How social media can help resolve HR challenges

Alex Brown, senior social media and employment branding specialist at Waste Management, talks to Savage's Robin Tooms about how they're leveraging social media to solve HR challenges.

Robin: Hello and welcome to this edition of Brandonomics, an inside look at top brands and their marketing strategies. I am Robin Tooms, Vice President of Strategy at Savage Brands, and my guest today is Alex Brown, Senior Social Media and Employment Branding Specialist at Waste Management. Alex, welcome to Brandonomics.

Alex: Thanks for having me once again, Robin. It’s a pleasure.

Robin: Well I know, Alex, that you work mostly with the talent group in H.R. at Waste Management. This has got to be great because it really lets you focus on kind of the H.R. and recruiting challenges there. I would ask you, what value have you been able to see that you provide to the recruiting efforts in that team specifically?

Alex: Well, at Waste Management we hire almost 9,000 people a year at 1,200 sites across North America. With dozens of recruiters and sourcers on staff, there’s an array of different challenges that everybody faces in different areas. I like to see myself as acting from a consultative approach, coming in and helping them solve those challenges using a tool box that includes tactics and strategies that they may not have ready access to. As I act as a consultant with the dozens of recruiters and sourcers that we do have on staff, I like to see myself as a way to extract the narrative out of the challenges that each of them face and translate that into consumable content that resonates well with our audience, thereby producing more qualified candidates to help fill those positions faster with better quality hires.

Robin: Well, this does actually seem to parallel quite a bit what happens on kind of the customer marketing side and how that might work with a social media person. So I would think that you would have a lot of advice for anyone trying to look at social media on either of those sides.

Alex: Absolutely. At the end of the day, we are all selling something. Interestingly enough in the H.R. space though, we are selling a huge change to someone’s life. So we just have to understand that there is a human element to what we’re doing in our tactics and strategies. As long as we don’t forget that, we can produce quality content that really resonates with our audience.

Robin: That’s what’s going to matter.

Alex: Absolutely.

Robin: Well, thank you so much for sharing that, Alex.

Alex: Thanks so much.

Robin: This has been another edition of Brandonomics, an inside look at top brands and their marketing strategies.

 

Waste Management, Inc. is North America’s leading provider of integrated environmental solutions. It partners with customers and communities to manage and reduce waste from collection to disposal while recovering valuable resources and creating clean, renewable energy. https://www.wm.com/