August 11th, 2009
Fortune 500 Series: How EMC used social media to recruit, re-brand, rebuild
EMC can best be described as an entity. Not only in the Fortune 500, the infrastructure information provider was recognized by Fortune as one of the 10 most admired companies for product and service quality. This success didn’t come easy to the giant, which needed to significantly rebuild its business after the 2001/2002 recesssion. Part of that rebuild included acquiring more than 40 companies over a handful of years. The other critical part of the rebuild included attracting top talent to help drive a more successful business. To achieve the latter, EMC turned to social media for its recruiting efforts. The below interview with Polly Pearson, vice president of employment brand and strategy at EMC, details how the company acquired talented employees through social media, how career fairs via Second Life can actually work, and how the company measures success.
Q. [Jennifer] How is EMC using social media as part of its HR efforts?
A. [Polly] We are using social media to build awareness and relationships between EMC and the talent market. We see social media as an ideal resource to further our employment brand in a meaningful, high-reach and low-cost manner. For example, externally EMC is using tools such as Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn and employee blogs and tweets to build awareness and affinity with the talent market. We use these tools to provide a genuine, testimonial-based look at EMC’s culture, careers and capabilities, as well as to bring awareness to certain job openings, company developments and general career tips.
Internally, we have a global social media platform for community building, collaboration and knowledge-sharing. This internal platform has resulted in the serendipitous development of organic EMC brand ambassadors who have taken their new found voices and confidence as spokespeople to the external social network airwaves. This has, in effect, multiplied EMC’s external efforts to build genuine relationships with the talent market.
Q. How did that start? Why did you want to add social media into the program?
A. Following the recession of 2001/2002, EMC experienced a multi-year turnaround. We rebuilt our business by entering adjacent markets, altering our business model and acquiring more than 40 companies. This evolution was a remarkable success. It, however, left some employees with a mild identity crisis. By late 2006, roughly half of our company was made up of employees who were new to EMC within the prior 18 months. On top of that, by 2007 we were looking at thousands of jobs to fill, a major college hiring program, and the sizable growth of EMC’s emerging global operations in markets such as India, Russia and China. As we looked at ways to elevate EMC’s brand with our target talent market, we realized we could not out spend our competition. We wanted to build EMC’s brand at the lowest possible cost, do it on a global basis and reinforce EMC’s core brand attribute as a leading innovation company.
Enter social media. The first tool we used was, interestingly enough, the least mainstream yet came with high buzz and superior results: Second Life. We held a series of highly effective recruiting fairs in Second Life that showed us the undeniable power of social platforms for business. The scale was infinite and the cost was low. The connections and relationships happened with a type of immediacy we had never experienced before on a business platform. In the summer of 2007, we launched behind our firewall EMC’s first customized internal social network. We named this platform EMC|ONE and today the majority of our employees worldwide are connecting on it and sharing information regularly in a 2.0 manner.
Next: Measuring for success –>
Jennifer Leggio, aka "Mediaphyter," writes about the "social business" side of social media - including enterprise, security and reputation issues. See her full profile and disclosure of her industry affiliations.
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