Social Media Recruitment
With 38,000 employees sprinkled around the world, General Mills is no stranger to recruiting and hiring workers. You may know General Mills as one of the world’s biggest food companies, producing brands that might be on your pantry shelves: Betty Crocker, Cheerios, Old El Paso, and Pillsbury.
But, by the end of this lesson, you’ll also know them as a powerhouse in social media recruitment; that is, using the tools of social media to find employees who are the right fit for their organization. Let’s get into the case study.
General Mills’ Social Strategy
Think about your own circle of influence, your friends and family. Most, if not all, probably have at least one social media profile, right? Some may have two, three or a dozen. This is the day and age in which we live. People connect with friends, favorite brands, celebrities, and sports heroes through the use of social media. So, it stands to reason, if you’re a business wanting to connect with potential employees, social media should be a likely destination.
For General Mills, their foray into social media started with the realization that they were having difficulty connecting with millennial jobseekers, those people entering the job market who were born primarily in the 1980s and 1990s. As the company started looking at its e-recruiting, or internet-based recruiting practices, they discovered that this generation not only lives on social media as a whole but expects to be able to interact with brands in terms of employment on channels like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and YouTube.
That’s when the company decided to fully commit to recruiting through various social media platforms. And, they approached each platform in a unique way, understanding that different types of people use different social media platforms for different purposes.
Question 1
Would you think e-recruiting is a possibility for General Mills?
Question 2
What challenges does this practice present for the recruiting process?
Sample Solution
Social recruiting is the process by which recruiters use social media platforms to locate applicants. Other names for it include social hiring, social media hiring, and social recruitment. Social media is widely utilized for employer branding in addition to recruitment. Employers may maximize their inbound recruitment efforts and spread the news about their employee value proposition through these channels. Social media recruitment has been growing in popularity among talent acquisition experts as social media usage has steadily increased. This is hardly shocking given that social media was used by almost 75 percent of professionals between the ages of 18 and 34 to find their most recent position.
