HireClix Stories: Optimizing Your Social Media Strategy to Engage Millennials

The Challenge

A global technology company in the Southwest faced an impending exodus of employees reaching retirement age. The client recognized the need to step up recruiting efforts and better engage with millennials to counterbalance their current workforce demographics. At the same time, the client realized they had a unique value proposition that they were not communicating effectively to the younger generation. For more than 100 years, the company has delivered innovative science, technology and engineering solutions to government and industry clients around the world. It was important to share this story with a new audience in ways that would resonate with potential hires and reinforce the client’s ability to hire workers with a STEM background.

While the client knew it was important to launch a social media strategy targeting millennials, they also realized they had limited resources to develop one and looked to an outside expert for help.

The Recommendations

The HireClix consulting team conducted focus groups, leadership interviews, and employee surveys as well as in-depth brand audits and analyses of the client’s existing social media. These efforts not only led to a deeper understanding of the company culture, employee experience, and its unique value proposition, but also revealed opportunities to increase engagement with millennials on social media. After reviewing the data it collected, HireClix designed a social media strategy that:

• Identified five different personas based on the client’s critical needs and talent segments
• Implemented a social media playbook mapping out channels, content types, cadence, messaging and budget for each persona
• Provided playbook and strategy training to the client’s in-house social media team

This laser-focused strategy of targeting key personas enabled the client to not only connect with their targeted audience, but also create a research-based, meaningful online presence and expand their brand awareness.

The Results

Working with the client, HireClix launched the new social media strategy. During the first three months of the launch, HireClix served as the client’s recruitment social media manager for these campaigns while also training the client’s social media team on content creation and messaging that aligned with the millennial personas. In addition, the client also leveraged the HireClix Creative Services team to help develop social media specific visual assets which added to the content delivery and messaging.

This strategic approach to targeting candidates, along with an emphasis on effective training of the client’s team, fueled a dramatic uptick in content that would resonate with millennials as well as increased engagement with the targeted audience. When analyzing the year-over-year social media results, there was a massive improvement in the engagement numbers for the dedicated Facebook careers page. The improvement in key social media metrics for the client  with the new strategy achieved great results, including:

The persona-based social media strategy established by HireClix and implemented jointly with the client positioned them to be in a better position to connect with candidates on social media channels. The strategic consulting team demonstrated how to connect with the younger generation through targeted content and messaging, while also positioning the client to effectively carry out its social media strategy with its own team.

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