Using Employee generated content for employer brand communication is a topic we’ve covered a couple of times on the podcast now. In this episode I want to take things to the next level and talk about using employees as brand ambassadors to strategically distribute and amplify brand content as a way of reaching targeted networks of talent.
I’ve always considered this to be the key to social recruiting success and my guest this week, Craig Fisher the Head of Employer Branding at CA Technologies, is certainly someone who shares this view. I’ve known Craig for a long time now and he has always been a practitioner who operates at the cutting edge of social media, experimenting with different tools and techniques to get tangible recruiting results.
In the interview we discuss:
• Why EVP should be “inside out” with the employees themselves communicating and carrying the brand
• Using employee advocacy platform technologies
• The 5-1 “give to ask” ratio and why it is vital to success
• How CA Technologies identified 80 internal brand champions and the results they have seen after the first five months of the advocacy program.
• The best tools for curating relevant job seeker content
Craig also gives some great practical advice on how to start a employee advocacy program and share his thoughts on emerging recruiting technologies
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Transcript:
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Matt Alder [00:00:59]:
Hi everyone, this is Matt Alder. Welcome to episode 56 of the Recruiting Future podcast. We’ve covered the topic of employee generated content a couple of times on the podcast now, most notably in episode 45 when Chris Ebbeler talked about the brilliant work the restaurant chain Chili’s are doing in this area. For this week’s episode, I want to take things to the next level and talk about using employees as brand ambassadors who strategically distribute and amplify employer brand content in targeted talent networks. I’ve always considered this to be the key to social recruiting success, and my guest this week is certainly someone who shares that view. Craig Fisher is Head of Employer Branding at CA Technologies. I’ve known Craig for a long time now. He’s always been a practitioner operating at the cutting edge of social media, experimenting with different tools and techniques to get tangible recruiting results. His work at CA Technologies is no exception to this, and I know you’ll find the interview absolutely fascinating. Enjoy.
Matt Alder [00:02:09]:
Hi Craig, and welcome to the podcast.
Craig Fisher [00:02:11]:
Hello Matt. Thanks for having me.
Matt Alder [00:02:13]:
My absolute pleasure. I think it’s a long time since we last spoke.
Craig Fisher [00:02:17]:
Actually has been. It’s been at least a year.
Matt Alder [00:02:22]:
Wow. Time flies. Time flies indeed. Could you, for people who might not be familiar with you and the work you do, could you sort of talk a little bit about, you know, your history, what you’ve done in the past and the job you’re doing now?
Craig Fisher [00:02:37]:
You bet. Absolutely. So I come from the drug industry originally. Right out of school I was a drug rep for GlaxoSmithKline GSK. Then I worked in the hospital selling hospital equipment for a few years before I got conned into recruiting physicians for a living. Someone said, you know, you can make more money, travel less. You could, you know, really utilize those relationships you have with hospitals and doctors, a growing field. So I tried recruiting doctors and I was hooked. I loved it. And that’s how I Got into the recruiting industry in 1995 and have been stuck there ever since. That’s sort of how it works with most people. But a year later I was recruiting tech people and the excitement just grew. And I started using technology to my advantage at that time. And I started blogging and I started teaching myself the tools that you need to use to do web development because this was a growing field that we were starting to recruit a lot for. And I noticed that if I could lurk in the chat rooms of the developers I was trying to recruit more as a user than as a recruiter, I could actually gain their trust. If I post helpful things there, ask legitimate questions, yes, I’m actually trying to teach myself to code, etc. Then they would respond to me and refer people to me. And so I became sort of a well known guy in that community. And every once in a while, oh, and by the way, I’m hiring. Well, it worked. It worked really well. And I became the top recruiter in the United States for a company called Matrix Resources, which is one of the larger regional staffing firms in the country. And from there I went on become a director of a larger firm that implemented HR software all over the world. And we staffed all of those projects for all the big accounting firms and their clients. And that’s how I really got involved with HR technology and really passionate about it, implementing ERP and HR software globally. Then I started my own firm. Eventually I was very fortunate to. We were one of the, I guess, first companies to do everything you can do for a social for a recruiting firm with free social media tools. And so that was a big hit. We got some giant contracts with HP and PepsiCo right off the bat because we were just innovating in our approach and able to save our customers money in the process. We documented it and I started a Twitter chat right about that time for recruiters called TalentNet Live. It used to be TNL. We went back to TalentNet after some Filipino teens in love group sort of usurped our property there.
Matt Alder [00:05:36]:
But the joys of social media.
Craig Fisher [00:05:40]:
Exactly right. And I was able to sell that company to my business partners about three years later and just do sort of the stuff that I’d been doing the whole time, which is teaching companies how to use social tools and be more personal online in their approach to attracting talent. And it’s worked for me since the 90s, literally. I started blogging right in 1999, writing about my experiences and really just writing about me and my dogs. That’s where Fish Dogs came from. And that’s my Twitter handle still and my blog. And so now I’ve just been a consultant in the industry for a few years and am sort of in a permanent role as an RPO consultant to CA Technologies. So we’re all, our entire talent team at CA Technologies, which is one of the largest software companies in the world, is outsourced through Allegis Global Solutions. And we have about 100 people on staff worldwide at an 11,000 person software company, which is pretty cool. And inside of that I have a six person marketing team just for talent acquisition, which is pretty unheard of. So I’m getting to really innovate with a big budget and big clients to bounce things off of. And I get to go help some of Allegiance’s other clients as well. So Allegiance has 20 companies like CA that they do work with, including companies like GM and Amex and HSBC. So globally I’m getting to do some really cool stuff and document it and having fun doing it.
Matt Alder [00:07:22]:
That’s great to hear. I mean, I’ve always been a great fan of your work. I mean, we’ve spoken many times. I’ve seen you present numerous case studies at conferences and unconferences all around the world. And you’re always kind of there on the cutting edge putting these ideas into practice. And it’s always interesting, you know, to kind of hear from your experiences. I suppose what I wanted to talk about on this podcast was the whole idea of employee advocacy in employer branding, which is a bit of a mouthful to say now. We’ve covered this topic sort of two or three times on the podcast. I’m seeing it as a really interesting, you know, rising, rising area of interest. And you sort of published a case study a few weeks ago from some of the work you’ve been doing with CA on employee advocates. Still can’t say it the second time. Could you sort of tell us what you’ve been doing, what your take on this whole area is?
Craig Fisher [00:08:28]:
Yeah, so my take on employer branding from the very beginning has always been about the employees of the company. And not just a marketing thing, not just a logo or a fancy mission statement that you post online that’s not really your employer brand. The EVP, in my opinion, has to come from the inside out. So you have to really talk to your employees about what’s good about your company. Be transparent about that, agree to work on the things that you need to work on, but highlight the best parts. Right. And get your employees to talk better about those things online and it’s funny, I wrote an article about that in early 2009 for Universum’s, I think, first quarterly print publication. They asked me to write an employer branding article. And so it was entitled Organic Branding for Employers. And it was exactly this. Basically, for better or for worse, your brand is going to be talked about in the world and online by your employees and they should be the ones carrying your brand. So fast forward a few years later and I’m at a conference and I get introduced to a platform called Q Social. And it’s basically an employee advocacy platform. So now there are dozens of employee advocacy platforms. Hootsuite has their own, LinkedIn has one, there are several. Right. But this one was really tailored very specifically to recruiting and they focused on the recruitment market. And so for me, I told them immediately and this was when it was still in beta. But I said, yeah, you need to let me play with this. I’m going to break it into a million pieces and send it back with lots of notes and then I’m going to implement it somewhere big at some point soon. And so a couple of years later, I’m in this position to do that. And that was one of my first missions when I got to CA and 2015, was to literally give us a platform through which our employees could talk about things that would attract job candidates. So we have a larger sort of employer brand advocacy. Well, just an employee advocacy platform at CA called Gaggle Amp, which is okay, I like it, all right. But the marketing team and social media team literally uses this to just promote company news. And I think that’s fine. But I prefer sort of a more give to ask scenario. So I use this 5 to 1 give to ask ratio whereby you post more helpful things that aren’t necessarily written by or about you or your company to your audience. Right? Your network. And you grow your own thought leadership this way and your network becomes more involved with what you’re doing because you’re a helpful resource. And so your network grows and the trust in your network grows and people are more likely to refer things to you. And then every once in a while, oh, by the way, we’re hiring or oh, by the way, check out our white paper or our CEO on the COVID of Forbes or whatever. But most of the time, right, some personal things about yourself so people get to know you. Some helpful third party resources. Great article from Inc. Magazine or Mashable, if you will. Maybe some pictures of you and your co workers having fun at lunch or at a function or giving back to Your community, those are all gives, right? And things that job seekers might be interested in. That third party content is really key, helpful stuff to help job seekers. Maybe fix their LinkedIn profile, for instance, or write a better resume or how to actually interview for a job that you’re going to win. These types of things really actually expand your network. And the funny thing is we noticed that we started with 80 champions on the Qsocial platform that we researched and discovered their networks don’t necessarily completely overlap. They only overlap by about 20%. So when we’re sharing these things, we’re reaching a whole lot of people that we would never have reached otherwise. And it’s not just the same people getting all the same message.
Matt Alder [00:13:04]:
So to clarify, these champions are employees who work in the organization and the platform is allowing them to share content with their broader networks. Is that how it works?
Craig Fisher [00:13:16]:
That’s exactly right. So what we do is we fill up the, the back end of this platform, the admin side, if you will, with content at the beginning of each week or the end of the previous week. And it’s one story a day and it’s mostly stories that are not by or about us. And then, you know, every fifth one or so sometimes, you know, the averages switch up a little during the week, but over the year the average is about that 5 to 1 ratio. Every once in a while, something about the company, right? Something interesting, something attractive. Maybe we’re hiring agile developers in Raleigh, North Carolina, whatever. And these messages get out and we realize that they really get clicked and shared. And if it’s not all just company stuff, it works better. So that ratio of content is really important. And yes. So these champions were not just our talent acquisition team. We also focused on some HR business partners and then just some leaders in the organization who would be hiring managers who needed to do a better job being social.
Matt Alder [00:14:35]:
And in terms of the content that you’re putting out there, not the content, that’s obviously, you know, not the ask though we’re recruiting. Here are some jobs, but the, you know, the third party content, the advice, how are you sourcing that? Is your team developing it? Are you aggregating it from elsewhere? What are you finding to be the most effective ways of doing that?
Craig Fisher [00:15:00]:
So qsocial was good enough to tee some of this up for us for the first couple of months to get us started while we were implementing the platform and going through training and things like that. And then we developed our own cadence. So I have several sort of automated feeds of things that I trust that I want put out on a regular basis. And then I also use the hootsuite app called Suggestions. So Suggestions comes right to your iPhone or whatever mobile device you use and, and gives you suggested articles based on three topics that you select. And so personally, my topics are LinkedIn apps and recruiting. And so it gives you the most popular recent stories from what it considers the best blogs and publications, and you just swipe right or swipe left to post now or post later. So I take this data, right, And I look at my hourly report from hootsuite every week and I say, all right, this is the kind of stuff that’s really getting a lot of attention, really getting a lot of engagement shares and likes. And so I sort of inform what we do there from this kind of data. I mean, what people are actually interested in. The great thing about the Suggestions app is it posts things when people are most likely to be online to see it. And so the feedback that I get, I know, is due to the fact that it’s all getting pretty good visibility, but now I know which stuff is actually engaged well, so we use that hootsuite Suggestions app and a number of other feeds and streams that we monitor on a regular basis to find cool stuff to put out.
Matt Alder [00:16:53]:
That’s great. And I’ll put a link to the HootSuite app in the. In the show notes so people can have a look for themselves. What kind of results are you getting from this? What’s come back? How’s it been working?
Craig Fisher [00:17:07]:
Yeah, so it’s fairly amazing. We’ve realized when we did the case study, we published it after an initial five months of being on the Q social platform and with 80 champions, we published. Massage that list a bit, right? So some of the people who weren’t using either got multiple, you know, attacks from me in email saying, hi, I’ve noticed you haven’t started using your qsocial app yet. But once we got all the users rolling, we started really tracking things. And over five months, our audience increased. I mean, this happened almost overnight, 1,019%. So from our owned media channels, which are not small, but. Right. The CA Careers, Facebook channel, LinkedIn pages, and Twitter channels, just by our employees, who probably all have smaller networks sharing these things, we increased our audience over 1000%. We had a 33% boost in post reach, a 68% boost in clicks per article, and a 70% boost in total engagement. And over a year, if we had paid for that, it probably would have cost us around $720,000. In earned media if we were going to pay for those kind of results.
Matt Alder [00:18:48]:
That’s, that’s fairly impressive. No, that’s. That, that’s fantastic that it’s worked so well. Do you have any kind of insight into how that engagement has, has, has turned into, you know, people that you’re talking to about roles or people that. People that you’ve hired?
Craig Fisher [00:19:07]:
We do. So we know both from candidate tracking and anecdotal evidence that the people who are applying and or getting referred are influenced by the content that we’re putting out. We also know that our own employees are seeing more of our jobs from their co workers on a regular basis that are open and are referring more people as well, which is pretty interesting.
Matt Alder [00:19:38]:
Definitely. That’s. Yeah, some really impressive stats there. What would your advice be for a company sort of looking at getting started with this, with this kind of approach? What do they need to think of, what do they need to think about or what do they need to do to make it a success?
Craig Fisher [00:19:56]:
So I’ll say that the human element is important. You can’t just wind it up and push all your jobs and company news out to a bunch of your employees and expect them to share it without giving them some sort of what’s in it for me? Right, for them. If it’s not going to grow their network. And let’s face it, just posting a bunch of company news is not going to grow their network. Give them some content that will help them build thought leadership in their own networks and grow their networks and get referrals for themselves, for their business, whatever it is they do, whether it’s recruiting or sales or anything, and help them be a better member of their online communities. And when you can do that, and that does take some human element on the back end by looking at what’s interesting to the types of job seekers you’re trying to recruit, what might be interesting to those employees, networks and then actually feeding it into the machine on the back end. Then you can really sell it to the employees and give them a reason to want to do it. And we get amazing feedback from our entire organization about how well it’s working. But really the people who are getting to use it right now love it. And that’s the fun thing for me.
Matt Alder [00:21:20]:
And where are you taking it next? What are your plans for the sort of next 6 to 12 months with this kind of approach? How’s it going to evolve?
Craig Fisher [00:21:29]:
Well, so we wrote this white paper in part to show the greater corporate team what kind of results could be gained and you know, we’re looking at potentially a trial for a greater corporate wide engagement. So fingers crossed on that. We’ll see what happens. But I’ve referred qsocial to my partners at Allegis and they are now in play for several more corporate opportunities and that number is growing rapidly. So I’m actually on their platform as part of the training that you can do. Qsocial is great because it’s gamified and so your employees get badges and things like that. The game originally was everyone wants to beat Craig, which is not possible because my network’s too big. But that’s part of a fun game. But I’m also on the training on the platform to sort of share how to share things better and how to be a better networker and be, be more social and more human about it. So, you know, I feel like I’m invested in the product because I know that it works and this has been my methodology all along. Get people talking better and, you know, I’m excited for their success.
Matt Alder [00:22:48]:
Final question and probably a slightly more general question. As someone who is always looking for new techniques and new approaches that are going to work practically for the recruitment challenges that you have, what’s on your radar at the moment? What do you think is the next big up and coming recruitment technology?
Craig Fisher [00:23:09]:
So what we’re talking about now is definitely first and foremost on my radar. The whole employee engagement, you know, marketing, inbound marketing technique, I think that’s going to be a better way to attract talent than just about anything else. But then you have to be able to do a good job of measuring what happens and then marketing back to those candidates who enter your system, whether it’s through a CRM or candidate community or just a job application. How do you find those folks and retarget them on a regular basis with quality content? And tools like Clinch I think are really great. You can really quickly on the fly create landing pages that are fit for very specific types of people. And they do a very good job of tracking the source of influence for those candidates that come into the system. They can also track sort of what managers do with candidates. You send to the managers through that system. You can actually see on a heat map if that manager is even looking at the candidate very much. And so you get some real good internal feedback there as well. So I like tools like Clinch that are very lightweight and let you develop internal and external marketing very quickly and track it.
Matt Alder [00:24:37]:
Well, I think one of the key things you said there is quality content. I think that’s such a massive area of focus to make these kind of tools work. Craig thank you very much for talking to me.
Craig Fisher [00:24:52]:
Matt, you’re very welcome and I appreciate you having me.
Matt Alder [00:24:57]:
My thanks to Craig Fisher. You can subscribe to this podcast on itunes or via the podcasting app of your choice. Just search for recruiting future. You can also find all the past episodes@www.rfpodcast.com on that site. You can also subscribe to the mailing list and find out more about working with me. Thanks very much for listening. I’ll be back next week and I hope you’ll join me.
