HCL Used Social Media To Hire Their Next Best Candidates With The #HIRAL Campaign

When was the last time you applied for a job after watching a YouTube video? Never? You’d have a different answer if you were an HCL employee. The latest campaign after the success of #CoolestInterviewEver saw another way HCL used Social Media as an effective recruitment tool, something typical of a business having a B2B angle to its business model.

Objective -

Generally the objectives start with a ‘brand awareness’ tone to it and takes off in that direction. But the campaign at hand has a different agenda in mind. Many a time B2B companies are known to use Social Media as an effective recruitment tool and LinkedIn is the first thing that comes to mind. The objective of this campaign was to simply find the best candidates using YouTube and the videos made simply for them. This was a deviation from the standard mode of text applications.

Execution -

The highlight of the execution was the use of a twofold strategy that employed YouTube and a website. The website was an extension of the HCL site and at the helm of it had these 4 videos integrated to the YouTube channel.

The 4 videos looked something like this.

Hiral Shake

The start of each of these videos has a disclaimer which states that the piece of work is fiction but the job mentioned is real.

The first being the Hiral Shake, a take on the Harlem shake would have, the protagonist dressed up in a black suit speaking about the video and the job opening stating the basic prerequisites for the job for L1 support executives. It subtly puts across the message of experience requirement of 6 months to 3 years of experience and are good at troubleshooting hardware, software and network issues.

Gangnam Style SAP FICO Consultants

The video embodied the Gangnam style dance and put across the message that those who do watch Viral videos and those who are the actual recipients of the job are two different categories of people altogether. Thus it appeals to the viewers that those who do have friends who are good at participating and supporting integrated test cycles and have participated as a SAP FICO functional analysts on at least 2 end to end projects then this video is perfect for you.

CATS go viral for C/C++ jobs

This particular video reaches out to viewers whose friends have good experience in test automation system development and have good knowledge of object oriented design concepts. Basically those who have C and C++ programming knowledge is the TG of the job description. But the TG of the video is the friends of these people who are more YouTube savvy and in turn would inform their friends upon the job opening.

L3 Infra L3 support jobs

This job opening for infrastructure level 3 support experts played on the Suarez bite and again reached out to not the direct recipients of the job but those who would see these videos and inform their friends about it.

The central idea is that the videos don’t have a direct bearing on the job and have no relation as such but since the concept of each of the videos has gone viral, they’ve used this very concept and joint it to the job description and created videos that are Hiral (a combination of the words ‘Viral’ and ‘hire’)

The website had all the above 4 videos with 4 different tabs within this page directing you to the application pages. Not quite sure though why this existed on the same page as videos as the TG for the videos and the TG for the job were both different.

The site also spoke about other aspects of the HCL brand on the whole directing you to places on the actual site.

Positives -

The videos, though bearing hardly any resemblance had reached a pedestal of 1000 videos in no time all of which were organic.

The videos have views in the range of 60,000 – 90,000 which is a steep number thereby reaching out to a lot of people.

Another positive is the effective use of Social Media for recruiting.

And an addition to that is the use of platforms other than LinkedIn for the purpose of recruiting a phenomenon classic of LinkedIn.

Another set of positives of the campaign is the success in executing it riding on the back of results like attaining 10 million impressions across channels and hundreds of applications.

Scope for improvement -

The simple most scope for improvement could have been the relevance of the videos to the job description. The videos took on the viral aspect of completely unrelated themes something that could have been worked on.

Throwing in Facebook and Twitter aggressively into the mix could have been an added advantage too but maybe the scope of the project would like to have restricted it to these two platforms viz. YouTube and the site.

Conclusion -

It seems like stepping out of the conventional ways of using Social Media platforms is becoming a thing of the past and may be in the new year you’ll see more of utilization of conventional platforms for unconventional purposes like the above campaign example.