One is you get a view of the market very transparently, very quickly.
Then, there's the idea of what I call 'the purple pony.' Sometimes we have a desire to recruit a range of skills and experiences that don't exist together, and it helps me manage the hiring managers' expectations of what the market looks like.
The third big thing it does is give us speed of connection. You can use social media to connect with people very quickly. As opposed to the old way of phoning people at their office or trying to find personal contact details for them at home and then leaving messages...LinkedIn--as do Facebook, Twitter and many other social media sources--allows you to message people directly and have a very fast response to questions and statements and connecting opportunities.
Yes, we do. We have a corporate profile page for Walmart on LinkedIn, as we do on Facebook. We also use Twitter. We've been quick to embrace a lot of social media platforms to be able to interact with customers and potential employees in our processes. And people are interested in the Walmart story.
The lucky thing for me is, for the senior roles that we recruit for, speaking English is one of the general criteria. Not all the time, but most of the time, we require English for roles that have a reporting line back into the US or some of our different regions. So, often we're looking for English skills as much as other capabilities. All the same, on my team we have recruiters with language expertise for the countries that we recruit in.
I can't say that I've ever done any print advertising for the roles that I personally recruit for. However, we may do some local media around the store level recruitment. We'll use job boards.
I think job boards are seeing a similar fate as some of the traditional print media. As time goes by, some of the social media is taking precedence over things like job boards. And job boards are changing as well. You've got BeKnown, a Facebook application for professional networking, which is essentially a product from Monster, the job board.
The industry that supports organisations recruiting and finding people is changing and adapting to reflect the online world that we're now increasingly spending our time in. I think the last time I did a print advertisement in a newspaper was probably in 2002.
I hope to have a long relationship with technologies and companies that enable us to connect with people that want to come and work with Walmart. So I'll say the same with LinkedIn as with other social media: I hope to be able to continue to leverage ways that help us make connections with candidates and people who are interested in Walmart.
With LinkedIn, I hope it continues to be a professional networking site. I spend as much time using LinkedIn to network through and talk to likeminded professionals, as I do actually recruiting, and I think LinkedIn is a great source for talking to experts in whatever industry you're in, whether it be retail or human resources or finance. There're discussion groups and meeting places for people to get together and share ideas and stories and challenges and problems.
I think LinkedIn is a lot more than a job site. It's a professional networking area that helps connect likeminded people. Twitter has a different approach in terms of those short byte stories, things that are going on that're affecting people. It allows you to sometimes follow professionals or other groups of people that you're interested in. I think such things will continue to flourish and grow.
It certainly helps us find people to talk to. And then our processes and assessment methodologies help to take care of the rest of the recruitment and hiring process.
I don't think social media can help me qualify whether someone's a good cultural fit for Walmart or whether there're capabilities that enable them to do a great job for Walmart. We still need to rely on interviews and assessments and testing and different things that we do once we've started conversations with people. I don't think that will change. I'd love it if it could. I'd love it if there's something that could tell you whether people are going to be successful, but I think that probably gets into a whole new world of technology and could be quite scary.
I cannot disclose how much we spend with them or the kind of cost savings that we see by using them. But I can tell you with certainty that we see a significant return on investment by using tools like LinkedIn and we see them from a way of being able to move processes faster, which obviously has a business impact and from a cost of doing business perspective. By spending money with organisations that enable us to connect with candidates effectively, we're not spending other money in other less effective ways and areas.
I wouldn't say so. Again, that savviness isn't coming through. What we're trying to do is getting people to come and talk to us. The required social media savviness depends on the role we're looking to fill.
We have a team who operate social media for us. We now have more than 11 million fans now on Facebook-so that team are incredibly social media savvy.
As for some of my colleagues, I've actually written their LinkedIn profiles for them and helped get them started and set up. They rarely look at LinkedIn but it helps me share and showcase the backgrounds of individuals who work for us. It works in a number of different ways.
We've got lots of people who know how to use social media, so that savviness isn't a prerequisite for a job at Walmart. It depends on the job that we're hiring for.
There's a thing that's being talked about a lot at the moment: personal branding. I think people, if they're interested in being found, they need to think about their social brand. We sometimes look for that kind branding. It's one of the ways, an exclusive way, that we look for people. It has been increasingly helping us find 'passive' people. I think the more you put yourself out there-if you're interested in being put out there, that is-the more likely you are to get found.
We use Twitter and Facebook for different things. We tend to use Facebook more to talk about Walmart and what we've got going on. We even have individual Facebook pages to represent the individual stores that we have, particularly in the US. We're doing a lot of work with Facebook in the US around having dialogue with our customers.
With Twitter, it tends to be a very fast way of being able to talk about different things that are going on at Walmart, whether it be our corporate social responsibility and sustainability messages.