We are at the Social Media in Recruitment Conference, hosted by Mike Taylor of Web-Based Recruitment.

Discover how the European Commission introduced Social Media recruiting into a public sector, multilingual organisation
Huw Davies – Head of External Communication – European Personnel Selection Office (EPSO)

EPSO is the European Personnel Selection Office. Centralised staff selection for ALL European public sector organisations.

PUBLlC SECTOR IS DIFFERENT

• Different than the usual perception. Not the old stuffy type of employers, but modern organisation
• Popular, over 100,000 applications per year
• Have a modern selection procedure developed over the last 3 years based on competency testing.
• Set up annual cycles for main recruitment drives
• Integrated more with HR front end, workforce planning

Challenges
Multi-lingual communications policy
All information on permanent job opportunities should be in 23 official languages, although exemption allows just the three main languages: French, German and English

Need a new Solid Visual Identity to reflect the EVP of the Community, not of EPSO. Created the EU Careers Logo
Available for use by all EU institutions and agencies, as well as partners in Member States’ governments

How did it all start?

Started with three outlets in three languages

Facebook and Twitter
Ran simultaneous live Q&A sessions for graduate recruitment

Set up a new Outlet:
The “Raconteurs”
16 members of staff across the EU Institutions. They are responsible forbBlogging on Facebook and tweeting on Twitter

Success Measurement
Within 10 months
35,000 Facebook fans/likes
(missed the rest of the numbers)

Any problems?
Case 1:
Dissatisfied comments posted to the Facebook Wall - those waiting for results or not happy with switch to competency based testing. This was not the First Impression that EPSO would want to give out

Solution:
Split FB presence into two sections
EU Careers
EU Careers - I’ve Applied
This is where the questions are tackled

Case 2
Dealing with questions in the Discussions app
The app does not work that well

Switched out of Discussions - move to the Wall
Answer all questions within 1-2 days

All of these solutions based on results of polling visitors with over 90% acceptance

Next Phase was to set up advertising on Facebook for specific groups

Worked closely Julia Levy and Fernando de Benavides of Terra Firma Associates to build campaigns and measure the results

Pilot 1
Secretaries in UK/Irleand
Focus on the 6 countries where having the most difficulty getting candidates, so target marketing/ads to those countries
Tweaked ads each week, using different languages.
Biggest challenge was not in finding people, but in that this target group are not that interested in moving abroad

Tracked all the data from different ads, different images, different languages
Benefit of FB is that all this data is available to see what works and what doesn’t
Created specific landing pages with analytics built in as the destinations from the campaigns

Lessons learned

• Adaptable campaigns
• Microsite landing pages worked
• More analysis possible

Pilot 2
Targeted Graduates in 6 countries and with specific academic backgrounds

2,400 applicants
Over 500 came via Facebook, one ad campaign

Of the 8,000 who have requested informaition on careers, over 1.500 heard about it from Facebook

Next steps 2011

• Establish LinkedIn presence
• Merge the 3 language career pages on Facebook onto one page
• More focus on careers and EU news related content, not just how to apply
• Measurement and Metrics, fine tune the definitions of “what is success”
• Add more events/communities
• Manage more of the Social Media on a local basis