In this beta edition of the Recruiting Future Podcast I feature an interview that I recorded back in November 2014 with Fredrik Tukk of Maersk Drilling. We talk about Maersk Drilling’s approach to recruiting with Facebook and the fantastic level of success they have had using it fill very hard to fill roles
Recruiting Future with Matt Alder - What's Next For Talent Acquisition, HR & Hiring?
Recruiting Future Podcast Episode 1
There has been more of scientific discovery, more of technical advancement and material progress in your lifetime and mind than all the ages of history. Hello everyone and welcome to the very first episode of the Recruitment Future Podcast. I've been working on this a while, very excited to finally be able to bring it to you. This is a podcast about recruitment innovation. It's going to be interview-based, I'm going to be talking to you some very, very interesting people, recruiters, heads of recruitment, thought leaders, people who are kind of really setting the agenda for the future of recruitment and recruitment innovation globally. So that's what the podcast's about, we'll be looking at what companies are doing now that's interesting, innovative and above all, effective and where people think recruitment is going to go in the future, what are the trends, what are the issues, what's happening. So podcasts will come out fairly regularly, you can subscribe to it on iTunes, you can also be publishing it on SoundCloud regularly and if you go to RFpodcast.com that's where I'll be publishing the show notes and you'll also find an archive of all the shows. I'm recording a number of interviews for forthcoming episodes at the moment, talking to some really interesting people but for the first episode I thought I'd go back into the archives and basically we'll re-publish an interview that I did a few months ago. So back in November 2014, I had a very interesting conversation with Frederick Took from Merced Drilling. Merced Drilling, a company I've admired for a very long time and I think that they're genuinely innovative in terms of how they've used social media for recruitment in particularly Facebook. So I wanted to find out a bit more about what they've done, why they've done it, how they've done it and the results that they've got. So here once more, if you've not heard it in the past, is my interview with Frederick Took from Merced Drilling. Hi everyone and welcome to another recruiting feature interview. This time I'm talking to Frederick Took from Merced Drilling. Frederick, would you like to sort of introduce yourself? Yeah, hi Matt, yeah I'm Frederick Took, I'm head of communication marketing and branding at Merced Drilling in Copenhagen and I'll be working for four years now and we put a lot of efforts in our new recruitment campaigns where we're going to find a tractor and crew 3,000 new people. Yeah fantastic, there's been a lot of, obviously a lot of talk about, you're amazing social media of Facebook campaigns. Can you give us a bit of background into how that started, why you were looking for 3,000 people and why you decided that Facebook for example would be the best place to do that? Sure, yeah it all started basically when our senior management team kicked off the new strategy growth strategy in back in 2009 or 10 where they came up with the brilliant strategy that we're going to double the size of the company and in our case it means that we have to recruit a lot of people and in the employees we're looking for are not anyone off the street, it's people with the exact right certificates, you have to have the right education and the right experience within offshore drilling which then posed a big problem because everybody of our competitors are also looking for the exact same competences. Of course, yeah, so I went up actually to the management team and told them we need to get ourselves established and on social media to be able to find these people and attract them and they were not, I should say, keen on that, it was basically, it was a lot of negative outcomes on that, you know, and basically I managed to persuade them anyway and we got to go ahead to, we just start up small. So the first thing we did was to actually ask some of our offshore employees because 90% of the employees we have are working offshore on an oil drilling rig. So we asked a couple of them, you know, which social media they're using and everybody said the same thing, it's Facebook, so for me it was natural to go with, we wanted to build networks, the stages, the places where we find these people, so then we came back and said it's Facebook and my HR department at that point in time basically went totally nuts and said no, we have to go with LinkedIn, it's heaven, you know, we're recruiting people, we're not going to post party pictures, you know, find young people online, but we convinced them then to actually take off these Facebook campaigns and so we started to build up, build up our Facebook site, nice and steady, we haven't been investing a lot of money in trying to get people in there, you know, it's organic growth all the way, as we never focused on how many people are in there, we are focused on getting the right people on board, so we are very keen to make sure that it's people that we actually can recruit, that we basically get in there. Okay, and how have you done that, how have you, because one of the, you know, most striking things about your Facebook presence is just how, you know, how many likes you have, how much relevant engagement that you get, what was it that you did to make sure that you kind of had that right audience and ultimately to build such a big audience? Yeah, I would say that a couple of important things we did from the start and one was that we had a very close relationship with HR, so basically HR developed their employer value proposition where we then have taken that one and whenever we post something onto Facebook, we basically tried to illustrate and build up stories around our employer value proposition. For instance, we never posted a job on there, you know, and we think that's a huge difference because if you think about it, basically 10 to 20% of the people are active job seekers, the other 80 to 90% are passive job seekers and if we were targeting the 10% who are actively looking for a job by posting jobs on there, they would be very keen and happy, but the other 90% we would never be able to attract them and this, we do this in two ways, you know, we both try to attract long-term the right people and short-term we also have campaigns which we shoot off together with HR where they have a need to find someone, so that's one key element in the success, I would say, to all the time look at build a long-term relationship with these people through storytelling, not by job posting. The second thing is that we put it up as a very strategic initiative, meaning that we got a clear connection to our corporate strategy and in that way we could get a buy-in from our senior management team who then sees the value, going from where it started, you know, saying no way we're going to be on Facebook to now like to see the value in it, where we deliver a lot of leads and the feedback we have got from HR on the more qualitative side is that they say the quality of the applicants has increased dramatically since we started this on Facebook, it's much more higher quality of them and the other funny thing is that when they come into the first interview they know a lot about most willing, which they didn't know before, when they will make a reference to say we saw it on Facebook, you know, or on your website or some other social media where we're present, but there's a clear reference there too that they learn much more about it, they get attracted by the company through the messages we're putting out there on Facebook, but it's because, as I said, it's a strategic initiative which is really important and the third factor I would say why it's been successful is that we always strive to get quality in there, the right people, we have never looked at, as I said before, how many likes we have or anything, it's never been a measurement, the measurement is engagement and the engagement levels we have are between 10 and 18% on each post the big amount. Yeah, that's amazing, okay, fantastic, fantastic and just when it's sort of going back to when you got started because obviously I can see now that the Facebook page is well established, it's doing all the things that you talked about, I love the fact that you don't post jobs on it, it's all about the company, the storytelling and people in the right audience kind of sharing the content, but how did you initially start it, did you sort of use pay for advertising, did you take it to your own employees, how did you get things, how did you kind of get the ball rolling with the page's audience? We did actually a couple of things there, one was that we asked all our employees to actually go in and like the page and also share it with their friends because in our industry when people be working here for 20, 30 years, they've been around to a couple of employers and that means that they know a lot of people at our competitors which means that that's the perfect way to connect, if someone of your old mates recommend another company you listen to it rather than if you see an ad, paid ad, so that was one of the strategies where we asked our employees to help out, which they did, it was fantastic and for the start we actually had some paid advertisements on Facebook to actually attract people within offshore industry but they were extremely targeted towards, first of all, the places where we know people live and work in the offshore industry like youth done in Texas, Stavania in Norway and Aberdeen in Scotland, which is like offshore cities, so we had very targeted ads, so we don't have these 10,000 Chinese people because we have no business and very few people know about offshore drilling for instance in China or other places, so we have really targeted and if you look at what, where we have our presence now, it's clear and it's also a very qualitative measure we use to say where are we present and the top 10 cities are the cities where we actually have business and where the people that we want to attract are located. Fantastic, so you measure the quality of your audience and part of that is making sure that they are literally in the right location for your business strategy and recruitment needs. Exactly, another fun effect with speaking of statistics, the interesting thing is that you can get so much statistics out of this, so one thing we discovered was that for a while we had almost 15% of our fans on Facebook were women, and given that we only have 1% of show workers are women, it's like a very interesting fact, but it turns out that it's the wives and the sisters and the daughters of our employees, but the interesting thing from recruitment angle is that all of a sudden we have another target group which was a pair of before, and we do get this odd email saying my husband is looking for a new job or here is CV, please have a look, so it is actually a target group where we have talked about not to create actually Facebook groups of the offshore wives or everyone called them, it's an interesting angle, and that came across only because you had this statistics and could read out of it. Yeah, of course, of course, absolutely, and in terms of the results, you mentioned sort of a few things, the quality of people coming through, people mentioning the Facebook page in their first interview being much more informed about the company, are there any stats you can share around that or is there anything else that you can tell us about how well it's worked? Yes, both on the long-term strategy, we see now that we measure how many people comes in from Facebook or LinkedIn directly to our recruitment page on our website, because that's why they have to make the application, and we can see there that roughly 15 to 20% of the people who comes, go directly from Facebook or LinkedIn into actually apply for a job, they don't only come into the website, we measure it very strict, so we measure it as if they have applied for a job even, so that means that we have increased both the number and the quality of the people who comes in there, but on the other side it's also interesting that we launched campaigns where HR has come to us a couple of times and said, you know, we tried everything, we are looking for two very experienced people in Houston, for instance, and then they don't say, we don't know what to do, we can't find them, and we then come up with the suggestion to make a Facebook campaign, which is directed for a job position, but what we do is that we launch a campaign targeted to the people they're looking for in a specific area, in this case in Houston, we've done the same for Singapore, and now we do it in Norway, but then we launch a campaign, and in Houston, they normally get around 90 to 100 applicants given that they have an X number of job postings out, and we did this for a month, they got 700 applications, and people then come back to me and say, yeah, but that's only volume, you know, that's not an interesting thing, but the thing is that they found the two guys that we're looking for, which they hadn't found before, and the investment was 200 quid for us. Fantastic, fantastic. And I think, you know, in an industry like yours, if you're driving more applications and the quality is good, I can't see why that's a problem when it's so difficult to recruit the people that you need. Exactly. Fantastic, and you've been winning awards for this work, or you've been nominated for awards for this work, can you tell us a bit about that? Yeah, both. Last year, we won actually the Danish Internet Awards for Best B2B Communication, based on this digital presence that we have built up, and now we're nominated for the European Internet Awards in three categories. It's the Best Recruitment Campaign Online, the Best Community Presence, and the Best Internet Strategy, our online strategy should be. Fantastic, and that's across all of B2B, not just recruiting. And they're up against Coca-Cola and all the other big consumer brands as well, so it's going to be really interesting, and we get to know by the end of September. Brilliant, well, very, very good luck with that, and I hope it works out really well for you. Final question, what's next, where are you sort of going with this now, is there more of the same, or have you got some more sort of initiatives that you're looking at? In the social space? Yes, we have two major initiatives we're looking at to take this to the next level. First one is mobility, to go mobile. We see that mobile recruitment is happening really fast, and people are on the mobile all the time. You just look around you when you sit in the bus, or wait at the train, or whatever, everybody's on mobile, and you need to capture them in this space where they have available time, a couple of minutes, and make it easy for them to actually apply for a job. I was invited to a meeting by LinkedIn in their head office in April, and at that point in time, they said that 41% of their visitors came on a mobile, and by the end of this year, they predicted it will be above 50%. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, actually. It's amazing growth there, and we see the same. So we have actually launched our first mobile application, but that's for internal use, because in a big organization like ours, we need to establish routines and organizations within IT, and connect to everybody with HR, and so forth, to be able to build this up. So we started on a small scale to learn internally, but the next big step is probably go out with mobile recruitment and drive that. Fantastic. And the second thing that we see coming very big, which we also have tested, is big data analysis. Okay. We actually did a project, a proof of concept, together with Microsoft here in Denmark, where they developed a big data model based on the input and the facts from our Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter accounts. Okay. And it's amazing what type of conclusions and analysis you could draw from this material, just based on a very, for this product, kind of simple model. Yeah. So we're taking that to the next level, and going to launch something new there to make analysis where you can then predict, you know, where do we find the right resources, which is what it's located in, and so forth. Fantastic. That sounds great. So I'm going to be, it's going to be a busy rest of the year for you then. Oh, yeah. Fantastic. But it's really interesting, it's fantastic, and so many things happening all the time. So, and we can see the results that we have always said, you know, that if you can see the results and it's measurable, then everybody's going to say that it's working. So now we come there internally, you know, people in the management team even admit now saying that, yeah, it is working. Fantastic. That's brilliant. I mean, I think as I've said in my blogs before, I think what you're doing is excellent. And I think there's a brilliant blueprint there for other employers to sort of take a look at and maybe rethink how they're doing social. So thank you very much for talking to me, Frederick. Thank you, Matt. Thank you. Great talking to you. Thank you. And to you, this episode of the Recruiting Future Podcast, you can find the show notes at rfpodcast.com as well as details on future episodes also, you can subscribe to the podcast on iTunes. Thanks very much for listening. This is my show. of the day. (upbeat music) [BLANK_AUDIO]