Social Media Recruitment Strategy Case Study: Accenture Plc.

Social media has become an essential and powerful recruiting tool available for HR managers and also changed the recruitment process by bringing relationships to the forefront. There is great value in leveraging this tool just because of its natural potential to multiply connections, build viral networks and reach talent faster. The use of social media as a recruitment tool has taken off in recent years with a number of high-profile companies like Accenture, Infosys, Burger King, Reckitt Benckiser, SABMiller, etc. using it to recruit talent for their companies. According to Suzy Style, Accenture's UK recruitment director, the professional services company turned to social media including Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter to adopt a more aggressive recruitment strategy to find talent. "There is a global war for talent and we believe that to [gain an advantage companies need to] develop long-term relationships with candidates. Social networking sites are one of the key enablers in achieving this," Style says. The popularity of social networks among graduates is one of the reasons the company started to test social media in the recruitment process.

"We're advertising all our roles through social networking and particularly in experienced-hire recruiting on sites such as LinkedIn and what we're finding is [LinkedIn] particularly plays to the strengths of some groups," Accenture's Style says. "We're actively involved with some groups - SAP professionals for example - and we're seeing an increasing number of people using it as part of their strategy to find jobs." This highlights the fact that Social Media also plays a crucial role in recruiting experienced hires too. But it's not just the big names using social sites to access a new talent pool. According to LinkedIn, smaller companies are using the professional networking site's tools to recruit new talent, along with more than 25 per cent of the FTSE 100 in the UK and 50 per cent of the Fortune 100 in the US. "In terms of company size, we have everything from companies with £100bn valuations to agencies and clients that have two or three people," says Ariel Eckstein, LinkedIn's MD of hiring solutions Europe.

According to John Campagnino, senior director of recruiting at Accenture, they are saving over $100,000 for a senior hire by using social media. He estimates that Accenture will make 40% of its hires in the next few years using social media. When recruiting through Social Media platforms HR managers have to know what tools to use for recruiting what type of talent. Social Media sites like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and blogs are all separate tools that may warrant different approaches. Accenture's Style says: "You might find that a graduate is more likely to be using Facebook for example and an experienced hire might be more likely to be using LinkedIn, so it's ensuring that you look at the channels for the best way to reach the people that you need."

Accenture has an employee referral program that is the management consulting company's primary source for talent. "[The] program allows employees to search for open jobs around the world and share them with their network through LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter," says Accenture's global head of sourcing, Sjoerd Gehring."Employees can track the status of their referral through their personalized employee referral site. Through integrated communication campaigns we've been able to significantly drive up the volume and quality of employee referrals." Accenture people play an important role in our recruitment efforts because our employees know Accenture well and can . . . help find the right person for the right role. Employee referrals are also a cost-effective way to fuel growth."  

In the past 3-4 years, Social Media recruiting has gained prominence and HR Managers are using social media sites for both checking the prospective employee backgrounds and also using the data provided on sites like LinkedIn in their recruitment process. The second aspect of social media recruitment is the distribution of information relating to job openings and requirements through 2nd degree network referral effect like Facebook’s “Like” and “Share” buttons, Twitter’s “ReTweets” and LinkedIn’s that allow rapid spreading of content (i.e. jobs and candidate referrals) to second and third degree networks, that also pushes message out to a much larger and more qualified audience. Another big advantage is the low cost factor as most of the social media sites are free to sign up and also charge lesser amounts of sign up fees which will definitely help the companies to save money on recruitment processes. But the fact remains that social media recruitment is a good option but companies still have to rely on traditional sources of recruitment for majority of their recruitment and for best results they should maintain a best mix of both the types of recruitment.