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You are probably already using social media to find and engage with talent. But do you get cold sweats when discussing results with management? You’re not alone – proving ROI for social media 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 strategized her engagement with prospects on social media sourcing 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 defined specific goals that would drive her efforts and satisfy inquiries from management.
As a result, Dell to set out two main objectives:
- Demonstrate how branding efforts on social media increase visibility of Employer Value Proposition within the themes of Diversity, University Relations and Work Culture.
- 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 Media Sourcing Metrics- What Really Matters?
For Dalhia, outlining measurable objectives and identifying the correct metrics for her activities has been crucial to obtain buy-in and necessary resources. Dalhia found that showing routine social media analytics was insufficient.
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, and the 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 Avature talent pool. Using the event hashtag and targeted content for this specific audience of engineers significantly helped them increase their reach and encouraged people to apply to Dell. Furthermore, the quality of hire increased since recruiters could 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 Social Media Sourcing Campaigns – Know Your Audience
Dell’s North American initiative included launching several campaigns that targeted diverse audiences to attract prospects and boost their employer band. For each audience, Dalhia stressed the importance of creating authentic, audience-specific content, such as the ongoing ‘Vets at Dell’ campaign showcasing employee stories of transitioning from the military to Dell. This campaign even caught the attention of Dell’s CEO, Michael Dell, who actively joined the conversation on Facebook.
While creating authentic content has been key to successfully highlighting Dell’s work culture, tracking their social media campaign activity in Avature is what provided Dahlia’s team with a clearer view of what works and what doesn’t for each segment.
When it Comes to Social Media Sourcing, 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. Dalhia’s interns help make this possible by creating authentic content and posting three to four 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 Media Sourcing Success?
The results speak for themselves. Without incurring any costs, Dell has organically reached millions of people on social media and tracked their apply clicks for each campaign and market targeted.
Here are two of Dahlia’s key learning points for solving the “Rubik’s cube”:
Demonstrate the impact of your branding efforts to achieve leadership buy-in.
Proving results to management is critical, so use metrics that they value, such as focusing on how many applicants you were able to obtain.
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
Discover more about Avature by checking out the resources below.
