How To: Social Media for Recruiting

How does your company leverage its social media presence to recruit the best employees? Alex Brown, Senior Social Media and Employment Branding Specialist at Waste Management, shares some tips and tricks.

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: Thank you so much, Robin. It’s great to be here.

Robin: Well I’m so glad you’re here, because we get to talk about social media and really what Waste Management is doing in the recruiting space. So you’re directly responsible for the content strategy around recruiting and HR. Tell us a little bit about how you are convincing people to work at Waste Management.

Alex: Sure. Well, we understand that a career change is a huge part of any person’s life. We understand how impactful that can be to not just themselves, but to their family and to their communities. And so we take that opportunity to influence not just them, but as many members of their inner circle as possible. We target our messaging not just to our target candidates, but to all those people who could potentially influence the major decision that they’re making about their career.

Robin: So the biggest part of that strategy is, you also need to employ the hiring managers into getting the message out about this. It’s not just you getting the message out as kind of the social media specialist, but employing them to use their networks on social media as well. How are you doing that?

Alex: In the recruitment group we are proud to be partnered with the front line business. So part of the recruiting strategy is to empower hiring managers to help us select star employees who are very pleased with the work that they do at Waste Management. We like to identify key members of our staff who can act as highlighted employees so that we’re able to tell their story. Over the last few years we have made a conscious effort to ensure that we’re not standing on soap box, talking about how we have jobs, they’re great, take our word for it. The messaging has really transformed into, “Take a look at the employees that love what they do. Take it from them how fantastic it is to work at Waste Management.” So we’re leveraging the power that we have in our own workforce to get the message out there, producing messages that inherently resonate with our target audience.

Robin: And that’s how you make sharable social media content.

Alex: Those kinds of postings are by far the most engaging and get the most shares, comments, likes or what-have-you on all different kinds of social networks.

Robin: Okay, well thank you for sharing that, Alex. 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/