Social Media Marketing for Recruitment in Asia


I recently had the pleasure of spending a few days in sunny Singapore training the marketing teams of Adecco Asia on using LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and beyond.

This is LinkedIn’s fastest growing region and there are more Facebook users in Asia than any other continent. As for Twitter, the top 2 cities in the world in terms of posted tweets are Jakarta and Tokyo (followed by London).

Some observations:

  • Twitter is massive in Japan, possibly because you can stay anonymous on the platform
  • Facebook is huge in Taiwan, more than half of the population are using it
  • The English language is fine for professional communication online, however the more campus/graduate focused the conversations are, the more I would recommend using local languages
  • Asian social media audiences seem to be more responsive and provide more engagement than in Europe
  • Any candidate looking for an international career and/or with a large company will have a LinkedIn profile, however it may not contain deep data

Adecco are doing great things already in terms of social media and watch this space for the world’s leading recruitment company also taking the lead online.

Here is a good summary blog post by Kanda Supawasin who heads up Adecco Thailand’s marketing efforts – if you don’t read Thai I recommend you use the Chrome browser which will translate for you!

Finally, I managed to take the lift up the Marina Bay Sands hotel to enjoy the view and share how people pronounce the word ‘LinkedIn’ in Singapore:

Related: How Do they Pronounce LinkedIn in Peru? [Video + Slides]

Filed Under: Events, Social Media, Social Recruiting Tagged With: , , ,

How Do they Use Social Media for Recruitment in Poland?

linkedin and social recruiting in poland

Hot off the trail from my journey to Peru, thought I’d got east this time and headed to Poland for a few days of Social Media training for Recruiters & HR. The first training session was in the historic town of Krakow, followed next day by Warsaw which is the capital.

Together with our partners in Poland, SMLS, we had attendees from Ernst & Young, Citi, Aon Hewitt, UBS, Luxoft, ABB and more.

Social media adoption in Poland

warsaw linkedinNo prizes for guessing that Facebook is the most used social network in Poland with about 9 million users. But the number two network is not what you expect. Every country has it’s own version of social networks and in Poland it’s GoldenLine which is their equivalent of LinkedIn. GoldenLine has one million registered users and is all about professional networking. The contender is of course LinkedIn which currently has about 700,000 users in Poland. The usage of Twitter is limited, apparently it’s mainly politicians that use it in the country. Google Plus, Instagram, Meetup and the other 2nd tier networks are rarely used.

In terms of where social recruiting is most successful, it’s definitely LinkedIn and GoldenLine. Job boards are still a good place to use for employer branding although very few good candidates apply through this channel.

Social media for recruitment training

My training consisted of a large chunk of LinkedIn which seemed to be the most interesting network for the HR professionals I trained in both Krakow and Warsaw. Then a dollop of Facebook mainly for branding and community building, followed by the other social networks mainly from a sourcing perspective. Somebody mentioned that Twitter is useless in Poland for candidates, I did a search for Java developers using Twitter in the country and came up with a few thousand users. The lesson there is that it’s not just about the biggest network, it’s about networks where you can find ‘passive’ talent before anyone else.

Here is a brief summary of the slides I used:


And this is what it looked like in Warsaw:

And what’s great about Poland?

I think Poland is great because of the people who are very switched on and friendly. They also have a great sense of humour which is helpful in a training room. I sampled some local cuisine in the shape of spinach piragis which taste better than they look :-) . If you get the chance, try to go to Chłopskie Jadło which is a chain of restaurants serving up traditional Polish fare in a beer hall setting.

Thanks for having us Poland, many thanks to Krystian at SMLS for organising and looking forward to coming back soon!

 

Filed Under: Events, Social Media, Social Recruiting, Travel Tagged With: , , , ,

LinkedIn Tips for Recruitment Agents [Presentation Slides]

apsco m square linkedin recruitment

Here’s a LinkedIn for Recruitment briefing presentation I delivered at APSCo and M Squared in London last week. My brief was to talk about the bigger picture as in stats, why people use LinkedIn, the future AND to throw in some tips and tricks there.

It’s a challenge to squeeze lots of content into a briefing but this was my attempt which stimulated a good conversation around how agencies use LinkedIn and social media in general.

If you are interested in learning more about LinkedIn for Recruitment professionals, have a look at our LinkedIn for Recruiters Masterclass at Covent Garden.

Any questions, just tweet me or or leave a comment below!

Related: Social Media Seminar at the Confederation of British Industry [Slides]

Filed Under: LinkedIn, Monthly, Slides, Social Recruiting Tagged With:

How Sodexo Deals with Negative Twitter Feedback

sodexo twitter escapades

Over at the Link Humans blog we recently wrote a case study about Sodexo’s social recruiting success in the US. The piece was very well received, especially by Sodexo themselves who tweeted, commented and shared it. In case you don’t know of the company, Sodexo is a one of the largest food services and facilities management companies in the world, with 380,000 employees, representing 130 nationalities, present on 34,000 sites in 80 countries (thank you Jimmy Wales).

They are also very advanced on social media, particularly for employer branding and talent acquisition. So it’s perfectly normal to be tweeting with their VP for talent acquisition, who is Arie Ball.

On Twitter you have to expect the unexpected and when we were tweeting about how great Sodexo are, someone jumped into the conversation and tweeted: “I know people at Sodexo being treated like garbage. But it’s not the one with a degree :-) ”.

I saw that and thought oooops, best to leave that conversation now. It obviously doesn’t look great and I was wondering if Sodexo would acknowledge the message which was public on Twitter.

sodexo tweets with flyingmike

Sure enough, about 12 hours later (reverse order in the screenshot here from Hootsuite) probably due to time zones, Arie Ball replies with “We value every one of our employees and would like to know more – please send us a note [email address]“. I translated that from texting language by the way.

I thought this was rather impressive, here you have a Vice President of a huge company taking their time to reply to a random Twitter user halfway across the world. Arie Ball’s reply looks very genuine and I don’t know what will happen next but judging by this response, I’d expect this to be dealt with properly.

The lesson here is that when you are a very transparent company and you have chosen to use public channels such as social media for your communications, you have to be ready to deal with the negatives. You open yourself to criticism but as long as you stay professional and actually take the time to listen to people you impress third party folks like myself. Indeed, by demonstrating this responsiveness and maturity, you even get a blog post written about it!

Has this ever happened to your company? How did you deal with it?

Related: How To Contact PayPal Customer Services: Twitter.

Image credit Mike Baird

Filed Under: Monthly, Social Recruiting, Twitter Tagged With: