Heaton spoke to MIS Asia earlier this year about how he and the Walmart organisation as a whole use social media not just to seek out good people, but also to build employee and customer relationships. Below is the expurgated transcript of that interview.
Walmart is in a number of operations across Asia. We have a very large retail business presence in Asia. In China, we have 354 stores; in Japan, we've got around 400 stores; and in India, we're in a joint venture where we've got about 12 wholesale cash and carry businesses running at the moment. In total, I think, the region generates about US$20 billion in sales or so at the moment.
We have a global sourcing operation which covers a lot of the manufacturing hubs across Asia-China, India, Pakistan, Indonesia, Bangladesh and Dubai. We have teams going out to factories in all these places looking at all of the different products that end up in Walmart stores across the world.
We also have an e-commerce business in Shanghai. And we have some IT people who work on different things for us in India.
So we have a very, very broad business in place at the moment across Asia.
Now, Walmart, as everybody knows, is about growth. We look to grow our businesses in China, India and Japan. And we'd like to grow the amount of sourcing that we do too.
We are undergoing a switch in our approach to running our businesses, becoming more about having direct relationships with manufacturers, farmers and different people in the supply chain, and trying to have more control over what ends up in our stores.
As you can see, we have a lot going on in this part of the world. Therefore, we always need lots of people to help us deliver on the plans we have to get them running.
Also, Walmart is an everyday low price organisation. To do that we have to be everyday low cost. So we are constantly looking for the lowest cost ways we can operate to help drive our business.
We have that approach within our human resources organisations too, which explains why we've turned to social media, things like LinkedIn and other tools, to help us identify potential candidates in the market place for recruitment. They help us keep costs down.
I've been using LinkedIn as a solution to help with recruiting since LinkedIn started. Actually, I've been using Twitter and job boards and all other types of online media search as well. Our social media efforts are not all about LinkedIn, of course. But LinkedIn is especially good and has certainly helped us find a lot of people that wouldn't have been available through other avenues.
Typically, what we do when we get a search is we will take a look at the brief of the search, put together a list of target organisations that we want to recruit people from and the target skillsets we wanted, and then go on to some of the social media platforms to do some searches and find people to engage with.
What social media helps us to do is find people faster than we would if we were to go through more traditional means, such as using external recruitment companies or having to rely on people applying for roles.
We can be much more targeted too. If we want to hire someone from a specific organisation with a specific skillset and they happen to have a profile on LinkedIn, we can reach out to them, talk to them very quickly.
After that, of course, we've got to go through the same old process of having to assess their capabilities, desire and aspirations more closely, and see if they fit with Walmart.
In summary, LinkedIn and other tools help us find and qualify people faster to be able to bring them into our process, which is still relatively consistent with how we've always recruited-incorporating a series of interviews and assessments with different people at the organisation.
It helps a great deal for when you don't know anything about a marketplace, like when you're going into a new market-as we were with e-commerce in China, an area we had no prior experience in. LinkedIn and other social media help us immensely when we were putting together a team. They helped us to draw a map of key people and companies and titles and the job descriptions of people who are active in the market, so we could have a view into what a potential recruitment process may look like. With social media we could go in and take a look at some target organisations, and where people have got their profiles posted, and have a good look at them before we even start doing some recruitment.
Also, with something like e-commerce, there tends to be a bigger proportion of people who have profiles in LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Spoke or some of the other places where people put information about themselves. All those resources give us access to the information we need straightaway. If we can get it there, we won't need to go to a third-party recruiter, who will give us about the same amount of information before we start our recruitment process anyway.
When someone applies for a job with you and posts you a resume or a CV, the information you get there and then is still at face value. What we do as recruiters is we don't just take the information off a LinkedIn profile and make our hiring decisions based on it, just like we don't just take the information off a resume an applicant sends to us at face value. We actually take references in the marketplace on people and start to connect the dots.
Walmart hires people from a lot of different organisations. Sometimes we might talk to someone who we recently hired from an organisation, and we ask him or her for opinions on certain people. We were doing that before social media became commonplace. Now social media has made it somewhat faster and easier.
Walmart, and most other organisations, rely on referrals as one of its biggest ways to recruit people. Something like LinkedIn actually helps systemise some of the processes for finding people and generating referrals.
We don't just hire people. We put potentials through a process.
LinkedIn is a source of information to find people.
You still have to assess them against the capability sets that you look for as an organisation. You have to look for a cultural fit. That's very important for an organisation with Walmart, because we have a very strong corporate culture. Sometimes the cultural fit is more important than the skillsets of the candidate. We can train skills. You can't train cultural fit.
And then we take references and then we use third party companies to go out and check for criminal and other types of records before we make an offer.
So LinkedIn is all of that upfront sourcing process, and is a part of an integrated way of finding people to come in and join us.