world's first ever end-to- end social recruitment campaign on twitter

World’s first ever end-to-end Social Recruitment Campaign on Twitter

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HCL TECHNOLOGIES

World’s first ever end-to-end Social Recruitment

Campaign on Twitter

Application for Forrester Social Reach Award


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1) Executive Summary: .............................................................................................................................. 3

2) Social Media Reach opportunity analysis: ............................................................................................ 3

3) Challenges ............................................................................................................................................. 4

4) Objectives.............................................................................................................................................. 5

5) Campaign’s Process:.............................................................................................................................. 5

A. Ideation: ............................................................................................................................................ 5

B. Channel Research .............................................................................................................................. 5

C. The Interview Process ....................................................................................................................... 6

D. Job Profiles: ....................................................................................................................................... 7

6) Campaign Strategy: ............................................................................................................................... 9

A. Awareness Phase: Curiosity Build-up ................................................................................................ 9

B. Interest and Desire Phase: Detailing ............................................................................................... 10

C. Action Phase: Launch ...................................................................................................................... 13

7) Selected Media Coverage: .................................................................................................................. 18

8) Major Outcomes ................................................................................................................................. 25


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1) Executive Summary: While organizations have been using social media as a platform for hiring through job postings and

background checks, there has never been an end-to-end recruitment process on a single social

media platform. #CoolestInterviewEver is a unique reach campaign launched by global IT major, HCL

Tech that leverages Twitter to create a complete recruitment engagement while amplifying

“Employer Value Proposition” reach. For the first time, hiring became a two way conversation on a

social platform. Total engagement from prospective job seekers was 250 K, 5 candidates shortlisted

via twitter interviews conducted, all over 15 days of rich conversation with candidates from over 60

countries. While the total spend on this initiative was equal to the average spend on recruiting one

full time employee, it ranks as one of the most impactful outreaches in social media history having

already been covered by more than 60 international publications . It has resulted in HCL Tech

enjoying a refreshed and strengthened employer brand and more followers on Twitter than any

other IT Services organization in the world.

2) Social Media Reach opportunity analysis: In the last 5 years, social media has grown to immeasurable heights and has changed the way

people drive political, social and economic change. It has developed itself from a medium where

information that was earlier sent and consumed, to a platform where content is being created,

shared, reused, changed and forwarded. There are approximately 1.7 Bn active social media users

today that make it 1/4th of the world’s population. LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter are undoubtedly

the key players in the race with an active member base of 250, 500, 200 million respectively.

Due to the growing popularity of these platforms, they have started influencing the way recruitment

was done a few years back. Where on one hand, the evolution in this space has equipped the best

candidates out there looking for the jobs with tons of information at their fingertips; on the other

hand, it has compelled the recruiters looking for high quality talent take a marketer’s approach and

shift their focus towards building their own virtual talent pool and appealing to candidates’

individual inclinations to find and cultivate top talent.

As per a study conducted by Jobvite1, it has been observed that 94% of the recruiters use or plan to

use social media in the recruiting efforts. This is 21% more than the usage in the year 2008. There

has also been a jump of 33% in the time to hire, 49% in the quality of candidates and 43% in their

quantity. All this has made digital media the number one channel for recruiting followed by referrals

and recruitment consultancies. This reflected in a study conducted by CEB that showed 82% of the

organizations are forecasting an increase in their social media usage over the next 12 months.

IT industry has grown tremendously in the world making its own mark. These companies have

become the growth engine of the economy and are driven by a generation that we call “Gen Y”. The

Gen Y (people belonging to age group of 19-30 years) is full of zeal and wants to work with an

organization, which gives free reign to its entrepreneurial capabilities. A place where its voice is


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heard and ideas implemented- thereby allowing it to make a real difference. This generation grew

up with the Internet and is used to having everything readily available and being savvy users of the

social media, it is technologically empowered.

The Gen Y constitutes 45% of the total HCL work force and hence social media recruitment becomes

all the more crucial. HCL has therefore aggressively started investing in the digital/Social media

recruitment interventions which has led to an increase in the non-digital to digital recruitment ratio

from 32% in the FY 12 to 51% in FY 13.

Though some of the organizations including HCL have started leveraging social media for hiring but

the world of End-to-End social media recruitment remains largely unexplored. The genesis of

#Coolestinterviewever evolved from the understanding of the untapped opportunity. The initiative

was ideated as a unique recruitment process to hire end-to-end from Twitter for a project at HCL.

1 Social Recruiting: Survey Results

3) Challenges 1) Post the global economic slowdown that originated in the US in the year 2009 several

countries experienced rapid shrinkage in their GDP, rising unemployment levels and an overall slowdown.Indian economy being fuelled by the growth in the technology sector, is dependent on the “outsourcing” or “off shoring” of key business processes by large global organizations. the growth rate of IT sector halved in 2013 ever since the global recession (from 30% to 15%). A large slice of revenues for Indian IT sector being derived from the US based clients, the impact of the slowdown in the US had a deep impact on the Indian IT sector.

2) Changing economic conditions have adversely influenced the employer brand. Due to lesser vacancies, it becomes very important to explore new age channels for talent acquisition.

3) The targeted economies have well established local job platforms, while there was no channel that could go across the boundaries and was more economical at the same time.

4) IT sector has been losing its sheen because of factors like low promotions, low salary increments and uncertainty. Thus, an intervention was needed to build the recruitment brand for the company.

5) A big portion of the allocated budget for recruitment have always been leveraged for sourcing requirements, leaving substantially lower budget for recruitment marketing initiatives. The challenge was to create a world class recruitment campaign using the amount of the annual salary of an average employee.

6) The reach of the social media platforms using the traditional recruitment marketing interventions at HCL is 60k for Linkedin and 3k for Facebook which could not yield the targeted hiring numbers. The challenge was to increase the reach by multifold.

http://web.jobvite.com/rs/jobvite/images/Jobvite_SocialRecruiting2013.pdf


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4) Objectives 1. To quickly create a preferred employer brand amongst the 32 countries where HCL

operates. 2. Achieve engagement of more than 200K through this campaign across digital channels. 3. Establish Leadership position in terms of reach & engagement on Twitter vis-à-vis

competition. 4. Introducing HCL as a “Digital Disrupter” by creating a “First-In-Class” initiative which

establishes HCLT as progressive Gen Y organization utilizing new age media in recruitment process.

5. To further HCL’s perception as preferred global employer for Gen Y with spend not exceeding the average cost of hiring an on-site employee

5) Campaign’s Process: Process included ideation, selection of the channel, social media strategy, selecting the job

profiles, the interviewing process

A. Ideation: The requirement was to establish HCL Technologies as the “First-in- Class” & “Digital Disrupter” in the IT Recruitment Industry. Instead of using traditional platforms of e-recruiting i.e. job portals or social apps or the website, the team decided to leverage the new channels for end-to-end recruitment drive.

B. Channel Research a) Selecting the best platform for the social recruitment campaign launch

After detailed research on the platform, Twitter was selected as preferred platform because

1) Twitter is a multi-faceted real-time conversational content based platform which allows users to create connections, network and hand-pick candidates. Twitter sees about 175 million tweets and about 300,000 new visitors on a daily basis and thus, is emerging as a major platform for recruitment branding & recruiters. Further to this as per the study conducted by Gozaik & ComScore –

6.7 Mn Tweeters plan to change their jobs in next 12 months

5 Mn Tweeters have used career search service in last 6 months

More than 500,000 social job announcements are released on Twitter each month

39% of all job seekers are on Twitter

By the close of 2014, total job announcements will reach more than 2M per month

Of the top 50 positions posted on Twitter, IT and sales comprise more than 24% of posted positions.

2) The platform’s structure of replying in 140 characters increases the challenge for candidates to provide their answers succinctly and cleverly. The one-liner mode of


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conversation on Twitter marks its superiority over other platforms for conducting social interviews and hence, Twitter.

3) HCL already had a strong follower base of 175k+ on twitter, the team had a captive

audience to initiate the campaign.

b) Mobile Responsive Website

As per the recent survey conducted by Glassdoor.com, it was found that 43 percent of job

candidates’ research their prospective employer and read the job description on their

mobile device. As per another independent survey conducted by Snagajob2, 68% Job seekers

consider their mobile as an important job search tool.

Thus, the first step for the team was to create a website which was mobile responsive and

multi–device friendly. The landing page as well as the website was designed to ensure that

we did not miss out on audience coming through mobile or tablets.

C. The Interview Process The interview process was divided in 3 Rounds, as described below:

Fig 1 – Interview Process

Pre-launch Phase


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Round 1: The selection would be basis correct answers to 6 consecutive questions on IQ, OQ

(operational quotient) and FQ (functional quotient). There is no validation being done and this is

similar to the practice being current followed by recruiters when they do telephonic interviews.

At the end of the first round, only 100 candidates are getting shortlisted- globally.

Round 2: Tweet Chat: HCL Leaders interacting with 100 shortlists to the answer their queries

about HCLT culture & domain requirements.

Domain Specific Q&A: Inviting the 100 short-listed candidates to submit their LinkedIn profiles

and. All 100 will also be asked to sign in a terms and conditions + authentication document

which will carry their digital signature.

Round 3 - Finals: In the final round, 5 short-listed participants will be evaluated by HCL Leaders

through an interaction on Twitter and 1 candidate will be handpicked from amongst them.

D. Job Profiles: After doing a thorough Google search volume analysis and Social Listening analysis, on different

domains in the IT sector, we chose 5 high search volume work profiles and created in

opportunity in them, so that, we could reach out to maximum job-seekers through the

campaign. All the selected profiles were mapped to HCL’s senior leadership & it was decided

that the finally selected candidate will shadow the leader in their respective field.

Big Data Guru is the

Data Analysis Consulting

Profile. The candidate is

supposed to stay

abreast with numbers

and understand Data

Analysis as a domain.

The candidate will be

mentored by Matteo

Colombo, VP, Business

Analytics Services.

Hacker-In-Chief is the champion software coder profile. (S)He is supposed to know various

computer languages and would be aligned with delivery teams of HCL. The candidate will be

mentored by Kalyan Kumar, Sr. VP and Chief Technologist, HCL.

Fig 2 – Job Profile (Big Data Guru)


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Fig 3 – Job Profile (Hacker In Chief)

Digital Trotter will work as a Digital Marketing Consultant to HCL Technologies and will explore

how HCL leverages digital to reach out to target audience. The candidate will be mentored by

Kiran Somalwar, VP, Enterprise Transformation Services.

Fig 4 – Job Profile (Digital Trotter)

The Ideapreneurship Evangelist

is the business & IT consulting

profile. The candidate is

expected to be aligned with the

company’s culture of

Ideapreneurship and will be

working closely with

Dharmender Kapoor, VP, BITS

and will explore HCL culture.

Fig 5 – Job Profile (Ideapreneurship Evangelist)


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Womenspiration will be a consultant for HCL Technologies in the field of diversity. The candidate

will further improve how diversity is implemented in the company and would work closely with

Srimathi Shivashankar, Associate VP, Diversity and Sustainability.

Fig 6 – Job Profile (Womenspiration)

6) Campaign Strategy:

Since the digital channels these days are flooded with information; it was required to launch the

campaign in a subtle phased manner.

Phase (AIDA) Awareness Interest & Desire Action

Theme Curiosity Build-up Detailing Launch

Period 23/12/2013 to 20/01/2014 20/01/2014 to 10/02/2014 10/02/2014 onwards

Details • No details provided but

the name of the campaign

• Subtle hints about the

idea were provided

• Details about the

campaign were provided

• Captured audience base

created

• Buzz created on Twitter

and other channels

• Questions themselves

created a lot of buzz

• Buddy Concept for

enhancing the campaign

• Tweet Chat to let the

candidates communicate

directly with the leaders

Collaterals 1 single page microsite and 3

Teaser videos

A full-fledged tabbed

website + 2 full length

videos

The website + The Twitter

hashtag

Table 1 – Campaign Strategy

A. Awareness Phase: Curiosity Build-up The campaign was kick-started in the second last week of December 2013 with the launch of a

microsite and 3 Teaser videos. The microsite was just a landing page with minimal information


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and a single Call-To-Action where the interested candidates could enter their e-mail IDs to be

the first one to know about the campaign. Neither the content nor the 3 embedded teaser

videos were meant to reveal the campaign details.

Prior to the launch of the website, A/B testing was done for two versions of the single-page microsite. In one version, the text on the website was the main attraction while on the other one the videos were the central collateral. The website performing best towards our goal was used for this phase.

The website was made Search Engine Optimized. Since, the website did not have too much of text, we used both on-page as well as off-page methods for optimization, like link building, XML site mapping, meta-tags, etc. In the first 20 days of launch, the website reached among top 5 search results on Google globally which generally happens in 2-3 months post launch.

Since, a large part of our target audience accesses internet through mobile devices, the website created was mobile responsive and had great UX on multiple devices.

The website also had social sharing enabled with customized messages for each platform.

Fig 7 – CoolestInterviewEver Microsite

B. Interest and Desire Phase: Detailing

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rJlLpkIwiKM

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ViO6xlMYugU

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WmO-Hc772OU


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Three weeks prior to the campaign launch, the full-fledged website was launched with the

objective of providing the interested candidates the complete information about the campaign.

This website also had two new videos which explained the campaign up to a certain extent.

In order to cater to the UX needs of our target audience, this website was also mobile responsive and had no scroll on the pages.

Instead of a single page website, this website was made tabbed which helped us from the SEO perspective.

Fig 8 – CoolestInterviewEver Main site

As quite a few people knew about the #CoolestInterviewEver, the focus of the new version of website was shifted from getting new registrations to creating buzz around it. Thus, the new website had a Call-To-Action that said “Start Tweeting Now”. Through this, the interested candidates could share the text “I am giving the coolest interview ever. Are you? www.coolestinterviewever.com #CoolestInterviewEver” on Twitter. Soon, we started getting a lot of engagement on the Twitter hashtag.

http://www.coolestinterviewever.com/

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v_v5eMriVIc

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2D4KhhShyIU

http://coolestinterviewever.com/


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The website www.coolestinterviewever.com reached search rank 1st on Google within 7 days of the new website launch for the keyword “Coolest Interview Ever”. In the process, the website overtook authoritative websites like www.theguardian.com, www.inc.com, www.today.com, etc for the search term “ coolest interview ever”

Email Marketing: Mailers were sent to the database of 200,000 job applicants from the previous year owned by HCL. Also, mailers were sent to the students of 67 Major B-schools in India, 6 B-schools in US and 6 B-schools in UK about the campaign.

The website has received tremendous response from 102 countries with 95,000+ page during

the campaign. This was enabled by promoting it organically on all official social media properties

of HCL Technologies which included LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus. The

communication about #CoolestInterviewEver received whooping response from our captive

audience on our Social Media Channels. Not only this, the 5 videos received 80,000+ views

during the campaign.

Promotion:

Paid Media:

Social Channels: A minimum amount of promoted tweets and promoted cards were used on Twitter to reach out to the Target audience by targeting the Twitter handles of major job search sites.

Campus outreach: In order to have an integrated outreach around the campaign, physical banners were also sent to B-schools and interaction sessions were carried out.

Owned Media:

Internal Outreach: HCL Technologies realized its major potential within. We reached out to our 75k+ employees through our internal channels like intranet, physical interactions, floor walks, webinars and individual emails, told them about the campaign and got them talking about it and sharing it in their social networks.

HCLtech.com visitors and Job Seekers: In order to Leverage the hcltech.com visitors and regular job seekers, the corporate website was aligned to the campaign and the career section was updated with information about the campaign along with a clickable banner which led to the campaign site.

Earned Media:

Social Channels: The website and the videos were organically shared with our captured audience on various social media channels. The queries from the interested individuals were regularly responded to.

Influencer Outreach: Considering the importance of Influencer Marketing, we reached out to influencers individually and shared the concept with them. As a response we got them (profile of some influencers who engaged with the campaign shown below) talking about us on Twitter.

http://www.coolestinterviewever.com/

http://www.theguardian.com/

http://www.inc.com/

http://www.today.com/


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Name of Influencer Influencer Profile

Gautam Ghosh Represents Philips, a Global 500 company, on social media, Featured as a Social Media thought leader on Forbes & Guest Blogger, Social Business News (14,500+ Twitter Followers)

Tinu Cherian Abraham

144,000+ Twitter followers; Public Relations & Digital @UST Global, Wikipedia Admin, Social Media Enthusiast, Frmr PR & Exec Com member @ WikimediaIndia

Anand Pillai Chief Learning Officer, Reliance (A 73Bn dollar company)

Mark Babbitt A major Twitter influencer with 26,200+ Twitter followers, CEO & Founder of @YouTern, which works in the field of recruitment

Sebastian Turner B2B partner and brand advocate at Twitter Table 2: Influencer Profiles

C. Action Phase: Launch The campaign was launched on 10th of February with the team actively engaging with the

participants.

For daily reporting, industry standard analytics tools, namely Simply Measured and Oracle SRM were used. A daily status update was sent to the team and the other internal stakeholders to get their inputs on further optimization.

HCL’s world class social command center was leveraged to track engagement 24 x 7. The social command center played the following roles:

o Engaging o Listening o Reporting o Shortlisting o Optimizing

The engagement commenced 3 days prior to the launch of the campaign with the team actively responding to the queries around #CoolestInterviewEver.

The tone used in engagement was extremely personal. The candidates felt as if they are interacting with a brand personified. The 3 tenets of HCL Brand – a) trust, transparency & flexibility b) value centricity c) Employee first customer second(EFCS) where exemplified in every tweet. The rising excitement could be felt in the participant’s tweets.


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In order to make sure that the information shared gets registered in the minds of prospective

candidates, a creative led approach was taken, and even the FAQs were converted into creative.

An Interesting Fan site During the course of the campaign, an anonymous admirer of the campaign created a fan site on

the lines of our main site. The site was named as www.coolestintervieweeever.com. (Screenshot

below)

Fig 9 – Fan Site

http://www.coolestintervieweeever.com/

http://coolestintervieweever.com/


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The website featured the Live Questions, the previous questions, HCL Tech’s Twitter Handle and

#CoolestInterviewEver search results. A nice piece of work, indeed.

Interesting responses: A few interesting tweets were obtained during the course of the campaign:


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Innovative response:

Fig 10 – Innovative Response

As we were trending… The website went down!!! Due to the amount of interaction being generated by the ones following #CoolestInterviewEver,

we trended in 19 cities across the nation for 4 different days. Due to the amount of sudden

traffic on the website due to trending, the website went down for a brief while before order

was restored and the website made live again.

Fig 11 – Website went down because of massive traffic


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7) Selected Media Coverage:

Redmond.com: HCL Technologies turns to Twitter for employee recruitment

http://www.redmond-reporter.com/business/246018091.html

BLOOMBERG BUSINESSWEEK: HCL to conduct job interviews on Twitter



http://investing.businessweek.com/research/markets/news/article.asp?docKey=600-201402120349KRTRIB__BUSNEWS_3184_63404-1


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[SOURCE: http://investing.businessweek.com/research/markets/news/article.asp?docKey=600-

201402120349KRTRIB__BUSNEWS_3184_63404-1 ]

RECRUITER: HCL Technologies launches Twitter recruitment campaign

[Source: http://www.recruiter.co.uk/news/2014/02/hcl-technologies-launches-twitter-

recruitment-campaign/]



http://www.recruiter.co.uk/news/2014/02/hcl-technologies-launches-twitter-recruitment-campaign/




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YAHOO FINANCE: HCL Technologies Launches First Ever Global Twitter Recruitment Campaign


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TECHGIG.COM: HCL Attempts To Hire Candidates With #CoolestInterviewEver Campaign On Twitter

[SOURCE:

http://www.techgig.com/readnews.php?category=Other+Technology+news&tgnews_link=http%3A%2F

%2Ffeedproxy.google.com%2F~r%2Fwatblog%2FAfck%2F~3%2FltbDtenZgfc%2F&tg_type=rss&tgnews_i

d=45556 ]

http://www.techgig.com/readnews.php?category=Other+Technology+news&tgnews_link=http%3A%2F%2Ffeedproxy.google.com%2F~r%2Fwatblog%2FAfck%2F~3%2FltbDtenZgfc%2F&tg_type=rss&tgnews_id=45556



http://www.techgig.com/readnews.php?category=Other+Technology+news&tgnews_link=http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/watblog/Afck/~3/ltbDtenZgfc/&tg_type=rss&tgnews_id=45556


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HERALDONLINE.COM: HCL Technologies Launches First Ever Global Twitter Recruitment Campaign

[SOURCE: http://www.heraldonline.com/2014/02/10/5662800/hcl-technologies-launches-first.html ]

http://www.heraldonline.com/2014/02/10/5662800/hcl-technologies-launches-first.html

http://www.heraldonline.com/2014/02/10/5662800/hcl-technologies-launches-first.html


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FORT MILL TIMES: HCL Technologies Launches First Ever Global Twitter Recruitment Campaign

[SOURCE: http://www.fortmilltimes.com/2014/02/10/3276823/hcl-technologies-launches-first.html ]

http://www.fortmilltimes.com/2014/02/10/3276823/hcl-technologies-launches-first.html

http://www.fortmilltimes.com/2014/02/10/3276823/hcl-technologies-launches-first.html


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Reuters.com: HCL Technologies Launches First Ever Global Twitter Recruitment Campaign

Source: http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/02/10/ca-hcl-technologies-

idUSnBw106296a+100+BSW20140210

Fig 12 - Viral

http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/02/10/ca-hcl-technologies-idUSnBw106296a+100+BSW20140210




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8) Major Outcomes With participants from more than 60 countries across the globe & media coverage from

more than 50 international and national media worth USD 500 K, HCL has furthered its position as an employer of choice.

The total engagement exceeded more than 250K, there was an overachievement by 25% in terms of engagement.

By the end of this campaign, HCL is leading the IT industry in reach on twitter with more than 201K followers ahead of global companies like IBM, Accenture and Indian Players like TCS, Infosys, and Wipro etc. The campaign has enabled HCL to organically gain the highest number of followers during the campaign month.

With trending across 19 cities & across the nation for 4 different days, the #CoolestInterviewEver campaign is an extension of HCL’s employee-centric culture, designed to uncover new talent in the IT field while strengthening its position as a progressive organization utilizing new age media to refresh the recruitment process.

The total campaign cost did not exceed average spend on recruiting one full time employee by utilizing mix of organic & inorganic reach through different online & offline channels.

25k+ increase in the number of followers in 2 months

83% increase in follower rate in the last two months as compared to the last 10 months

Lowest Cost per engagement among the marketing channels

world's first ever end-to- end social recruitment campaign on twitter

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