The purpose of this thesis was to find out how Talent Center Oy could use Social Media to attract more employees and client organizations and gain more visibility in the market. The objective was to renew and modernize the open job vacancies that Talent Center Oy posts on Social Media. Both were randomly selected from the posts that the Talent Center had posted in their Facebook timeline.
In the early days, Talent Center Oy's clientele consisted mainly of Logistics customers and this opened the door to the Finnish market for Talent Center. Currently, Talent Center's HR services include recruitment, headhunting, temporary workforce and temporary management.
The need for recruitment
Recruiting a new employee can be seen as a project that starts from the need to do something and ends with a solution. Nokkonen from Talent Center is not busy with applications or job interviews, he is out looking for new clients. All the while, the recruitment process is running at the back with open job advertisements on social media and in the newspapers.
In our case, the need for recruitment is usually born through another organization, as they do not hire people to work for Talent Center, but for the client's companies. A situation where Talent Center's client volumes were to increase remarkably would force them to go through this process and look for employee(s) to work for them rather than the client organizations.
The phases and problems of recruitment
- Advertisement
- Applications
- Interviews
- Final selection
It is useful if the interview lineup consists of the applicant and two people from the recruiting organization. Hiring extra hands for the business doesn't seem to be a priority at the moment, but it's something that will definitely happen in the future if the business grows as planned. Then again, someone applying for a high-tech engineering position may lack some social skills, but it's really important that they're experts at what they do.
In the end, it must be remembered that it is not only the applicant who influences the selection, but also the person conducting the interview. It's something they all have an interest in and have shared their ideas and opinions in the process to make the content more inclusive.
Characteristics and features of social media
- User orientation
- Interactivity
- Openness
- Democracy
- High speed and real time
The phrase Social Media is used to describe new services and applications that combine communication between users and the creation of their own content. The characteristics of a social media are ease of use and speed of adoption, it is free and offers the possibility to create something collective. Social media openness refers to the honesty and transparency users demand from companies and organizations.
Transparency requires courage from the organizations as it is not always easy to act in your own name in public and seize the opportunity to be blamed. One thing that goes hand in hand with the openness is the democratic style of social media. Social media is part of a huge change in society, where relationships have partly moved online.
This has had a major effect on the way people and organizations communicate with each other, which is why a company should pay close attention to the use of social media services. In short, Social media is a public platform (website) where members of a community can read, view and post various articles, photos and/or videos. The French blogger Fred Cavazza (2013) has created a model in which social media services are divided according to their main features: sharing, discussion, networking and publishing.
In this thesis I have focused on using Facebook as it is the largest social media service and my knowledge and skills of the Talent Center are strongest with Facebook. According to this research, the Talent Center will increase the use of services such as YouTube and Twitter, and a little later will add Instagram to this social media mix. The main goal is to find the best combination of social media to maximize visibility with the optimal amount of work and effort.
YouTube
Logged in users can subscribe to different channels and like and comment on other people's videos. One can also create their own channel and upload their own videos for other people to watch. The step to try is easy to take as one can login to YouTube with Google credentials and the uploaded videos can be hidden or shown only to certain people.
When a business's goal is to be the cheapest in the market, they need to point that out all the time. Before starting this project Talent Center already had accounts on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, but they were not using those platforms very effectively. Talent Center CEO Jari Nokkonen said that he tries to post as many business-related articles and things as possible, but since he's taking care of everything else in the company, those things get less attention.
Somehow, the post has almost all the vital information about the job; Estimating the duration of the work, how many shifts they have and when the work starts. The comment is an attachment to the post as it is a link to the Talent Center website where the application form for this job can be completed. Even when you measure the amount of clicks - which includes clicking on the posted link and "other clicks", ("read more..." etc.) - the percentage is still 9.77%.
All the videos have the same main character: A young man in a white shirt and sometimes a bow tie, overalls or some other work-related accessory. All the videos also follow roughly the same pattern: First there is a short introductory phase, which is about the vacancy that the video is advertising, for example a man driving a forklift or talking on the phone. The last stage is simply stating what the open competition is and where you can find more specific information and contact details: “Talent Center is looking for call center employees.
They are made to be a bit humorous, short and sweet just to grab people's attention and make them click on the link that leads to Talent Center's website. The preview and statistics of Talent Center's "Talent Center" can be seen in photos 12 and 12. The call center video was left without advertisement on purpose: the application period was almost over and Talent Center already had some applicants.
All other videos are limited to the application period of each vacancy, but business-to-business videos can be shared and distributed at any time as long as Talent Center has the same services. All the new videos received a lot of attention from the likes of the Talent Center Facebook page.
The Electrician
Many people clicked like, wrote comments and most importantly shared the posts with their Facebook friends. Paid ads were used in two of the four videos, but that mostly impacted the views of the post, not the views of the video. This is why the total reach in the videos' Facebook stats received less attention.
In the following chapters, I open up the main points from the results of each video.
The Warehouse Worker
The Call Center
The Talent Center
Talent Center's B2B video, "Talent Center" only got 83 views, but at the time of this writing it has been on YouTube for significantly less time than the others. One thing that cannot be seen from these numbers is that the Talent Center's Facebook page has gained more new likes during this process. 13 likes is generally not an improvement, but since Talent Center's likes have been sitting around 153 for a long time now, this is a good improvement.
Talent Center Oy's Facebook ad posts had all the required information, but they lacked imagination and attractiveness. This research is done to get more job applicants and more importantly, more visibility for Talent Center Oy. Talent Center didn't actually consider traditional channels - other than the newspaper - as an option.
The latest "Talent Center" video was created to attract the attention of potential future client organizations, firms that are likely to use temporary labor or temporary management in the near future. Since all the videos were visible to the followers of Talent Center Oy's Facebook page and through it available to the rest of the people, there was no doubt whether the videos had an effect or not. In "Electrician" and "Store" the improvement was hundreds of percent and the results surprised even the CEO of Talent Center.
One of these was already taken care of in the "Talent Center" video, as it was the Talent Center logo clip at the end of the video. The clip does not change anything about the ad but it helps to make Talent Centre's logo more known and also the website is included in the clip. For the future, my suggestion to Talent Center is that they should continue doing these video versions as much as possible.
Talent Center is already using Twitter and LinkedIn and during this research they registered an Instagram username. Selected employees working in different organizations will receive user credentials on the Talent Center's Instagram, and in this way they can post photos from their daily work life and show people what they are doing.
