Based on what I see during my work as a consultant it is fair to say that most employers are still struggling to use social media effectively for recruiting. Even the concept of using it as a key platform for Employer Branding and Employee Engagement seems like an impossible dream to many. However as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn embed themselves further into everyone’s lives all companies will have to think differently about the methods they use to attract, recruit and retain talent.
My guest this week is someone who is a genuine pioneer round social engagement in the talent space. Chris Ebbeler is Director of Workplace Community for Chili’s, a company who are embracing social media in a way that is just brilliant.
In the interview we discuss:
• How Chris got both his job and buy in from his leadership team to do what he does
• How Chili’s have used social media to shift deeply held brand perceptions and are now considered a great place to work
• Why their employees are at the heart of what they do on social and the great ways they have driven authentic user generated content from their global work force of 80,000 people
• A completely different way of thinking about the role of corporate Careers Sites
• The importance of Instagram in their social strategy
Chris also talks about the way they measure results, the importance of a selfie with the COO and how he sees their approach to social media developing over the next 18 months
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Recruiting Future with Matt Alder - What's Next For Talent Acquisition, HR & Hiring?
Ep 45: Social Media For Employer Branding Done Brilliantly
Support for this podcast comes from Cielo. Cielo is the world's leading provider of global recruitment process outsourcing and related solutions, spanning the talent lifecycle from employer branding to onboarding. Cielo takes a "we become you" approach to RPO that provides their clients with customised solutions that match industries, geographies and business priorities. To find out more, visit www.cielotallant.com. Hi everyone, this is Matt Alder. Welcome to Episode 45 of the Recreating Future Podcast. With most employers still struggling to use social media effectively for recruiting, the thought of using it as a key platform for employer branding and employee engagement might seem like an impossible dream. However, as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn embed themselves further into our lives, all companies will have to think differently about how they attract, recruit and retain talent. My guest this week is someone who is an absolute pioneer in this space. Chris Ebbler is Director of Workplace Engagement at Chili's. Chili's are a company who are embracing social media in a way that's just brilliant. Keep listening to find out more about what they're doing, including the really cool way they're using Instagram. If you listen right to the end, you can also get details of a great special offer that's available for all listeners to this podcast. Hi, Chris, and welcome to the podcast. Hi, thanks for having me, Matt. My absolute pleasure. Could you just introduce yourself and tell us what you do? Yeah, my name's Chris Ebbler. I am the Director of Workplace Community for Chili's Grill & Bar. A lot of people ask me, "What the heck does that mean?" The way I like to describe it is in the same way we're trying to grow a community of people that might be interested in our brand, whether that be social or guest-facing. I work on the same thing, but for the people's side of the business, so everything relative to talent marketing, employment branding, as well as internal marketing and how we connect our team members to the business, so really building a sense of community inside the company just as much as we might outside the company. Now, there are huge amount of things I want to ask you, just based on what you just said. I think you're doing some hugely interesting stuff, but just to back up slightly, there are probably quite a few people listening outside of the States who haven't heard of Chili's, so could you just give us a bit of background on the company for people you might not be familiar with it? Absolutely. Chili's is the kind of casual dining company that's been doing this for 40 years now. We actually started here in Dallas, Texas in 1975, actually in a renovated post office, believe it or not, back in the days when Greenville and Meadow Avenue here in Dallas was a dusty, two-lane road. It's kind of funny to go out to that intersection now because, of course, it's all steel and concrete, but it's funny to imagine a time when really casual dining at that time essentially didn't exist. We had a gentleman that was really an entrepreneur. He's actually still in the business, Larry Levine, who wanted to kind of create a new idea for going out to eat, and he started Chili's as a deliberately very casual place. At the time going out to eat meant you were probably going to a steakhouse where it was tablecloths and linen napkins, or your only other option was a fast food place, maybe a burger place that you were going through a drive through or something like that. So there really wasn't anything in the middle, and he came up with this idea to just focus on the basics of fresh techs and fresh mechs food. So tacos, burgers, over the years we've expanded into stuff like ribs and burritos, but the same idea that he had back then is what we hold true today is that this is a great place to hang out with friends and family over a burger and a beer, and enjoy the fact that you can connect with those people around you. It's actually the evening in the UK and you're making me quite hungry, describing all that. I'm sort of moving back to a directive of workplace community. That's a fascinating job title. How did that come about? How did Chile's decide that it needed someone to sort of curate their employee community for talent and everything else that you do? Yeah, it's a great story. We probably don't have time for the whole story because I'm so thrilled and so lucky, really incredibly blessed that I had the opportunity to work very closely with our leadership team to kind of carve out this idea. So I will tell you just my backstory briefly is that I came from essentially traditional learning and development. I was a stand-up facilitator for years. I loved getting in front of folks and talking and sharing stories. I did that for a major retailer for years. It's a funny story because that company doesn't even exist anymore. I started very young with Blockbuster Video. I think it's a really compelling kind of story that when innovation started to kind of take over the idea of entertainment and specifically that people were starting to get DVDs in the mail and Netflix was saying we think we're going to do streaming movies. Everybody at the time said that's a niche market. It'll never be a thing. And sure enough, the story has been told very differently than those who were kind of sitting in the office trying to craft what our strategy would be moving forward. So I tell that story because I've always been kind of fascinated by innovation and what's kind of cutting edge and what companies are doing that's really great in the marketplace. And for years I've been working in traditional human resources and was in learning and development. But I would say about six or seven years ago we started talking a whole lot about the experience of what it's like to work and in particular how people feel connected or not using a lot of the Gallup data, a lot of their great research basically pointing out that engagement is driving productivity. We really started there and looked at a lot of our people processes and got down really frankly to the nitty gritty of saying that even a team member handbook can be a great experience that connects people to the company and to the reason that they are working there. Or it can be a very simple black and white document that is written by the legal department and ends up in the trunk of somebody's car somewhere. So we took that on. And my leadership team has been very receptive. That goes back many, many years. But they allowed us to look at design and really branding and how we create messages that feel relevant to a team member that's working for us. And the idea has grown and grown and really taken a foothold. And I think I'm happy to have been a part of it because I think we were onto it maybe earlier than a lot of folks. So now these days you're starting to hear a whole lot more about employment branding and talent marketing and what that means to differentiate yourself in the market. And I think gladly I was able to kind of craft a role that really leveraged my strengths and my skill set. And the company was super receptive and the leadership team helped me with that. And so here we are actually 10 years later. I'm celebrating my 10 year anniversary with the brand and the rest is history. It's been a wild ride. Fantastic. Digging into sort of talent marketing and employer branding specifically. Tell us a bit about the channels, particularly the social media channels that you're using to tell your stories. Absolutely. So we started very quietly and very small actually. And yet felt like we had to start to shift the conversation about the Chili's brand. And I'll take you back a few years. This is probably going on maybe five years now. We did some research because I think the big question was what do people think about us anyway. And we were looking at that not only from a guest facing standpoint of what our consumers think of us but also from the people side of things. And we did a blind study. We asked managers that were kind of identified as really exceptional managers at other brands. We asked, "Would you ever consider leaving where you're at currently to explore new opportunities?" And most of them said no. Most of them said, "Well, if it was right, if it was the right place, if it was the right thing." The follow-up question was, "Would you consider Chili's as one of those right things for you to leave where you're at now?" And hands down every last one of them said no. Which was a little bit of a lump in the throat and kind of recognition that we had some work to do. We asked them why. Of course, as the follow-up question, they all said, "Well, you're an old brand. You're not growing anymore. There's really no big stories coming out of Chili's. There's probably not that much growth and development opportunity for me. I don't really hear anything that you're doing in terms of innovation." And frankly, my mom and dad used to take me to Chili's. So there was this kind of general consensus of you're old. And I think what we took that to mean was that maybe we weren't relevant anymore to people that were looking for jobs. And how could you be a best place to work if you're not creating a story that you are relevant, that you're meeting the needs of the people that are looking for these jobs. So fast forward a couple of years we took that research. And one of the great things that I was able to do was show our leadership team that people were already using social media to talk about us. It was our own team members. They were already out there. All of our Chili heads nationally as well as around the world were posting selfies. They were tweeting about working at Chili's. They were excited that they got the interview. We saw people saying, "I'm so excited I got the interview at Chili's. I'm going in this afternoon." And what I tried to convey to everybody around here was they're already talking about us, but we're not engaging with them. And actually, we almost ran the other way. I mean, it was like, "Oh gosh, don't say anything. We don't want to create a social media firestorm of somebody saying the wrong thing as one of our team members." So we did a lot of work internally just to kind of change that belief and got people supporting the idea that we could create a shift or a change in that story if we went out there and started engaging with people. And so to answer your specific question about the channels, we actually started very quietly on Twitter. We saw people were out there in our kind of demographic and the people that were talking about us were certainly there. What we found pretty quickly was that started to get recognized by our own team members. We started to engage. We started to build out a story that there is something going on at today's Chili's. That the Chili's that you might remember from being a kid and coming into the restaurant with your mom and dad is a different Chili's today than it was maybe 15 or 20 years ago. And so we started there. We've grown into telling that story on LinkedIn. We are on Instagram and we have a job feed through the Chili's page on Facebook as well. We're not really as active on Facebook. We have found Twitter and Instagram to be great places for us and LinkedIn of course as well. But it's been a blast. It's been fun to see people identify and understand the story that we are telling. And we started there on social very kind of deliberately. We took a crawl walk run approach. We did not want to go fast right out the gate. We wanted to learn about it. We wanted to see who would be interested in what we had to say. And then as that started to take off, we knew that we were going to need a platform to be able to broaden out the story which is when chilijobs.com launched this past August. And so we have a fully fleshed out career site that is fairly elaborate. I mean we're pretty excited about it. It's got a social hub on it. It's got a blog that we're able to do more long form messaging and go deeper into some of these stories and use that as a vehicle to extend the story. So it's been a wild ride. It's been a lot of fun. I think that's amazing. The way you kind of position it and think about it. The social media is about telling, starting the story and the career site is about deeper engagement and longer stories. I think that's a brilliant way of doing it and something that I don't see many other employees sort of thinking like. Yeah, I'll tell you it's funny because a lot of our partners in this journey flat out told me you're not going to be successful because you don't have a website yet. In other words they were saying why are you going to even go out onto social media and do anything if you don't have anywhere to drive people to. And we gladly and happily were able to still get the support we needed internally to at least start the conversation. And I think there's this perception maybe that if you're going to go into social that you have to do it really loud and really big. But we were very methodical and deliberately slow because we wanted to kind of start the spark going rather than try to do it all at once. We didn't try to boil the ocean as they say. We took it slow and just quietly built a very grassroots story out there and the website came later. I really having looked at the kind of things you do. I think the way you use Instagram is sort of particularly interesting because I think again I think lots of employers and companies kind of struggle with Instagram as a channel in terms of not really understanding how to make it effective. What's the secret to your success of all Instagram? So I think we're still learning. But what I will say is one of the things we have learned time and time again is that people want to be seen. And what I mean by that is not that it's always about look at me, look at me, but it's about do you know kind of that I was here? You know what I mean? Do you see me for who I am that I'm doing something of value that my kind of unique energy is being put out there into the world? And that's what we love about our company and what we love about the people that work here is they are incredibly giving very generous hearts and frankly love what they do. And they love their guests. They love their co-workers. We just flat out have a lot of love in this company and it's been a joy to watch. It's been so rewarding for me kind of personally being kind of at the heart of that or at the hub of that and really getting the opportunity to share that. So I would say the secret if anything is acknowledging that we see you. You know that we know you are there. It was funny in the early days, I say early days. It's really only been about a year that we've been on Instagram. But early on what we started seeing was people basically shocked that we tag them or that we liked their photo or that we said hello to them. And they were like how literally saying to kind of their followers and their friends, how cool is this? My company paid attention to what I was doing today. And I think if anything, if there is a secret, Matt, it's that we've been able to reach those people that are touching our guests every day. And they love that we see it. You know that almost like in a sea of people that might work here, you know 80,000 people that work nationally and around the world that we are able to look into and get kind of a glimpse of what's going on in their life at more of a local level and really engage with that. So it's been really really rewarding because people have a great sense of pride in the company. And when they show that on Instagram, we are able to repurpose it and we use it a ton in our advertising, our talent marketing. Because as anybody would say, you know user generated stuff has such a level of authenticity that's hard to find anywhere else. And people love it. They just adore it. So obviously, you know, it sounds like this was all based on the fact that there was lots of spontaneous user generated content if you like, coming from your employees about their job and what they were doing. Have you kind of instigated any initiatives to generate more content or encourage people to sort of produce things and share things that you can use specifically for talent marketing? Yeah, we've done a couple of things again, kind of small, just kind of dip in our toe in the water. One of the things that was frankly the most fun for me and my team was getting involved in a very kind of quiet but innovative approach to testing some of our new food and things that were essentially industry insiders that were getting a peek at what was coming. And it's a program you can look it up on Twitter or Instagram. It's Chili's Underground. And so we had a hashtag Chili's Underground. The marketing team actually came up with the idea which was genius. And the first time they did it, they brought in some industry bloggers and just kind of friends of Chili's, people that we've known through the years. And the culinary team, this amazing chef team was able to come out and show them what we were doing and give them an insider peek at what was coming and some of the menu items that were new. And obviously it created a lot of buzz on Twitter and on Instagram. And it was essentially two weeks or so before the national launch of all of this stuff. So it created a lot of excitement. What was really cool though was the second time that we were going to do it, the first time it happened, we weren't as plugged into what was happening. And so it was almost a surprise to us as well. And we said, "Gosh, next time you do that, let us know because I can tell you for a fact, we have tons of people that are out in the field that would love to connect with that and be a part of it on social." And so we sponsored a contest essentially for the second time that we did Chili's Underground where we said, "We want social media insiders. We want people that we're going to fly you to Dallas." These were team members from all around the United States. We asked them to submit videos on Instagram or Twitter and tell us why they were the right person to be chosen for this really special assignment to get kind of backstage as it were and be an industry insider for us. And we picked three of the best. We had tons of submissions. We had posters in the restaurant that was telling everybody, "Go do this." And it generated, to your point, a lot of great stuff. But the coolest part of it was what happened on the backside, which was the results that started to come through after the event. So we had three social media insiders that came to Dallas. We took care of them for two or three days. They got to meet the leadership team. We took them out to dinner and just had a blast and really showed them a peek behind kind of the curtain as it were of what it's like here at the home office in Dallas. And they had a blast. But then that night we went over to the culinary center. They got to be a part of the whole thing and interact with bloggers and industry professionals, the media. They just had a fantastic time. What ended up happening as a result of that was engagement and the use of the hashtag doubled over the last time or the first time that they had done the Chili's Underground. And we saw engagement off the charts because all of the people that were back home kind of watching from afar were saying, "Gosh, I was there getting to be a part of Chili's Underground." And so we're looking at ways to continue to use that. But it's one of my favorite because these three guys and gals that came from the field just were so excited and so proud. And they wanted to represent. And a lot of people said, "Man, you've got to be careful. What if they do something wrong? What if they drink too much? Or what if they just do something stupid?" And I was like, "We're going to be right there. We can walk them through it. There's nothing to be scared of." And sure enough it ended up being kind of one of the highest levels of engagement we had on social relative to a new food launch. So it's been one of the proudest things that we've done as a team where we just really got to see these guys light up as they came to Dallas. So just to clarify, the people were applying to be part of this and they were actually applying publicly on social media as well. These were channels where everyone could see. So even their applications is content. Yeah, absolutely. I mean we basically just said, "Go film a video and show us why it should be you." And we sat around a room and we looked at all of them. And we just frankly had a blast because we realized how much talent we have in our restaurants. And frankly how incredibly passionate our teams are for the work that they do. And it's been one of the certainly greatest senses of pride in my career and really where I kind of found my purpose along the way is to be able to let that pride come out and to be able to let the world see it. Because it's really been a journey in terms of understanding that you don't have to be afraid of this, that yes there's going to be bad stuff that happens and we deal with that. And don't get me wrong. We have those moments where an employee as my VP might say takes a stupid pill one day and does something dumb on social media in the restaurants. And we have to deal with that. But those moments are certainly fewer and much more far between when you see the impact that you're able to have on people that are living our purpose and really doing the work day in and day out because they're the ones that make us successful. So it's all their applications. Everything was out there for the world to see. And we sat around a room and watched it all and we were able to pick the three that we thought would be just great representatives of the brand that night. We had a blast. Fantastic. I could talk to you about this for hours. Just in the interest of everyone listening, just a couple of sort of quick and final questions. You mentioned engagement. What do you measure? What does success look like out of all this activity? So we've been looking at engagement for a while now. I would say we've been essentially tracking elements of engagement for about 9 or 10 years now. And I think a couple of the things that we really look at that we want to watch. So it's broken out into multiple different kind of questions and segmentation. But one of the things that we are really encouraged by is first of all engagement has gone up every year over the course of the past four or five years. I don't have the numbers here in front of me. But it's really kind of cream of the crop, best of the best engagement levels that we are seeing. And that our vendor partners flat out say this is unprecedented. We don't see stuff like this. And you guys are clearly doing something right. One of the things we look at is just belief in brand direction. And so if we are telling the right stories and if we are connecting and engaging with our team members in the field, then a byproduct of that should be that they really believe that what we are doing is the right thing and that they are a part of it. That they are engaged in the fact that they believe in this company, that they want to stick around. And so here lately, while turnover has gone up, we still have best in class turnover. We have best in class retention. We are proud of the fact that people say on that survey, on the engagement survey, they say, do you want to be here six months from now? Do you want to be here a year from now? And those numbers have gone up. The last thing I would say is belief in the leadership team. So another thing that we are really excited about and proud about from a social perspective is that our leadership team is widely available on social media. I think they were maybe a little skeptical at first. And I think they were kind of like, "Chris, what are you doing exactly?" And two years later, pretty much every last one of our senior leadership team is now available on social media. And they connect with people, they engage with people. One of my favorite, favorite stories is I was mentioning to Chili's underground team that came in and we flew them into Dallas. At the end of the event, this was two days later, we were at lunch and they were about to jump on their planes back home. I asked the team, I said, "So what was your favorite part?" And one of our rock stars from the field, her name is Samitha. She said to me, "You know, I think my favorite part was taking a selfie with Kelly Valade, who's our COO." And I thought, "My goodness, we've spent like three days with these folks giving them like the tour and letting them be a part of the backstage stuff that's going on with new menu tastings and interacting with media and all this." And she says, "Yeah, one of my favorite parts I think my favorite was taking a selfie with the COO." And I thought, "That's it." Like, that's what you want is a leadership team that is readily accessible, that is authentic and transparent, and they live that. They are available. They are flat out, proud to take selfies with our teams in the field and very quickly, those things have the highest sense of engagement. I mean, one of the funniest things is our CEO, Wyman Roberts, was in the restaurant. This was last week or week prior, and probably the single highest level of engagement we've had on a post with him taking a selfie with a couple people in the restaurant. And we just thought, "That's gold." Like, I don't have to work very hard for that because people love seeing that our leadership is accessible. So that's been one of the greatest parts of seeing the engagement numbers go up, is they have a real strong belief in the people that are leading the company. So final question. What's next? What's kind of in your plan for the next 12-20 months? Yeah, that gets me really excited. I was at a conference a couple weeks ago, and one of the ideas that Brian Solis was mentioning was the fact that each platform has its own purpose. If you're out on social, Instagram really has a different strategy maybe than LinkedIn and maybe that Twitter does. And we're going to start exploring that a whole lot more. How do we use these platforms? Instead of just repurposing content equally across all of them, how can we really target or leverage a strategy for each one of them? I think really we're super excited about seeing where we can take it in terms of new initiatives that we're going to be testing, really transforming the people experience for Chili's. I'm incredibly excited that we are venturing out on an endeavor to truly get at why people work. And hopefully tell that story to the world because a lot of people would say, "Well, of course I work to pay the bills or I work to, I've got a car payment or I've got two kids at home." But what we want to get at is really getting at the root of why does it matter? Why do you choose this place over someplace else? Because if all it is is a paycheck, then you can get that anywhere. And what we're finding time and time again is that it's more than a paycheck to the people that work here. And tapping into a company purpose and really getting behind it and kind of doing good in the communities in which we live and work. And being an integral part of those communities really wanting to be the change around what this brand stands for. So really excited about that. I think we're like anybody else. We're also trying to make sure that people are hearing what we're doing. And so there will be a whole lot more conversation around how can we kind of extend the voice. So I talk a lot about we've got a very active and engaged community of people. And yet I want to make sure that others can be a part of that and that they're invited in and welcomed in to engage with us. One of the concerns that we always watch out for is do people think this is only about people that already work here? And the answer to that is no. We want anybody and everybody to be a part of our community with Chili's Jobs and really see how we see the world. And so we're looking for ways to kind of maybe extend that reach some more and share that with more people than just our own team members. So really exciting stuff I had where we're getting fired up to take the next step. Chris, thank you very much for taking time to talk to me. Thank you Matt. It's been a pleasure. My thanks to Chris Ebbler. So what about the special offer I mentioned at the beginning of the show? Well, it comes courtesy of longtime podcast supporter Wreckfest. In the summer of this year, as the eyes of the world turned to the Olympics in Rio, Wreckfest is bringing its own style of street carnival to the recruitment industry, taking over Borough Market in London. Now in its third year, Wreckfest is a one day celebration of all things in-house recruitment and resourcing. With an emphasis on the power of sharing, Wreckfest creates one of the largest conversations of in-house recruitment professionals in the world. Head to www this is Wreckfest.com and use the code podcast16 to get your discounted ticket. Don't forget you can subscribe to this podcast on iTunes and on Stitcher and find past episodes at www.RFpodcast.com. On the site, you can also subscribe to the mailing list and find out more about me. Thanks very much for listening. I'll be back next week and I hope you'll join me. This is my show. [Music] [BLANK_AUDIO]