Comment by Jeanne Ritterson on January 6, 2009 at 12:32pm

I have been thinking about strategy too. I listened to your YouTube. My problem is that Ecolab has one website and about 30 recruiters. We all hire for different talent streams - mostly sales, but I look for engineers. I like to use Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook but I cannot integrate with my website because I don't own it -- how do we do the many to one approach? I can tell you that one Twitter won't work because I sell something different to a Chem E than what is sold to a sales rep. I am interested in your further thoughts.

Comment by ryanchartrand on January 6, 2009 at 12:55pm

Hi Jeanne,

That is indeed one of the difficult aspects of all of this. Here are my suggestions to your two problems:
1. Since you don't have control of Ecolab's site, you're ultimately going to have to propose to someone in IT or HR that you need this coordinated effort and that they need to enhance their site if your 30 recruiters are going to work together at all. It can become such a mess with 30 people recruiting all over the web without the same strategy, without something keeping you all connected. Propose something to them and see what they say.

2. The many to one approach can work. It's done easiest on Facebook through groups and pages, but through Twitter and LinkedIn it can be a bit more difficult. For Twitter, I would suggest still having one main account that all 30 of you can access and follow. The branded message on this Twitter should be one that attracts all candidates, not niche candidates. The tweets for this account should be about the company as a whole, and of course, do @TwitHire for all job openings, not just the niche positions. Use this account to find those niche candidates for your specific specialization and then approach them and follow them on your personal Twitter account. So ultimately you would use the main account to attract everyone and then have all 30 of you go in and follow the people that you're interested in. A big pot for everyone to share from.

The same goes for LinkedIn. You create a main account like "Ecolab Talent Management" or "Ecolab Careers" (you have to use first and last name creatively here), link to this from the Ecolab careers site, pull in hundreds of connections, and again, pick and choose for your specialty and connect with them via your personal account.

What this approach does most importantly is assures that the company holds on to these connections once a recruiter leaves the company. Think about it: you could build up 1,000 followers and 500 connections on LinkedIn, and the day you leave the company, Ecolab loses all of those connections. So having the main accounts will make the bosses happy as there will always be a strong talent pool for their recruiters to source from.

Comment by John Sadler on January 13, 2009 at 6:44am

Hi Ryan, many thanks for sharing your social neworking ideas. I have recently launched a niche site www.nuclearcareersonline.com and now we are in January I have started a press and aggregator campaign and am trying to get people paying for advertising on my site. I am still a very small fish but in a specialised pond so I do not have numbers that impress yet.

I have a Linked In group UK Nuclear Industry I have used to make contact with a number of people new to me and to my site. I ask them to visit and give me feedback. I can see a lot of recruiters use blogs to promote jobs and opportunities. I take on board what you say about branding being consistent and I will be trying to make that my way forward.

I am very interested to read more on your ideas. Keep up the good work :o)

John Manchester UK

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