CASE-05

IMPROVING CISCO'S SOCIAL RECRUITING

PRESENCE

Cisco is no longer a “networking” company, it’s a technology company, with a new

CEO, a new Executive Leadership Team and a new focus on culture with a newly
appointed Chief People Officer. Not even a year-old, Cisco’s People Deal–the
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employee value proposition that guides our culture was the catalyst for a shift in
Talent Brand voice, because not only was there a description of w hat Cisco
expected from employees, but what employees could expect from Cisco.
Most people know of Cisco, but do they really KNOW Cisco? The Talent Brand
team had to overcome the image of Cisco as this “stodgy old tech company” image.
We are diverse, we are cutting edge, we are a great place to work–and our
employees are the ones saying it.
The Talent Brand interpreted Our People Deal as top-down permission to take some
risks, make some changes, and breakthrough the status -quo.
One (very big, and very successful) change was how we approached social media.
We aimed to do some storytelling – focus on showing, not telling (all about them,
less about us) and foster personal connections with current and future employees.

WHY WE DID IT
(Adapted from a LinkedIn blog post by Carmen Shirkey Collins – found here)
We did it because we had no choice. Our social voice was about as non -engaging as
you can get.
Cisco has its fair share of social media channels. Before the summer of 2015, you’d
see a lot of the same posts as the other channels. The Cisco Careers accounts were
lined up like little corporate soldiers amplifying Cisco content (that often had little
to do with attracting talent) and a steady stream of job postings.
If you wanted to think of Cisco Careers as a social job board, that would best
explain it. Here’s a sample post (you’d see 3-5 of these a day):

“#HotJob - Cisco is #hiring an #engineer in #SiliconValley. Join our team. (link here.)”

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 Engagement was dismal. We would get a couple of likes, maybe a repost or two–all
from recruiters. (That is the one thing we had done well as a social team –training
and incentivizing our recruiters to get social.) However, we weren’t trying to reach
recruiters. We were trying to reach the best of the best talent.
No one else was paying much attention (not even our Execs).
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It totally makes sense, though, to anyone who is a social media professional. Just
look at that tweet. Even if you were an engineer, why would that post make you
want to work at Cisco? Recruiters know that if you have any engineering talent
worth talking about, you have your pick of opportunities. What about that social
media post would incentivize you to click and come to Cisco over any other
company?
Our metrics answered that question. Nothing.
The Talent Brand Team entered a season of new management, who asked a talent
brand consultant to come in and give some feedback. The feedback was a brutal
dose of honesty– the social efforts were terrible, and weren’t doing much to move
the needle.

WHAT WE DID
We started with a mission statement. For us, the talent brand for Cisco hinged on
the idea of “personal connections” amongst our employees, with both future talent
AND with our technology. Technology without an impact on people is meaningless.
Especially in social, it’s all about the human element. If you’re going to be in social
and be taken seriously, you’d better post like you’re a human being.
This was a perfect match with Our People Deal, which was created a few months
earlier. Directed by our Chief People Officer, Fran Katsoudas, Our People Deal was
a declaration of putting our employees at the center of everything we do, what
Cisco expected from them, but also what they could expect from Cisco. Our talent
brand team interpreted that as a people-first philosophy. It was like our mission of
personal connections was supported top-down, and that was the inspiration for how
we’d revamp our talent brand.

HOW WE DID IT
First, we started from scratch and started disrupting. It’s like the score was 0 -0
now, and we were going to start playing.

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 1. WE CHANGED OUR TONE AND VOICE IN SOCIAL. WE GOT REAL.
REAL HUMAN, THAT IS.
What we mean by “real” is that we stopped posting like we were a 70,000+ person
company and we started posting like we were 70,000+ people, wi th distinct voices
and motivations located all around the world, working for the company.
What’s the difference? Our voice. It’s not corporate – we call it our “co-worker”
tone - and it’s focused on our people. There are real people at Cisco doing real coo l
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stuff with real results, amplified by the real people running the talent brand social
media channels. Individuals, with individual stories.
To help illustrate the idea, consider you’re in an elevator. When you get on an
elevator with someone else, usually you’d first say “hi.”
Then you’d maybe introduce yourself, but then ask, “What about you?” It’s a
conversation, it’s not you getting on an elevator and talking at someone for 30
seconds. That makes you more of a robot, less of a human. It’s broadcast - not
conversation.
Always choose human. Always.

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 2. WE PUT OUR BEST ADVOCATES–OUR EMPLOYEES–FIRST.
Who is best positioned to tell others why Cisco is a great place to work? The people
who work here.
Edelman’s Trust Survey gives us the hard numbers. What makes someone buy (or in
this case, “buy in” to an idea) is determined largely by what people in his or her
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network say. In fact, people are 90% more likely to trust their network than a brand.
This meant that we could post on social until the cows come h ome about how many
awards Cisco wins, how great it is to work here, etc. but it wouldn’t matter without
our employees to back us up.
As we shook things up and adopted co-worker voice, we upped our trust barometer
reading–and took it a step further. We started to post photos of our employees and
repost what they say–this way we became an amplifier of their words versus a
marketer of what WE wanted to say. (Luckily, our culture is such that what we
wanted to say is often what our employees already said.)
There was one more step. Our social channels were named @CiscoCareers –a
moniker that by it’s nature focused on US, and what WE wanted. If we were going
to be a co-worker, we were going to need to focus on our employees, and what
THEY were saying. So we became all about our tribe and changed our name to
@WeAreCisco.

3. WE CREATED A RECRUITING BLOG FOCUSING ON OUR

EMPLOYEES.
Where could we tell our stories? As much fun as it is for social media managers to
write in 140 characters, we needed to highlight more of the employee voice, with
links and extra information on “why work at Cisco” and how to apply.
Content is the key to any great talent
brand, and we thought a blog would be
a great place to do this. Plus, we’d be
disrupting again – only 9% of the
Fortune 500 have a “talent” blog.
We worked with the Cisco blog
platform to create a unique instance of
a “recruiting blog” –where we do talk
about career and resume tips, but
mostly we let our employees do the
talking. Now, we have employee blog
contributors who tell their own stories,

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 many of which we find from employee social posts. For instance, a self -identified
Cisco employee posted a photo of her trip to Honduras to volunteer at an orphanage
onto Instagram. She tagged it #WeAreCisco. What a perfect opportuni ty for her to
share about Cisco’s giving back philosophy to both current employees and future
talent.
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4. WE ENCOURAGED THE CONVERSATION.

There had never been a clear way for employees to come together as a tribe and
share their experiences on social media. We started encouraging the usage of a
select few company-wide hashtags to encourage and “corral” the conversation.
#WeAreCisco was the strongest “tribal” statement, but we also encouraged
#CiscoLife and even created a campaign where we encouraged em ployee-generated-
content around #IChoseCisco and #LoveWhereYouWork.
By partnering with Employee Comms, we were able to raise awareness of our
campaign, as well as offering team social trainings about why Cisco needs
employees to talk about Cisco as a great place to work, but (back to being about
THEM and not US) also, what’s in it for them? We are going to scale those
trainings this year through Video on Demand.

5. WE SHOWED WE COULD HAVE FUN.

While staying true to the
Cisco brand voice, we all
agreed that the talent brand
was a subset brand and
needed its own nuances. One
nuance that we developed
was the idea of fun.
That doesn’t mean that we’re
all fun all the time. Our
employees do some serious
work, but when you spend
half of your life with the
people you work with, if you
can’t have a little fun, what’s
the point?
We even got named a “happy workplace” by Career Bliss for 2015 – so we posted a
photo of employees laughing, and gave a nod to the master of “Happy” - Pharrell.

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 The social comments were all about the visual – how it looked like we truly were a
happy place. Not only did we tell the world about the award (the “all about us”
way) we SHOWED it with an authentic photo.

RESULTS
We grew our Twitter followers by 400% in 6 months. Only after such extreme
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organic growth did we start to supplement that growth with paid, targeted follower
campaigns. (And these campaigns are not ads, they are the same human touch posts
we put up organically, so we attract the right people to the channels who will
continue to engage with us.)
We launched an Instagram account and earned 2K followers with above -industry
engagement in those same 6 months. We then followed the same strategy of
promoted posts (focusing on posts with the strongest visuals, we don’t think of
them as “ads”) and now we have over 5,000 followers with continued strong
engagement.

TWITTER BY THE NUMBERS - @WEARECISCO TO DATE:

1500 followers in first two years of existence. From May 2105 to date we have
more than 13.5K followers
We reach more than 2 million people per month
#WeAreCisco trended during our #LoveWhereYouWork campaign in conjunction
with our employee meeting
Twitter verified our account when we became @WeAreCisco

LIFE AT CISCO BLOG:

The Life at Cisco blog is the second most viral blog a fter Cisco Newsroom. (shares
per reader)
The Life at Cisco blog consistently ranks in the top 10 most -shared articles per
month metrics from the blog team

INSTAGRAM BY THE NUMBERS - @WEARECISCO TO DATE:

Launched channel in August 2015 as CiscoCareers
From 0 to more than 5K to date
Instagram account earns above-industry standard in engagement
Instagram verified-account when we became WeAreCisco

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 For all social channels – our Klout score has jumped from below 40 to over 60
Because our social media posts don’t always have a call to action to apply–because
we’re operating a lot at the “top of the funnel”–we know anecdotally that we are
sending job applicants, and we have conversations with talent all the time who see
our posts and ask “How can we apply?”
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WHAT WE MISSED
METRICS
While we have some of our social metrics, what we don’t have is a detailed
understanding of how many job applies we’ve sent. That’s because when we tested
against our ATS (Applicant Tracking System), any tracking codes dropped when
people hit the site from a mobile device.
Social media is a mobile game. 80% of users come from a mobile device. So when
someone clicks a link from Twitter or Instagram, that gets clumped in our metrics
into the Mobile category. That mobile category as a driver o f applies is a pretty
high percentage. However, we can’t parse out what’s social (the social team feels
like it’s a pretty substantial piece, based on the click data from the social platform
insights.)
Because more people read the blog from a computer, we can see that we’ve driven a
significant number of job applies from those stories –more than 1000. However,
we’re still missing mobile numbers now.
The solution is a new ATS.

SCALABILITY
Two social media folks plus five channels plus two blog posts a week is a lot of
content. Between training people to be social, how to write, how to tell a story and
editing when they do, we’re often actively looking for content. This is time -
intensive.
Another piece of scaling this is really internal PR. Letting other team s know that
we’re here, we have a voice, and we have a place at the table. Internal stakeholders
will go through traditional channels to create traditional content, but when it comes
to asking for promotion in our channels, it doesn’t match the tone, voic e and goals.
We’ve made progress, but it’s usually us being drawn into the process at the end,
rather than at the beginning. We take it team by team.

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 FROM GLOBAL TO LOCAL
There is often a need for hyper-local content, which, without a paid strategy, isn ’t
feasible. Posting about an event in Houston from a Twitter account is akin to “spray
and pray” (how many of our US followers are in Houston and at this event).
Also, in other areas of the globe, the social media audience isn’t as large. If one
geography makes up less than 1% of your follower base, it’s hard to support super
local content.
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STRATEGY FOR JOB SPECIFIC CAMPAIGNS

While we attract talent with content and perception, talent acquisition always wants
to post job ads. There’s a balance with letting people know that there are openings,
and with the content that tells WHY someone would want to work here.
The business hasn’t caught up yet, in the understanding that posting this on their
own channels, and building up their brands in social will provide more results.
Some individual teams understand that they have to create their own content. Some
are resistant and feel like the talent brand team should be doing this for them.
This has created some internal tension when the internal client groups really want is
a “typical” job ad posted on Twitter or Instagram, and we push back to develop a
more personalized approach. While we have provided lots of training for recruiters
on this, there’s still resistance.

KEY TAKEAWAYS
The key takeaway number one is that employees are your talent brand. They are
your culture. You can be a marketer and put together a plan about how you want
employees to talk in public about the work environment. But it actually works the
other way around.
Authenticity. Today’s savvy job seekers (really, any consumer) can see “marketing”
from a mile away. It’s got to be authentic. It’s got to come from real employees.
And if it comes from the brand, it should be in an authentic tone and voice.
You’ve got to show, not tell, future talent why they want to work for your company.
Storytelling goes a long way.

TECHNOLOGIES USED
Twitter, Instagram, Blog, Career Bliss

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 Questions:

1. Provide a summary of the case.

2. What were the reasons lead to bring changes/reform to the company?

3. Explain strategies they used to overcome issues?

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4. What were the HR related challenges they faced before and during
implementing stage?

5. State your personal view about decisions taken by the company?

6. Based on the decisions taken by the company, do you believe that this
company has got some advantages over their rivals? And why?

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