By Paula Santonocito
There are countless stories of best practices—so many in fact that the term best practices has lost some of its allure. Best has come to mean better than the norm, and norm isn’t all that inspiring.
Remember Norm, the character from “Cheers”? He may be a sitcom legend, but he’s not exactly who you’d choose as a role model.
Cheers to nexus IT group
Yet, “Cheers” actually did inspire one staffing agency, nexus IT group, to create an employee referral program that is truly among the best (it won a 2010 Onrec-RecruitingBlogs award). The program’s creator, who uses only his first name, Travis, says a comment that he looks like a character from “Cheers” got him thinking about the show’s theme song, “Where Everybody Knows Your Name.” From there, it was a short leap to furthering the company’s brand, while creating a referral program.
Travis says nexus IT group was started with the founding principle, “If you provide a commodity to motivate an individual, that individual will in return always be thinking of you in professional and personal endeavors.” As he explains, “People are motivated by money. Whether it's right or wrong, money still forces a reaction.”
Therefore, in order to build a strong IT candidate pool, nexus IT group offers a very competitive referral fee. And it doesn’t matter if a referred candidate is in the firm’s system. As long as a candidate hasn’t already discussed a specific job, nexus IT group pays a referral fee.
But that’s not all that makes this referral process, and nexus IT group, different. The firm does not invest in external search engines, and it doesn’t have a job board. Its entire process, which utilizes a software program to track referrals and send out updates, is about making connections.
So how does nexus connect with potential candidates and the people who refer them? “Every article, every email, every LinkedIn interaction, every Facebook message mentions our referral program,” says Travis.
The idea is that even when IT employees are extremely happy in their current jobs, people might still connect with nexus just so they can refer others in their network in the hopes of making some extra cash.
According to Travis, word-of-mouth marketing, motivating people to react, providing a very intimate process and contact method, and keeping people who make referrals updated is a highly effective—and cost-effective—formula.
If You Build It…
Whether you’re a staffing firm or an employer, recruiting comes down to connecting with candidates.
But how does an organization that offers quality of daily life service solutions find enough quality candidates to fill 5,000 management and executive positions each year? It’s an ongoing challenge for Sodexo.
Even in a down economy, the talent pool the company seeks is specialized and in very high demand. In order to better connect with candidates, Sodexo has turned to social media.
Sodexo launched its recruitment campaign, Building Engaged Talent Communities through Social Media, which won a 2010 Onrec-RecruitingBlogs award, with a multi-faceted, phased-in approach. Each channel was added separately; and when a channel was added, it was connected to the company’s careers site and to the other channels. The intent was to allow candidates to connect using their medium of preference.
Sodexo Careers - Past, Present & Future is the company’s primary LinkedIn group. It provides insight into Sodexo’s culture and offers opportunities for candidates to connect with recruiters to find jobs.
The company also has a Careers Facebook page where candidates can ask questions about corporate culture and the hiring process. Candidates immediately receive replies from recruiters, and/or from current and former employees.
On Twitter, Sodexo can be found @Sodexo Careers. In addition, more than 50 recruiters use Twitter accounts to engage candidates and peers, build a targeted network, and create one-to-one relationships with candidates and groups in specific focus areas.
And these aren’t the only social media venues the company utilizes. Sodexo Careers Blog aims to build personal relationships by providing an inside look at the company. The Sodexo Careers brand can be found on Flickr and YouTube as well, and the company’s podcasts reference the brand.
Sodexo has effectively leveraged social media to build an online, interactive talent community it can tap into now and in the future. What’s more, it has furthered the company’s brand in unexpected ways.
Recognized as a leader in recruitment practices, Sodexo has become sought out by professional and industry associations and private sector firms to speak on its social media program. Additionally, Sodexo’s social media best practices have been profiled by numerous media outlets, including The Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Good Morning America, ERE—and now RecruitingTrends.com/Onrec. This notoriety expands recruitment reach, while enhancing the company’s reputation as an employer of choice.
Indeed, results of Sodexo’s social media recruitment campaign have been impressive. Traffic to the Sodexo corporate careers site has increased by nearly 300 percent. The company has seen an increase of 25 percent in candidates posting to open positions, including an increase of 50 percent of diverse candidates.
There has been a bottom-line impact as well. Because social media efforts have been so successful, Sodexo has reduced its reliance on job boards and other paid advertising, saving more than $300,000.
Cheers to Sodexo for deviating from the norm.
Got Personality?
And speaking of cheers, William Uranga deserves a round. Uranga is the winner of the 2010 Recruitment Personality of the Year award from Onrec-RecruitingBlogs.
What has Uranga done to deserve such a lofty title? For starters, he’s senior director of talent acquisition at TiVo, where he has been innovative in his use of quality of hire metrics.
When you mention the word “metrics” people’s eyes tend to glaze over. But Uranga approaches metrics as he does so many aspects of recruitment—with humor and in the spirit of sharing.
Uranga shares his knowledge as he co-leads the Recruiting Leadership Forum, through courses he teaches in the HR Management Certificate program at UC Santa Cruz Extension in Silicon Valley, and at his blog, “making fans.”
Wherever Uranga goes, it appears he is making fans. Among the terms colleagues use to describe him: dedicated, smart, deeply engaged, collaborative, innovative, unafraid to try new ideas, approachable, honest, enormously likable…and oh yeah, hilarious.
Uranga shows you can be passionate about your work and highly successful and have fun in the process, and that’s certainly the stuff of best practices.