If you’re most companies, you may get one or more entries that may or may not point a job-seeker to the correct website. If you’re a few companies I won’t mention, you sadly go to the archives of well-known recruiter blogs begging you to upgrade your site. For the company Sodexo, the first result is its blog, and the second is the careers site, and the rest of the page is profiles in Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Flickr.

Sodexo is one of the largest employers in the world, and yet it flies under the radar when it comes to staffing. Sodexo staffs food and facilities management services around the world, and employs over 120,000 people in North America. Imagine that req load.

Sodexo didn’t have to imagine. To add to the confusion, it recently changed its name, which means new branding, new marketing, and new search terms. So in December of 2007, curious about the blogosphere and the impact of social media on staffing, it launched its first blog. Sodexo Careers is written on Blogger, and covers issues of staffing and HR, but also corporate citizenship, technology, and culture. It’s the number one search result on Google for “Sodexo Careers,” beating out the careers site on Sodexo.com.

The blog started out private, but after a month of internal monitoring, got the green light to go public. The Staffing team didn’t have much marketing help in the beginning, so the task fell to Kerry Noone, a marketing associate with a background in branding to manage the social media duties. The blog success led Kerry to create a Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Twitter presence, complete with hiring groups, touchpoints, and most important, live recruiters managing the action. For each site, the goal was to establish a presence, understand candidate expectations, and meet them.

Each site built on the success of the other profiles, and as Sodexo as a company got more comfortable with a site, individual recruiters begin linking to each other, supporting each other, and using personal profiles to create a lively and engaged hub for all of their hiring needs. What started as a single person writing turned into an organizational change that allowed each recruiter to use the company’s social media presence for their immediate and long-term hiring needs.

The focus was always on metrics. Traffic and hires were tracked as best as they were able (recognizing that hires often come from multiple sources). The result? A near tripling of traffic to the careers site by mid-summer, prior to the massive influx of resumes from the weakening economy.

• In February of 2008, traffic to the site averaged about 50,000 uniques per month. Three months later, that traffic was at 120,000 a month, and by August 2008, the three-month rolling average was at 135,000, with peak numbers reaching 150,000 uniques.
• These numbers only represent unique visitors to the careers site, and don’t count individual recruiter pages, fan pages, company profiles, or any traffic to the blog and other social media sites. YouTube alone saw over 60,000 video views in the first eight months of use.
• Hires can’t be tracked accurately all the way from the first contact to the eventual hire, but recruiters do report regularly on the importance of social media in the initial connection, through the employment process, and after the offer. Candidates are better informed, and anecdotally more engaged and more excited about Sodexo the company.

The effects of integrating social media into the Sodexo employment process are undeniable, but the startling part of their success came from understanding the effects of social media on the internal workings of the corporation. Having a successful social media program that is highly visible has led to a high degree of cooperation between the Talent Acquisition team and other divisions. Other sections of Human Resources, as well as Marketing, Sales, Diversity, and Corporate Communications, use the Sodexo social media presence to better launch initiatives and connect with clients. Internal resources look to the Talent Acquisition team for its obvious social media expertise, and the executives have a firm grasp on the value of the effort, measured against other costs like advertising, job boards, and recruiting fees.

Anthony Scarpino manages the division for Sodexo, and with the firm support of the overall head of Talent Acquisition, he has seen results that far outweigh the costs of implementation.  The campaign, made up of individual efforts (and light management oversight), has made Sodexo better at hiring the staff it needs. They are better recruiters because they actually carry on conversations with potential job-seekers in the medium the job-seekers wish to use. This conversation has helped teach Scarpino what job-seekers expect, and through that Sodexo has been better able to empathize and tweak the process for an improved overall experience. The result has been a steady increase in hires in the short time they have had the program working.

Most important, the success of the program has brought increased participation from the hiring staff. Recruiters aren’t forced into social media, but as they see results, they engage more and more, using the tools that best suit their hiring niche.

What Lessons Can Be Learned?

First, social media in recruiting may best be used at the individual level. Programs designed to give a company a presence online don’t work if they aren’t generating results for the recruiters in the trenches.

Second, supportive management is a key factor. The right amount of oversight and guidance is necessary to manage a system without dampening creativity and enthusiasm. In opening up to social media, Sodexo gave future employees avenues to speak with past and present employees. That’s a scary proposition for any company, especially one with so many employees, but the result has been a long-term positive reaction.

Finally, we see that it is possible to track the ROI of social media in staffing. Sodexo uses a mixture of branding and marketing metrics tied into standard hiring benchmarks.

The result in this case is an astounding increase in targeted traffic that once again shows that when social media is integrated into a company’s hiring DNA, good things happen. There are no silver bullets, but the earnest application of social networking can help your company put people to work.

The company is RehabCare, a provider of physical rehabilitation program services headquartered in St Louis. Each year, RehabCare is tasked with hiring hundreds of college graduates with degrees in physical, occupational, and speech therapy, as well as replenishing its current employees despite a severe shortage of therapists. The campus relations department is a lead generator for the company. Its job is to make contact with students early in their college careers, and shepherd them through the employment process until their graduation. In December of 2007, Leslie Stevens posted here and wanted some hard numbers. The department doesn’t share hiring numbers, as it works in tandem with the recruiting department, but last year, the company beat its goal for college hires, a number not easy to achieve in its market.

RehabCare’s Barbara Wallace, assistant vice president of campus relations, believes social media has been part of its success.

The most visible aspect of its web presence is still the Rehabcare Campus Relations Blog. The blog was started in August of 2007, and is the focal point of its web campaigns. Written entirely by staff, the blog discusses its trips to different colleges, showcases its top facilities, shares interesting stories about the industry, and serves as a platform to launch new initiatives. The biggest value is the ease of use.

Barbara’s team has made a real effort to integrate social media into its daily work routines, which means the work is spread out, other departments don’t have to be involved, and time spent on the sites can directly be tied to candidate tracking. While no one can definitively say that a student joined because they listened to a podcast, we do know that the site offerings give the recruiters something to talk about, and candidates have something to come back to besides job postings and a vague benefit page.

In the last two years, the company has used a number of free services to enhance the site and its offerings:

Speaking of search engines, relevant traffic results have been excellent, leading the blog to be on the first page for terms important to the company. Traffic levels have been steady at around 1,600 uniques per month, which is impressive given that it is a niche blog. College students are on the site regularly, and are more comfortable interacting with the recruiters through the blog. Wallace explains that “the blog has enabled us to reach and relate to students on the level that they are comfortable and familiar communicating. It also demonstrates that we are a progressive company and open to fresh and new ideas.”

What does 2009 hold? You’ll have to wait and see, but the desire to be on the cutting edge of college recruiting hasn’t been dampened. RehabCare is clearly an early adopter, and competitors for talent who haven’t joined the party will be playing catchup for some time. There have been successes and failures, but in each project, the knowledge level of the campus relations team has increased, and the rest of the recruiting department and the corporation are benefiting from an increased online profile. Social media has not been a silver bullet, and it certainly doesn’t replace the work the team already performs. Rather, the social media projects enhance its profile, and are an easy way to communicate with its audience. That communication clearly contributed to its success last year, especially in the eyes of the executives, who have green-lighted even more ambitious recruiting goals and strategies despite a tough economy.

The lesson is an important one. Social media recruiting works, but only when in concert with a strong team, a knowledgeable manager, and buy-in from executives. There are no starry-eyed Facebook surfers or YouTube watchers in this department. Just recruiters using social media to do their jobs — better.

This is not up for discussion. We sometimes dance around the premise, but recruiting is essentially the selling of a company on a candidate and a candidate on a company. Those who choose not to engage in selling can pretend to be noble, but they’re doing a disservice to their clients and employers. It’s engraved on stone tablets for every third-party recruiter who makes it longer than three months, and even the most sales-averse HR generalist has to admit that at one time or another, they’ve tried to talk a manager into meeting with a candidate based on their internal interview. It’s the nature of our business.

Where we sometimes butt heads is in the implementation of a sales mentality versus that of a process-oriented human resources approach. I have good news: The sales mentality is remarkably effective for finding high-quality candidates or hiring large numbers of people quickly. Unfortunately, no company needs that kind of structure forever, and the friction caused by a sales mentality in hiring can lead to management, administrative, and even legal obstacles. The human resources approach of a kindler, gentler HR works when you don’t have urgency, and when you have an enlightened HR/executive management relationship, but process-oriented hiring turns off the top creatives and results in the hiring of a stable, but less aggressive workforce. That’s no way to run a company in uncertain times.

These are uncertain times, but also exciting ones. Jobseekers, through social media, now have access to information on their would-be employers that is truly revolutionary. In addition to being connected through social networks to hiring managers and other employees, candidates can gather information on individual recruiters, staffing firms, referral programs, and even interview questions. They can do so while they are sitting in an interview room waiting for that manager to arrive. The imbalance of information has been a strength of companies, who can set wages, benefits, and generally control the employment process. Today’s job-seeker has access — and is learning the skill — necessary to balance that information. The result is smarter, better-prepared candidates with wider options as to where they work and what’s acceptable in the employment process (such as whether someone will put up with multiple interviews and long assessments).

This trend may not yet have affected your open requirements, but the strategies employed by the very top candidates are spreading to other high-quality candidates. I know this because I, and others like me are helping train them. Every time I write about a tool on a blog or a social network, candidates have every bit as much incentive to read as do recruiters. And from my website stats, those kinds of readers are growing in droves.

A declining economy, high unemployment, and an increasing need for knowledge workers is running up against demographics, increased specialization, and social media. Recessions are supposed to be times when companies get lean and mean. They cut benefits, reduce or eliminate raises, and often use layoffs to restructure the business. All of that is happening, but the ease of finding candidates hasn’t changed. Companies sometimes get hundreds of resumes per open position, and with the implementation of ATS and database search technology, one would assume that companies could afford to sit idly by and let job-seekers come to them. Companies adopting that attitude are already hurting, and have been for years.

The Answer: Become A Marketer

You don’t have to buy non-prescription lenses and large amounts of hair gel, but will have to adjust to a world where employment branding is not a buzzword, but something that defines what kind of candidates come knocking on your electronic door. Those companies that brag of hundreds, or even thousands of resumes per position aren’t happy with their results. Candidates looking for work blast off resumes hoping for a lucky hit, which ultimately clogs up the recruiting system, especially when you’re in an industry required to log what you’ve received and why you accepted or rejected the resume.

Recruitment marketing used to mean writing job ads and placing them in newspapers. Today, it covers a wide range of disciplines that includes creative, copywriting, SEO, web analytics, pay per click, video, blogging, and social media marketing. The new goal is getting in front of the right people at the right time, and that’s a marketing function. To be successful, it requires that every touchpoint (another marketing term) within your company be aware of how you hire and the best way to apply. Providing accurate information to channel candidates into the correct funnel is the most efficient use of your recruiting time, freeing your employees up to interview and match, rather than sort and sift.

Let’s be honest. Even with massive databases and an influx of resumes, most recruiters still spend over half their time on the job boards searching for new resumes. The reason is simple. Resumes are old the second they hit your database, while resumes posted on job boards (particularly if you search by “last posted”) show an interest in getting hired right now. The advantage of a marketing mentality, especially one of pull-marketing, is a value to all activities taken. Searches for a position today can be magnified by social media to create a long-term search engine value and online profile for your company. Unlike job boards and company websites where information appears and disappears, online marketing creates relationships that continue to bring value after a search is completed. It’s not easy, and much of this work is in its infancy, but companies that embrace online marketing through the prism of social media are finding that recruiting gets easier, and more efficient.

It’s no panacea. Marketing requires a lot of retraining and a sympathetic management who puts a priority on hiring. Marketing requires a commitment to long-term employees and long-term strategies, but the benefits of an enhanced company profile are easy to measure using onboarding surveys. Rather than simply asking where the candidate heard about the position, questions should focus on what worked to influence the candidate during the employment process. Where did they get information? What information was helpful? Who was helpful? Companies who embrace a thorough strategy of recruitment marketing will find it easier and easier to hire the best employees. Those who focus on short-term sales or long-term process-oriented hiring will find it easier to hire those who are left.