Planning and executing a social media strategy for recruiting and employer branding is never a straight forward undertaking. However, doing this within a global organization can be particularly problematic. Complex stakeholder relationships with PR, marketing and comms are a key issues as is getting the right segmentation of channels across geographies and audiences. Local versus Global is a debate I’m often asked my opinion on.
My guest this week is Charu Malhotra. Charu has a wealth of experience working as an interim within a range of global organizations and has some unique expertise in building global social recruiting strategies. She is currently leading EVP and Employer Branding projects at Ferrero.
In the interview we discuss:
• The specific challenges social media presents for complex global organizations
• Transparency and fishing where the fish are
• Content types
• Alignment, stakeholder relations and project management
• Global versus Local
• The power of social media as a research tool
Charu also shares her thoughts on the future development of social media and tells us which emerging social channel she thinks has the most potential.
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Transcript:
Matt Alder [00:00:00]:
Support for this podcast comes from Working Films. Working Films is a full scale film and video company with a leading reputation for showcasing natural and engaging storytelling through film. From producing cost effective recruitment videos to full scale employer branding films, their work reflects passion for producing film about people and their work, along with powerful stories that engage with your target audiences. To find out more about how Working Films can help you with your video content strategy and employer branding, please visit www.workingfilms.co.uk. working films telling the stories about your people and their work.
Hi everyone, this is Matt Alder. Welcome to episode 63 of the Recruiting Future podcast. Planning and executing a social media strategy for recruiting an employer branding is never a straightforward undertaking. However, doing this within a global organization can be particularly problematic. Complex stakeholder relationships with pr, marketing and comms are a key issue, as is getting the right segmentation of channels across geographies and audiences. Local versus global is a debate I’m often asked my opinion on.
My guest this week is Charu Malhotra. Charu has a wealth of experience working as an interim within a number of global organizations and is currently leading EVP and digital employer brand projects at Ferrero. She has some unique expertise in building global social media strategies and I know you’ll find her insights extremely interesting. Hi Charu and welcome to the podcast.
Charu Malhotra [00:02:08]:
Hello Matt, how are you?
Matt Alder [00:02:10]:
Yeah, very good. Very good indeed. Could you introduce yourself and tell everyone what you do?
Charu Malhotra [00:02:17]:
Absolutely. So I’m Charu Malhotra. I worked in resourcing for about 14 years now and then over the last the 8, 9 years move more into digital and employer branding roles within businesses that you, I’m sure you’ll heard of.
Matt Alder [00:02:33]:
Absolutely. And you, you, you’ve kind of, in the time that I’ve known you, you’ve tended to sort of work for some very large global organizations. What kind of projects have you been, have you been doing or specializing in in that time?
Charu Malhotra [00:02:47]:
Sure. So I think my role at BP led me into enjoying all things global and social. So I was at BP 4 and a half years and really, really looked at how they set up resourcing and in that the whole attraction piece came to life. That then led me into Unilever where I was there three and a half years, which I guess was really much the starting point of working closely with marketing, brand comms and the digital teams. Those type of roles where you’re not necessarily sitting within hr, your resourcing SME, working with stakeholders that sit outside of HR have become very much my sweet spot, if you will, and that’s led me to choose those type of roles or even sort of start creating those type of roles in subsequent businesses that have approached me or I’ve approached them. So, yeah, always been global roles with businesses that tend to either be on the starting point of a transformation or have a problem statement that means that they’re unpicking previous processes and projects. I like sort of fixing things that are not necessarily broken but can be, can be improved. Things that are status quo don’t really interest me and I’ve been very lucky that the global roles I’ve been in have really enriched my cv, but also my skill set. Dealing with different countries every day means that you have to be a bit more pragmatic and you have to really recognise the world that your colleagues are dealing with when and before you start creating solutions.
Matt Alder [00:04:22]:
So really, in this conversation, we’re focusing on social media for recruiting and employer branding and how that works within, you know, within a global. With. Within a global organization. Before we do, though, let’s back right up and you know, to you, what is the point of social media in this space? What is it, what is it actually there to do?
Charu Malhotra [00:04:47]:
Social media in the context of recruitment or social media in full stop, is around engaging in a conversation that’s happening already. For me, there is something around and we’ve spoken about this a lot in previous sort of encounters at previous roles when that whole conversation about why social has started is we’re talking to people, we’re talking to candidates who are like you and I, spending a lot of time on social. So if you want to be part of a conversation, you join those, Those channels, you join that dialogue. But I think the part that you just asked is, what’s the purpose is we’re living in a world of greater transparency, we both admit that. And the world is going to become increasingly transparent. And the best way of showcasing, but also in a way that’s real, what you’re doing, where you’re working, the people that you’re working with, the culture, the values, if I’m allowed to say that word, I know it’s a bit of a buzzword now, is using social. You know, the first time I met you, you used a phrase, you fish where the fish are. And for me, and I’ve stolen that shamelessly. You don’t drive a conversation to happen where you want it to happen. You come and talk to me on my channel that I own that you’ve never been on, you go and talk to people, engage with people on the channels that they’re hanging out with on at the moment. So it’s around engagement, it’s around sharing, and it’s around listening. I’m always stunned by businesses that are spending so much money on engineering feedback sessions, focus groups both for employees and external talent segments. And then you think or you ask them how much social listening are you doing? And they’re not doing any. So you know, this is the best way of getting great feedback. That’s raw and undoctored.
Matt Alder [00:06:40]:
Absolutely. I 100% agree with you, which of course I would because you were quoting me back to me. Just in terms of complex global organizations, what are the specific challenges that you found working in those environments with trying to get an effective social media campaign or social media program up and running?
Charu Malhotra [00:07:04]:
Sure. So I think the first challenge is often if you’re talking to a business or you’re within a business, whether it’s an SME or a large business global, there is often that sort of shiny new toy syndrome where somebody senior has gone to a conference or perhaps, you know, a hands on recruiter has sort of looked at a competitor and said I want to do what they’re doing and rushed to start up that particular channel. And I think the channel, the sort of biggest channel, sorry, biggest problem challenge is around taking a stop and saying why are we doing this? There is no point being on a number of different channels if you have nothing to say or the audience you’re trying to target, it has no time to spend on that channel. The other area that I would like to talk about because I think often it’s sort of swept under the carpet and it’s probably where I spend the most amount of my time in that pre setup is alignment, stakeholder management. And that over the last five, six years whilst I’ve been working deeper in this space has become not just more important but essential. So my role or the roles that I do within the digital resourcing space, spend more time aligning with comms, with brand, with marketing, with people outside of hr before we can do any of these things, before you approach an agency to help you, before you start thinking about your channel management to understand what they’re doing. Because again, if we can maximize on what your other parts of the business are doing socially, or at least get them aligned in what you want to do, it will help you. The other challenge, Matt, and we’ve both been there where we’ve seen things go horribly wrong on social media is when people haven’t actually plan, had that dialogue with their corporate PR teams, with their comms team to prepare for any kind of issue. So I think that the challenge that I would prioritize is stakeholder management has become increasingly important. Social is not a channel. It’s around how a business operates socially and therefore you need to be talking to the different parts of the business before you even do or even start thinking about the social channels. Your channels are all activation. But what are you saying about yourself impacts corporate pr, comms and so on just as much as it impacts you and your resourcing teams.
Matt Alder [00:09:22]:
Yeah, you’re definitely right about that relationship. I mean, when I’m talking to my clients, it’s always one of the biggest issues that they have. And people are always asking me questions about how, you know, how they should, how they should manage those relationships. Do you kind of have any tips for doing this?
Charu Malhotra [00:09:43]:
Well, yeah, I mean, I think whether it’s about doing it well or whether it’s about actually being very open about who does what, it all lends itself back to that whole project management roles and accountabilities and recognizing that the audience, that’s the consumer or the strategic partner or the candidate, the applicant won’t care if the channel that he’s talking to you on is managed by comms or PR or external affairs or recruitment. He’s just seeing the voice of your business on a social channel. How it’s managed is irrelevant to him or her. So I think the trick or the tip I would say is look at this as a project management perspective. Look at it as a racy. Agree the roles and responsibilities and ownership early on, but at the same time, when things go wrong, when things are looking like they need an intervention, then you need to group together. The other thing is in recruitment, I think we could do a lot to learn from people that sit within the PR and the corporate team that do digital very well because they naturally have already decided how to prioritize issues and how to triage issues. So by that I mean we in recruitment always need to make a decision about how and when we engage, you know, if there’s an issue on there. So learn from your corporate PR teams because they’ve learned already how to prioritize issues. They’ve already got situations in place to think, okay, I’ll, we’ll get involved now or we can leave this to go, carry on a dialogue for an hour or two hours or this is the kind of conversation that we need to have or intervention on Twitter and so on. So I guess there’s something around project management, knowing the roles and responsibilities, agreeing that up front. But when there’s an intervention needed or when there’s an issue needed, everyone needs to work together to have agreed, when do you intervene or when do you leave things be? And I personally have learned a lot from that whole sort of that triage or that sort of traffic lighting of issues that the corporate PR guys and functions do so well.
Matt Alder [00:11:52]:
So one of the other questions that I’m often asked about this kind of approach is what should companies do in terms of, I suppose, you know, geographical or market segmentation? So you know, should companies have one central place on Facebook and Twitter and the other channels they’re using, or should they have something that’s very, very country specific or somewhere in between? What have you seen that works well?
Charu Malhotra [00:12:21]:
Sure. So I’ve been lucky that in the majority of my roles I’ve sat in a global role but have worked closely with the country’s talent managers, recruitment managers, comms, individuals. And I think what I’ve seen work well and what I’ve implemented myself is the starting point of capability, but also resource time and budget. So again, going back to that point that if the people that you’re dealing with in the country simply will not have time to share content on a regular basis, provide answers on a real time basis, that the candidates that are asking to actually be in a situation where they are using the analytics that are coming forth on their local channel, then for me it’s around okay, setting something up from a global perspective because then that allows you to work still with the countries to share content that’s local, but the channel isn’t a sort of a bear and like tumbleweed for the majority of the time because you’re reliant just on the local countries giving you content. So just to explain that more succinctly, when you’ve got countries that simply are resource fresh and do not have time to be managing their channels locally, then setting something up globally, for example Facebook, which works I think really well, where if you have the ability to set up a global channel, which I’ve done at Unilever, I’ve done at other organizations since then, and actually set it up with your digital partner so that your content calendar is very nicely furnished with local content when there’s a need, or when they have content that’s appropriate, but the rest of the time you already have content in that content calendar, whether it’s Monday motivation, it’s around conferences that you’re going to. It’s around tips on interview skills. It’s on a virtual tour of your office. So you’re not always reliant on that country. So I think it’s around capability, it’s around time, and it’s around resource, I think local channels where you’ve got specific landscape issues. So, for example, China is an obvious example. Here you are able to do things a bit more smartly. So when I was at Unilever, clearly we set up channels specific to China and we worked very closely with the Chinese talent team there. How we worked smartly was a lot of the global content we created we shared with our Chinese counterparts and the Chinese agency that we’re working with, again, their local channels were still furnished by some global content. It still gave the global feel with the localized tone of voice and the localized content and that what would my office that I’m going to work in locally look like? So that premise is how, Matt, I’ve looked at things clearly when I’ve worked in an SME or a sort of a smaller enterprise operating slightly differently. But the thoughts and the premise is always the same. You know, where are your candidates spending time? What do you have the time to do? What’s the best thing to do? Well, again, being pragmatic and essentially looking at this rather than being on a channel because the channel’s there, let’s do two channels. Well, rather than trying to be on six, just because, you know, everyone else is on, on the channels. So, yeah, so, you know, I can talk about the global setup in a more detail if you’d like, but that’s the, the essential way of looking at it.
Matt Alder [00:15:52]:
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it’d be great to, you know, get, get a bit more kind of insight into that. And also, you know, from, from your experience, you, you, you talked a lot about, you talked a lot about content. What’s what generally has worked really well. What kind of things should companies think about when they’re, when they’re producing content? Calendars for their, for their, for their social channels?
Charu Malhotra [00:16:16]:
Sure. So I think asking questions. So that sounds really obvious, but when you have a channel that’s just constantly sharing content but not actually asking for feedback or, you know, in an easy way, asking for people’s comments, thoughts. I think, you know, when you involve yourself in a conversation with the followers of your channel, the users of your channel, that’s often worked well. What’s always very prominent when it comes to analytics is the moment you start sharing videos of well, videos full stop, but videos of people and videos of individuals doing their job, what their job is, what it looks like, what it feels like, what they’re experiencing on that day. So you know, it’s old school but a day in the life without it feeling like it’s an advert. So again, think gone are the days where you’re doing this sort of broadcast beautiful advert type video that sort of pretending that that marketing manager’s role is like nirvana. I think what’s worked really well is sort of, you know, videos where perhaps it’s a bit more real, it’s a lot more about what that person’s experiencing and feeling and you know, showcasing true examples of what jobs are like. So to bring this to life is sometimes you look at companies that are actually very big volume recruiters of perhaps more industrial hires, more so blue collar hires, but you go to their career sites and the only videos and the only roles they’re showcasing in a rich media perspective are the roles that are more senior. Actually that’s not going to help anybody that’s coming to their website or going to the job board to apply for a job that they’re, you know, is a Saturday job or it’s a job where actually they just want to know, you know, what does that shop front look like? What does it look like to work in retail? What does it look like from a scheduling perspective? What’s my manager going to be like? Is there a uniform? I mean again, the amount of times that that’s been asked on the social channels I’ve helped run. What’s your uniform policy? I’m listing a list of questions that often we don’t answer, but in a video, in a visual, they’ll be very quickly satisfied and the candidate will be very quickly satisfied with the answers to that. So I think we just need to step back and think social. Isn’t this amazing ivory tower where we just need to share really beautiful things all the time and represent ourselves like we’re all Google that that doesn’t need to happen. And I don’t think that is happening anymore. But I think being a lot more real and as you can tell, I’m dancing around not using the word authentic and struggling.
Matt Alder [00:18:58]:
You can use the word authentic, that’s absolutely fine.
Charu Malhotra [00:19:01]:
But you know, it is true. You know, we, you know, me as a job seeker, you as a job seeker. What do we want to know? What does it like to work for that business? So I think, you know, increasingly the dialogue, the conversations, asking for feedback, you know, in Our actually advert sometimes we struggle with actually realising that the candidates can want to give us candidate feedback in a way that’s true to them, you know, not going to take loads of time. So rather than, you know, asking them big grandiose questions on a candidate survey, actually showing them an adverb which works better so you know, real a B testing done in a way that sort of feels a lot more, you know, we’re using your feedback to put together our campaign. So I guess if that answers your question in terms of questionnaires so questions, dialogue but showing video in a sort of a really bite sized way rather than doing some kind of big advert types of campaign where you look, it looks beautiful and then you realize actually it’s a hospitality company that you know, most the hires are volume hires and you know it’s not going to give any of the candidates coming to the career site any real insight into what it’s going to be like to work there. So that’s not actually helping your purpose, not helping your objective at all.
Matt Alder [00:20:18]:
Yeah, that’s brilliant and chimes very well with you know, what I’m seeing with, with my clients and also what other people who’ve come on the podcast have said. Final question. So obviously social channels are developing almost at the speed of light. Whether it’s the, you know, the big channels like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn or newer ones that are coming, coming into the market. Where do you see the future for this? What do you think social media for recruitment and employer branding is going to look like in 12 to 18 months time?
Charu Malhotra [00:20:52]:
So I think it’s a really exciting time. I don’t think Facebook is going to go anywhere just to sort of throw that in because I’m getting a bit tired of seeing lots of conversations around. It’s all that Snapchat and Facebook is dying. Think about is it three quarters of the stuff that’s shared socially is done on Facebook that is very powerful. But I believe the new channels that are coming up or channels that are slightly younger pretenders to the Facebooks of the world, Instagram are going to get much more clever about how they work with brands and organizations allowing us to do a lot more nifty agile things with them. A lot more things that will allow that whole segmentation piece that recruitment’s all about now in terms of talking to me as a candidate rather than trying to talk to everybody, I do really like the idea of a lot more live video streaming actually giving access to people. So you know, the channels that are developing and Are, you know, doing this really well, you know, allowing people to be, you know, use, whether it’s periscope, whatever, you know, using people to get that inside view, real time view are going to be I think in a really rich position in 18 months time because the consumers that, the consumer brands that are using this for their events, for their launches are you know, I think getting a really good feedback. I think we’re in recruitment a bit behind the game when it comes to using these things but I think, you know, that will be really helpful for us as a channel, I know showcasing that whole reality. Using live media, using streaming I think will be really good. I think I’m really interested in seeing where WeChat is going to take us. Really fascinated by its use in China. It really fascinated by its use across Asia. The penetration it has is magnificent and I think it’s, it’s one to not just want to watch but one that’s, it’s, it’s evolving in a way that others, other enterprises, other social channels are going to stand up and start taking notice of. I think we in our, in our space can no longer go that’s this, that’s the channel for China or that’s just great in Asia. I think we’re going to have to be a bit more clever about how we, how we look at WeChat. And then lastly, this is a bit more of an internal facing comment but I think, I genuinely believe this, that we in the space, digital marketing in recruitment marketing and employer branding, our world with comms and PR are going to blur even more and that whole company purpose, the employee reputation piece will have much more shared ownership. So the silos that some of us still work in, which I think are fewer and fewer and fewer but I think that whole I own recruitment marketing, you own corporate pr, you own tone of voice on this channel, I own tone of voice on that is going to get more and more blurred and I think the skills needed will be ones that can move across functions and enterprises and I think we’ll see a lot more of that. So that’s more of an internal lens but I, but I think you know, those walls are breaking and the silos are becoming less and less. But I think, you know, that whole ownership piece when I own LinkedIn and you own Twitter are, you know, well behind us. We can’t work like that anymore. So yeah, that’s my parting shot.
Matt Alder [00:24:12]:
Charu, thank you very much for talking to me.
Charu Malhotra [00:24:14]:
No, thank you. Really enjoyed it. Thanks Matt.
Matt Alder [00:24:17]:
My thanks to Charu Malhotra. You can subscribe to this podcast on itunes or via your podcasting app of choice. Just search for Recruiting Future. You can also find all the past episodes@www.rfpodcast.com on that site. You can 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.
