Customer Experience

By adaptive - May 20th, 2014

Naveen Narayanan is Global Head - Talent Acquisition, HCL Technologies. He is responsible for driving HCL Technologies’ worldwide strategies around talent acquisition, integration and effectiveness. He has over 19 years of rich experience across HR functions and has lead large-scale HR culture change, quality interventions, managing development cycles, human capital strategy and execution, formulating & implementing
competency based architectures, talent acquisition and management. He was last associated with Accenture India Private Ltd for six years .

What are the key drivers behind your organization’s use of social media?

From an organizational perspective, social media is used towards three major deliverables:

1. Listen (what people are talking about you) – At HCL, we listen to and analyze more than 200,000 HCL Tech brand related mentions every week.
2. Reach (out to the correct set of target audience) – HCL Tech reaches out to more than 1 million people through its social channels
3. Engage (with them in their own language) – HCL generated more than 90,000 engagements in the last quarter.

As social media is the best channel to generate two-way engagement with a large target audience, the major drivers behind deciding which channels to use (and which not) are:

1. Availability – Is our target audience available on the platform? Unless a substantial number of TA is available on a social media channel, investment in the same is not suitable.
2. Targeting – Is it possible to target them through paid (and organic) methods?

How is social media organised within your company? What organisational models do you use and why?

At HCL, we use a Centralized Model for Social Media management. Though the content comes from the various business teams, the ownership of the social media properties stays with the Social Media Team, which is a part of the Brand Team at HCL. The end-to-end management of Social Media is done in-house. The reason behind using a Centralized Model is our Matrix company structure (6 Service Lines x 17 Industries). Social Media at HCL not only works towards branding, but also in the direction of HR, resourcing, etc.

As a corporate user of social networks, how does your company value the networks it has a presence on? 

HCL Tech values its Social Networks depending upon the effectiveness of the channel defined by the combination of parameters like the Industry’s Average Active Users and percentage Target Audience on the channel. This gives the most scientific way to define the effectiveness of a channel for the brand. Going ahead, HCL’s sees social media evolving towards:

• Lead Generation
• Recruitment
• Taking propositions to market
• Implementation in emerging geographies

Can you outline a recent initiative that included a social media component?

#CoolestInterviewEver– World’s First End-to-End Recruitment Campaign on Twitter. While organisations have used social media as a platform for job postings and background checks, there has never been an end-to-end recruitment process on a single social media platform. #CoolestInterviewEver was a unique marketing campaign launched by HCL Tech that leveraged Twitter to create a complete recruitment engagement while amplifying ‘Employer Value Proposition’ reach. The major outcomes from the campaign were:

• HCL Technologies was the best social brand in India from reach and engagement perspective in February 2014 according to an independent analytics report by the Social Bakers.
• With participants from more than 60 countries across the globe and media coverage from more than 50 international and national media worth USD 500 K, HCL has furthered its position as an employer of choice.
• The total engagement exceeded more than 250K. There was an overachievement by 25% in terms of engagement.
• By the end of this campaign, HCL is leading the IT industry in reach on Twitter with more than 201K followers ahead of global companies like IBM, Accenture and Indian Players like TCS, Infosys, and Wipro etc. The campaign has enabled HCL to organically gain the highest number of followers during the campaign month.
• With trending across 19 cities and across the nation for 4 different days, the #CoolestInterviewEver campaign is an extension of HCL’s employee-centric culture, designed to uncover new talent in the IT field while strengthening its position as a progressive organization utilizing new age media to refresh the recruitment process.
• The total campaign cost did not exceed average spend on recruiting one full time employee by utilizing mix of organic and inorganic reach through different online and offline channels.
• 25k+ increase in the number of followers in 2 months.
• 83% increase in follower rate in the last two months as compared to the last 10 months.

How much pressure is there to show ROI with the social media you use?

The effective ROI for any social media initiative is a mix of ROI from financial and branding perspectives. Thus, financial ROI is not always a mandate though is never neglected.

Are there any specific tools you employ that help your business manage its social media activity across multiple departments?

HCL has been using many of best in class tools including: Oracle SRM, Simply Measured, Crowdbooster, Socialytics (HCL tech’s internal tool) for Social Listening and Analyzing. And HootSuite, TweetDeck, HubSpot, Buddy Media for engaging with the audience.

What is your advice to organisations that are beginning to map their own corporate structure with the view to embedding social media activity within their enterprise?

Social Media, if used effectively and strategically, not only brings about a brand impact but also drives significant business results. Thus, such organisations need to embed social media not only as a part of their execution but also their strategy. Through social listening implementation, the organisation can do a data intensive research on their products or services’ performance and grievances.