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Employer Branding Talent Acquisition

The Adecco Group’s Guide to Leveraging LinkedIn

Next up as part of our interview series with some of LinkedIn’s Most Socially Engaged Staffing Agencies is the largest staffing firm in the world, The Adecco Group.

The Swiss-based Fortune Global 500 company excels in terms of content performance and content engagement on Linkedin, so we caught up with Ed Blust, the Global Head of Digital Marketing to get an in-depth understanding of how the company leverages LinkedIn.

LinkedIn has been instrumental in our social media journey because of its special focus on the professional world. Like the perfect candidate and client match, LinkedIn is aligned with what we do. Like the Adecco Group, LinkedIn is a global network of candidates and clients who are making connections, looking for new talent, or the next job opportunity. It is crucial for us, as the global leader in workforce solutions, to make a meaningful impact on this kind of platform.

Consolidation is key

Being a very decentralized company, with a number of different brands, consolidation was a key aspect. We now have 5 global pages for our leading brands. At the same time, we work on a very personalized and localized user experience. We have also been investing in employee advocacy, with our internal colleagues acting like social media ambassadors in a very successful way. Of course, content marketing also played a crucial role. Social recruiting was the natural framework for our recruiters and consultants all around the world.

We started this four years ago, but have really ramped up our focus in the last 12 months. Here’s how:

  • Consolidation of brands
  • Focus on thought leadership and content marketing
  • Leveraging employee advocacy
  • Attention to internal education and training
  • A big emphasis on ROI

Employee involvement

As a global organization, it’s vital that everyone understands the importance of being socially engaged in our industry. We have thousands of employees involved in recruiting and hundreds creating content. Many of us are active on social media, both in a personal and professional way. We work a lot on education to encourage people to use this platform, as we see it as strategically important: we do monthly webinars on how to build and develop your own personal profiles. We also have one-to-one sessions with specific people in the company.

We encourage our most active and connected colleagues to use our employee advocacy platform elevate to help them share content across their own networks. This means their profile is not only comprehensive and consistent across all platforms, but also alive and engaging.

Content marketing mastery

Content marketing is critical for us. Our work has an impact on the lives of millions of individuals, we have a significant role to play in society, and we need to be as accessible and open as possible — and you cannot do that with basic advertising. Content marketing is a way for us to include, empower, influence, and – why not – wow people as well. The greatest learning for us has been that you can have jaw-dropping content but it is not enough unless you are also investing to make sure you reach the right audience. Another learning is: be bold. We don’t need to speak too much about the Adecco Group as a brand, let’s speak about the world of work and how the job market is changing – let’s talk about things that matter to us and to our audiences.

For us, it is vital to make the future work for everyone, and social media helps us get that message across and shape the future. We always work to align our content goals with our recruiting goals because our content needs to support our wider mission in the world of work. In the end, it’s a great way to attract, engage, grow and retain your audience – and that means customers too.

We see content marketing as a way to attract new business, to define our brand, to listen and learn about where our industry is heading, and to provide thought leadership on issues that matter in global labor markets. Being a global leader in HR solutions, we are naturally “people-focused.”

We are talking to candidates, clients, associates, media, investors, governments, and lots of different types of institutions at the same time. These audiences are all important to us, and they all want to hear

Develop a complete plan

Planning is a central part of any successful content strategy. If you don’t plan, you cannot be consistent, and you cannot improve. A content plan should always be closely aligned with the overall strategy and activities of your organization.

Practically speaking, we have developed a global content calendar that is supported by local content planning. When we publish content, we use a global content management tool – again to keep that consistency. It obviously depends on the platform, and we tailor content to be effective across the social media universe, but the important thing is to keep that message consistent over a long period of time and to back it up with action.

We work closely with our PR and communications teams on this, as well as involving experts and specialists from across the company.

There is a huge potential for our industry. Boundaries can be redefined and we have new ways to match candidates and companies. It represents a whole new system to communicate with our stakeholders and it’s all about engagement. Last but not least, it’s impacting our product offering too, with dedicated apps and social platforms, such as Adia or YOSS.

By Guest

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