Key takeaways:
- Executive Engagement Strategy: Vanguard prioritized boosting executive engagement on LinkedIn to showcase thought leadership and enhance the company’s social presence. By securing influencer status for CEO Tim Buckley and encouraging other senior leaders to participate, Vanguard aimed to attract top talent by showcasing its culture and values.
- Personalized Messaging and Audience Segmentation: The Talent Brand and Recruitment Marketing team developed a comprehensive Employee Value Proposition (EVP) comprising eight candidate personas based on key roles at Vanguard. They tailored social strategies and content to resonate with each persona, ensuring personalized messages across channels and maximizing impact.
- Collaborative Approach: Collaboration with internal stakeholders, including recruiters, business partners, hiring managers, and public relations, was crucial for the success of Vanguard’s social media expansion.
In a tightening labor market, hiring for positions in an area such as Information Technology, which isn’t specific to finance, is extremely competitive.
In order to effectively reach potential candidates, Vanguard knew it needed to expand its social presence to meet candidates where they are.
“We’re competing against some big, high-profile companies that people are more familiar with,” said Laura Borden, a Content Project Manager on the Talent Brand and Recruitment Marketing team. “We knew we needed to get our brand out there and share the Vanguard culture to show what makes us different.”
They first focused on driving executive engagement on LinkedIn.
Laura’s team had previously worked with senior leaders to boost their profiles on LinkedIn and secured influencer status for CEO Tim Buckley, which helped emphasize the importance of creating a strong social presence throughout the company.
“Executives were able to see the benefits of being out there, getting exposure, and showing what it’s like at Vanguard from a thought leadership perspective,” Laura explained. “This is where people are researching jobs and companies, and we want to ensure we are attracting the best talent.”
The increased leadership presence on LinkedIn served as an example for other crew members (employees at Vanguard), making them more comfortable engaging on their favorite channels.
According to Laura, it’s important to have advocates for the company showing their pride on social because candidates use this information when they’re searching for and choosing jobs. “Having our crew share stories about Vanguard with their friends, family, and networks can also help attract the right talent,” she said.
Next, they worked on creating personalized messages segmented by audience.
The team recently developed its Employee Value Proposition (EVP), which helps the company maximize the impact of content on social channels.
The EVP includes eight different candidate personas, all based on key roles that are considered high volume, or challenging, to fill at Vanguard.
As the team built out its social strategies, it had to consider the channel in which each EVP persona would most likely live so that content could then be developed accordingly. This would ensure that information was not identical or repetitive if someone researched Vanguard in multiple places. A few months after the initial launch, the strategy will be re-examined to determine whether it needs to be adjusted based on engagement and partner feedback.
Their partnership with marketing has been crucial throughout the entire process.
From a strategy standpoint, the team had to identify goals for each channel and build a plan with the help of stakeholders, including internal recruiters, business partners across the company, hiring managers, and public relations.
“The stakeholders had to have a solid timeline explaining how we were going to launch, what we were going to do on the channels, and how we’d measure success,” Laura noted. “Most important, each of our partners needed to fully understand why we were expanding our social reach.”
It was crucial for the team to collaborate with other marketing groups across the company as well.
Vanguard has social media channels for a variety of departments, and it was important to include other social media managers in each step. This kind of coordination results in best practices, shared content, and improved communication globally.
A strong relationship with recruiters has ensured that content is fitting the needs of candidates, whether emphasizing tough-to-fill roles, high-quantity areas, or answering the most common questions.
Expanding Vanguard’s social media presence has been successful due to the steady, methodical approach of the team, and the company looks forward to seeing further results as the social media reach continues to grow.
