Social media is finding its way into countless aspects of business, and recruiting is far from immune. On the contrary, Social Recruiting is sparking innovation and significant benefits for those organizations that move beyond initial skepticism and embrace the new paradigm and technologies.

In July, Taleo hosted a webinar on the subject of Social Recruiting, with the special guest presenter being Michael Schmidt, Director of Recruitment at Ministry Health Care. Mr. Schmidt described himself as having gone on a “journey from social recruiting skeptic to innovator” and his story provided a great example of how an organization can use social media technologies as part of an innovative overall recruiting strategy. Impressed with this story, I’ve since been able to catch up with Michael, and asked him to share more about Ministry’s journey in this area.
  

Could you start by describing Ministry Health Care so that we understand your organization’s scope?
Ministry Health Care (MHC) is a network of hospitals, clinics, and other health related organizations operating across the central, northern, and northeastern regions of Wisconsin and eastern Minnesota. To meet the needs of the communities we serve, we offer a complete continuum of care through acute and tertiary care hospitals, physician clinics, long-term care and assisted living facilities, home health agencies, hospices, and numerous other programs and services.

In terms of numbers, Ministry Health Care has approximately 12,000 employees across 75 locations. We hire approximately 1,500 people per year.

What are your responsibilities at MHC?
I’m responsible for the hiring of all personnel within the system – except for the doctors. I direct a team of 14 professionals, including five focused on patient care (nursing) roles, five focused on various specialty areas, three that cover what we call the “hospitality” roles (e.g., food service, maintenance, housekeeping), and one metrics and reporting analyst. That is definitely one best practice I can share with your readers: if your budget allows, having a member of your recruiting team dedicated to technology, to the metrics, reporting, and analysis, will be well worth it by allowing for focus and a better division of labor amongst the overall team.

Since the topic we are focusing on here is the use of “social recruiting” at MHC, what was your background with social media before getting involved with it professionally? Were you already an expert?
No, I was not a “social media guy” by any means. I didn’t have a Facebook account in January of 2010 – I resisted for a long time. By now, I have maybe 100 friends on Facebook, 150 connections on LinkedIn. I don’t use Twitter really, so as you can see I’m just not a heavy user of social media in my personal life – but I’ve found it critical for my work at MHC.

So how did you get involved with social media and social recruiting at MHC?
Because I was one of the younger members of the team, and because I had an IT background, I was asked to join the Social Media Policy team. Over a period of six months of weekly meetings we formulated a policy for MHC around Social Media.

Your policy has gotten some acclaim – how did that come about?
Will Weider is our CIO – he is author of a popular blog at CandidCIO.com. He had a strong vision that instead of shutting down social media for our employees he wanted to see “12,000 employees tweeting, friending, and preaching praise to and for Ministry Health Care.” He was on the Social Media Policy team and shared this vision. Eventually our policy was getting acclaim such as from AonHewitt Consulting who said “MHC is one of the most forward thinking organizations around Social Media Policy.”

Let’s move now from social media at MHC in general to social media use for recruiting. What was your thought process?
In short, “I have to do something here!” We had the new social media policy as a baseline, and I was seeing a lot of HR literature talking up social media. The vendors too were prompting me with ideas: get a Facebook fan page, get a social media foot print, re-build your career site, and so on. Initially I needed to focus on some simple tasks to get started, so I focused on the recruiters on my team and I connected these tasks to their recruiting scorecard. The main goal was to establish a social media presence – and use my metrics expert to quantify the results.

What was the initial plan?
We got going in December 2009. Keep in mind at that time I still didn’t have my own Facebook page. So I first found someone on my team to be the lead “social media person.” One of the first things we did was to create professional-looking recruiter pages on Facebook – separate from each person’s personal pages. We trained each person one-on-one regarding social media methods. We assigned metric-driven tasks – actions they could take daily, weekly, monthly, and quarterly. And we did have some early resistance, so some time was spent getting everyone “on board” with this social media plan.

This original plan had merit, but was vague in some respects – especially when it came to exactly what we would be measuring. So some of the specifics that we quickly instituted were for recruiters to login to Facebook daily and post a minimum of one status update. They were to “friend” at least six people per week, and we tried to update Ministry Careers Facebook page once per week. We each also spent around 25 minutes per week researching Facebook content and groups, such as joining Facebook groups, posting weekly info in these groups, and sending relevant openings to groups as soon as reqs were received/posted.

It is important to note that our Ministry Careers Facebook page is separate from the marketing Facebook page for Ministry Health Care. We are the experts in recruiting, so it makes more sense for us to create and maintain the recruiting-focused Facebook page, rather than ask marketing to do so.

What about LinkedIn?
We had a similar approach: login in daily, invite people to connect each week, spend about 25 minutes a week joining groups, posting relevant jobs, and so on. The key was to stay involved on a consistent basis, so that it became a part of our normal workflow, and also could be seen as consistent attention by those we interacted with.

What about Twitter?
My social media expert introduced me to TweetDeck, a tool that lets you update Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn all from one interface. I also learned what #hashtags on Twitter were all about, and so we started to make sure we were using those in our Tweets to expand the set of people who would search and find our messages.

How did the recruiters react to all of these new tasks they were being asked to do?
Funny thing was, for much of that first year the reaction from new team members was like “So Mike, you are going to PAY me to ‘mess around’ on Facebook and LinkedIn for an hour per week?” And my reaction was “Yes, exactly.” And when they did so and successfully developed a presence on social media, I would say “Good job.”

So what kind of feedback did you start getting as you went along?
We got positive feedback from our recruiters, from hiring managers, from the candidates, and from existing employees. Overall, this initiative created instant “buzz” around MHC Recruitment – and for me, this was a great thing because I was only one year into the job and came to it without any healthcare background.

What kind of tweaks did you make to the program?
After the first six months, we found that Twitter wasn’t working well for us. Our audiences just didn’t use it very much, so our time was better spent with other social media. At the same time, we found we really needed to add YouTube into the mix instead. We also adjusted the goals, because with a baseline in place we didn’t need to connect/friend with as many new people each week. We definitely focused on friending/connecting with our new hires though, as doing so assisted in building our networks within each job discipline.

You mentioned YouTube. What did you do there?
My VP of HR came to me with a contact who works for a company who sells videos of “newscaster”-style job descriptions. I talked with this vendor, and the videos were nice – but they were expensive and too slow to produce. But it was a good idea – I just needed to do it faster and without spending much money!

So the solution was to make our own videos, using a simple Flipcam. I asked Taleo if such videos could be used, and sure enough they could be integrated with Taleo’s platform. So now on our different job postings, we could have the hiring manager, or a peer in the group (e.g., a nurse) on video talking about why they like their role, why they like working for MHC, and so on.

So I went out and bought flipcams for all of our recruiters – they carry them with them at all times. The videos are short – 30 seconds or a minute – and get posted to the MHC Careers YouTube site. The goal was for each recruiter to post one video per month, embedded in a relevant job posting. We also use the videos at our micro sites. And we even do videos of our recruiters themselves to promote their name in their area of specialty.

So what kind of successes have you had?
By October 2010 we were definitely seeing many results. Internally, the team was having small group discussions and learning sessions, and social media best practices was a recurring agenda item on our weekly calls. I mentioned the buzz this was creating, and that included MHC employees giving us great positive feedback. And most of all we are making hires – reaching candidates and making hires we never would have gotten without the YouTube videos or the other social media efforts.

What are your most recent tweaks to your strategy?
In December 2010 we realized we needed to update our Facebook Fan page. And we realized this shouldn’t be a one person job, and I didn’t have budget to turn it over to an outside vendor to manage. So I again relied on my recruitment team: each member is assigned four non-consecutive weeks within the calendar year, they login daily to assure content is relevant and add new content, including at least one new YouTube video. This gives the page a different focus each week – in line with the focus area of each recruiter. The goal each week is to get more people to “like” our page – and we keep track of this and then give prizes to the recruiters who got the most “likes” during their weeks in charge of the fan page. Such an incentive has led to the team adding 60 new fans per quarter.

Please share some numbers – overall, what has social media and social recruiting done for MHC?
First off, my overall spending has actually decreased. My “advertising spend” has been reduced by 18%, and that is impressive because given where we are located we need advertising reach. We’ve hired 47 people that we know we wouldn’t have gotten without our social media presences – I actually think the full impact is much greater if you factor in additional hires that came through social media indirectly or through multiple channels. We now have over 250 hires that follow us on Facebook. We’ve found that people will stay on our career page up to three minutes longer if they watch a video – so that speaks to improved engagement with our site. We have over 100 videos posted, and one of them has even been watched over 500 times!

What about the impact on your recruiters’ networks?
If you add up the recruiters in each specific area, combining their Facebook and LinkedIn networks, we see numbers like over 2,000 connections for Nursing, over 1,100 for Emergency Medical Services, and nearly 1,000 for Executives. And although the numbers are lower, Pharmacy (over 400) and Rehabilitation (over 600) are the “white whales” of our industry – very hard to fill positions – so we are very pleased with our expanded networks in these areas.

What’s next?
We are continually improving our Ministry Careers Facebook page. We are starting to send videos out to applicants, to further increase their initial interest. And now that this has proven its value, I’m being given some modest budget to grow it further – so I’m considering some add-ons that weren’t possible before.

Something else I’ll mention that we’ve started using recently is SMS texting for recruitment. We began this in March 2011. Recruiters were responsible for picking one job and making their first contact with all desired applicants via texting. This has worked great – it saves the recruiters from making as many calls. Also, many in the health care industry can’t take calls when the recruiter first contacts them – but with texting, they get the message and return the call when convenient for them. And this has grown already – we now text 75% of desirable applicants to begin recruitment process.

This has been a great wealth of insights and best practices. Can you summarize your top “words of wisdom” on social recruiting?
I spoke at Taleo World in 2010, and I have the same “words of wisdom” today that I had then. These are:

• You must have a social media corporate policy.
• Have a goal and communicate your goal to all on the team.
• Write out your “assignments” and assure all know the details and the expectations. Make sure they make sense for everyone involved.
• Even if you are an expert, have someone be the “social media person” on your team, and let that person do the research and drive change.
• Continually gain team feedback and allow for change based on future needs. Evolve the program over time.