Jobs in Pods Blog

Yesterday we discovered an ad on Facebook that piqued our interest. McDonalds has a new recruitment campaign. Here’s a quick screen shot. See the page.

It’s a rather long fan page with a story about an employee and a call to action to “Search Careers Now“. There is no wall to make comments so this page is clearly designed to drive traffic to McDonalds.com to apply. They currently have over 1,000 fans. Check out some other facebook recruiting tips.

NOTE: it is very likely that this page was created by their ad agency and they paid to sponsor it throughout Facebook.

Ernst and Yong’s Facebook group is up over 13,000 members. An impressive number. But I found this quote from their director of recruiting about why it works:

Dan Black, director of recruiting for Ernst & Young used Facebook to connect with students. But he did so in a different way. Lots of questions were asked on E&Y’s wall, and he wrote back in a very personal tone. Realized that this was one of the few channels to have a direct conversation with students.

E&Y definitely gets this social media thing. Its about establishing relationships above all else.

We were browsing the company groups on Facebook today and came across Oracle’s page. Upon first glance it appears to be a popular group with more than 1600 members. But we were disappointed to find that it is rarely updated with content, nor has anyone bothered to remove spam on their comment wall.

There are problems with this group from several standpoints. First, it appears that a lone employee started the initiative. Bad move. Companies wanting to utilize Facebook are better off assigning a TEAM of people to manage the group. That way if one person leaves or loses interest, the group will not get stale.

Secondly you need multiple people to add content and engage the members. There is some content on here but most of it appears to come from overseas members. Its curious why they didn’t start the network as a closed network (employee only) because anyone can join. The only reason to create an open group is for recruiting or PR purposes.

Thirdly, spam has found its way to the Wall and no one has removed it. All administrators have the ability to remove spam so its obvious that the creator has forgotten about this group. (A group can have multiple administrators)

Perhaps one day someone at Oracle will discover this group and close it or revive it the right way.

Blogger buddy Matt Martone of Hotjobs alerts us of the recruiting efforts of Sodexho. They are embracing social media with a fervor by utilizing YouTube, blogs and Facebook. They also use Second Life.

Now if they would only add podcasts they could be maximizing their social media recruiting efforts!

As we’ve stated before, all employers need to start crafting a social media strategy for recruiting. The next generation workforce is waiting in the wings.