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companies. My job is to go out into social media to talk about Cisco as a great place to work, with a focus on our people, teams, and projects.”
The main KPI for Collins’s team, which consists of five people around the globe, is attracting top-notch talent. With about 70,000 worldwide employees, there’s a good chance a Cisco applicant already knows someone who works there. Those people will undoubtedly lean on their contacts for a bit of info on what life is like inside the company. For those without a connection (or for even more information gathering), Collins’s team gets them as close as possible by using employee stories, photos, and sentiment to paint an accurate picture of life at Cisco.
Four years ago, at the team’s first off-site meeting, the group decided that they wanted to make personal connections with talent. “Social is all about community,” Collins says. “As a social media person, this idea of personal connection really galvanized me. Who better to tell someone about working here than someone who works here?”
How would they do this? By using what Cisco employees were already saying when they talked about working at Cisco. And the employees doing the talking don’t have to be the ones with the most clout. In fact, the 2017 Edelman Trust Barometer indicated that employees are a more trusted source than a CEO by 16 points out of 100.
“When the CEO talks to the press or the public, he is expected to say good things, because he is the CEO,” Collins says. “For employees, that’s not part of their job description. We only had our gut instincts to go on when we started this, but now we’ve seen stat after stat indicate that we are on the right track. We had never planned for it, but retaining talent also became a key benefit of our efforts.”
To mine for employee-generated content in 2016, the @WeAreCisco team launched its first contest on Twitter and Instagram, encouraging employees to share a photo with the reasons they love working at Cisco, using the hashtags #WeAreCisco and #LoveWhereYouWork. During that February contest, more than 1,000 entries were submitted. The effort was so effective that
Collins’s team is gearing up for their fourth-annual contest in February 2019. Once employees realized they were empowered to share in social, the conversation kept going. If you search those hashtags on Twitter and Instagram, you’ll see a variety of photos and social media posts of Cisco employees sharing why they love life at Cisco.
Encouraging employees to share to their own networks is a key piece of the Cisco Talent Brand strategy. Using their authentic voice, they can reach future talent that lives within their personal networks. Employee advocates are great sources of referrals, which means a better quality of candidate.
“We are now working in artificial intelligence, machine learning, security, blockchain, and other technical areas that are moving us into a new digital era, so we want people who do those jobs to think about Cisco where maybe they wouldn’t have in the past,” Collins says. “The people who currently do those jobs at Cisco are connected to people who do those jobs elsewhere.”
These contests also help Collins’s @WeAreCisco team uncover a host of interesting employee stories to tell on their social channels, including that of one woman who took part in The Amazing Race, which Collins said they would have never learned had she not
Image Credit: Sarasota Photo Studio
tweeted about it in the #LoveWhereYouWork contest. Compelling stories such as that one have helped grow the @WeAreCisco Twitter followers from 2,000 to 20,000 in just one year (nearing 30,000 as of today), while
the @WeAreCisco Instagram account grew from 0 to 15,000 organic followers (now
at 25,000).
The Amazing Race employee wrote a blog about how running the race and working
at Cisco were both exhilarating. Today, only 9 percent of Fortune 500 companies have a blog for recruiting talent. Cisco is one of them, and
Encouraging employees to share to their own networks is a key piece of the Cisco Talent Brand strategy. Using their authentic voice, they
can reach future talent that lives within their personal networks.
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