it's great branding for us.
We do other things with
National Society of Minorities in Hospitality.
We get involved with them.
We get involved with the
Multicultural Food and Hospitality Association,
I'm on that board.
And go out to the colleges and the high schools
with panels and industry,
with people from different companies and sectors
within the hospitality industry.
And talk about the kind of careers
that they can have in our industry.
We do, again that's to brand us and also our industry.
And then as far as social media,
we have, there's a blog called the Student Branding Blog,
that's very popular, it's put up by Dan Schawbel,
who's a personal branding expert,
if you've read any of his stuff.
And his blog, I think,
gets something like 70,000 hits a month.
And it's targeting high school and college students,
where we have a guest post that we put out every other month.
So again that's really... - Every other week.
- Every other week, sorry.
You know, so that's really great branding for our company.
So we're doing quite a bit with that.
We have an internship as well.
And those who graduated out of,
we select 20 interns each year who graduate.
They become brand ambassadors
and we train our brand ambassadors on social media.
So they're back on their college campuses,
and, you know, using Twitter and, you know,
doing some different things to help promote us on their campus.
- And that's a really good point.
So we don't try and create a new community on these sites
for ProStart or for NSMH or for some other college.
We go where the communities are already built.
So if we are working with Purdue University, for example,
we'll go and find the groups that already have
established communities and then insert ourselves
into those conversations.
So provide context and content
that will be helpful for that community.
We're not asking them to come over
and join our community.
We just want them to know that we have value for them,
so we go where they are.
- You know, one of the things we also do is we spend a lot...
Our recruiters will go out into, go to these organizations,
the local organizations and teach them
how to use social media to find a job or prepare for a job.
And believe it or not, even though these students
are young and they understand the technology,
they don't know how to use it, to brand themselves,
to find a job, to get involved with conversations
within their industry in these communities.
So we go out and teach them how to do that.
And again our expectation is
it'll come back to us in the end.
- On the whole teaching theme,
maybe this might be a question for Anne.
But how do you decide, you know,
what your recruiters need to know?
How are you getting that information out to them?
And what type of, you know,
major buckets are you actually instructing them
as far as social media grouping?
- You know what, either one of us could answer
that question, but I don't want Anne to feel left out.
[Laughter]
- Neither did I. - So, Anne.
- Oh, my goodness!
Well, as we've been talking about today,
the first step is really that Kerry
and members of Kerry's team
and Arie go and evaluate the technology
to see if we're actually going to train
our recruiters on it or not.
When we have evaluated it and really said
this is something we want to invest in,
then typically Kerry and I work together
to put something together
as far as walking recruiters through the tool.
But not only the technical clique here do this,
but the reason why.
Just like we've been talking about today, you know,
what are our goals in using that tool?
Why are we out there using it?
And then we do, I have to say, little mini contests
to highlight what's good about what people are doing.
And so we started out only, first used Twitter,
we started out with tweet of the week
and we highlighted people who were doing really great tweets
that linked people back in a really involved way back
to our blog, or back to our website,
or back to a particular job.
And now we've kind of expanded to all of the social media tools
and we have a brand ambassador of the month.
And so once a month we get everybody together and highlight
people who are active
on the different social media tools that we have.
And really give them the opportunity to shine
for the work that they're doing behind the scenes.
- There you go. All right.
Any more questions coming in, Anne?
Anne? - Hold on a second.
- Okay.
- Someone was asking, our friend Barry.
Barry wants to know if there is an article or some place
that he can look up the demographic differences
of the different social media tools?
- Yes, I can get it to him.
I don't have it off the top of my head.
- Okay, I've got his email address.
- Okay, we'll get it to him.
- Okay. - Okay.
- Other than that, that looks like it.
- All right, thank you. - Thank you.
- Thank you so much for the opportunity.
- Oh! Oh! Stop! Stop!
We do have a survey that we would like you to fill out and,
Anne, I think there's a survey coming?
- Yes, online participants will get it by email.
- Okay. Super.
So fill out your survey and thank you very, very much.
If there's anything additional that you want,
please put it into the survey.
Thank you.
[Applause]
- Thank you, thank you.
Thank you, Arie. Thank you, Kerry.
It was a great presentation.
Thank you for your participation here at OPM.
Thank you for your participation online,
to everybody who tuned in and went through the surveys
and asked a bunch of questions.
And in case you haven't noticed, I'm not Carmen, I am Tom Formby
and I got a couple things
just to give you before we leave.
If you need more info on these topics,
social media, recruitment, please go to usajobsrecruit.gov.
We have lots of information in there and in fact
we just posted four brand new learning modules.
There're two-minute videos, social media, employer branding,
internal branding, crafting outreach messaging,
it's all out there, it's all free, it's all for you.
And also don't forget,
Carley who is our person behind the scenes here,
told me don't forget to fill out your survey,
and get it to us, so that we can keep bringing you
better and better programs.
And once again, thank you to our speakers.
It was just wonderful to have you here,
we really appreciate it.
- Thank you. - Thank you.
- Thank you. Have a good day.
[Applause]