Siemens: The Challenge of Human Connection at Scale

For Siemens, recruitment marketing is all about leveraging the Employer Brand to deliver specific recruiting outcomes.What that means practically is that the recruitment marketing team ensures that Siemens recruiters (a global workforce of approx. 300) have what they need to successfully market and sell Siemens to their candidates.

The challenge

More than 360,000 people work for Siemens in about 200 countries. Last year they recruited close to 40,000 people into roles as diverse as Chief Engineer, Cloud Solution Architect and HR Operation Advisor. Recruiting 40,000 people annually is no easy task.

With only 30 odd per cent of the workforce actively seeking new opportunities, Siemens' challenge is to connect and engage with a huge variety of talent and give them a reason to consider Siemens as en employer of choice. It’s challenging enough to connect and engage with candidates when a business recruits a few hundred roles a year in one location – but with 40,000 globally dispersed roles the challenge Siemens faces is sparking these human connections, at scale.

In 2017, Teresa Collis, Head of Global Recruitment Marketing and Competency & Culture Development at Siemens, attended a Melbourne event hosted by ATC Events & Media and witnessed a product demonstration by VideoMyJob founder David Macciocca. As she walked away from the venue Teresa started to think that video just might be the answer to her challenge.

Why Video My Job?

1. Reaching passive candidates 
2. Increasing the marketing skills of recruiters
3. Living Siemens brand value of 'innovation'
4. Improving time-to-hire and quality-of-hire metrics 

Businesses are aware that the traditional method of posting a job ad and waiting for people to apply no longer delivers. Employer Branding has come into its own as an attractor, but Siemens are realistic about the power of polished big budget employer branding content to incite action, acknowledging that it’s just not enough on the ground where the recruiting really happens. Employer Branding builds awareness and interest in a company’s values and culture, but it doesn’t provide a window into what it might actually be like to work in a specific team.

A recent Lighthouse survey of 301 job seekers supports this hypothesis. It’s key take-away was 'No script. No make up. No problem.' 55 per cent of respondents said they find employee generated video more trustworthy than a company produced video, and overall they wanted to see videos of hiring manages 10 times more often than seeing an HR message. All this underlies the need for genuine, authentic human connection when it comes to engaging with candidates and interesting them in your job and company.

The pilot

The first thing Teresa did after deciding to give VideoMyJob a try was to reach out to Siemens global recruiting community and ask for volunteers. She wanted 20 recruiters from a variety of countries who were open minded, were willing to 'have a crack' at something new and were willing to dedicate some time to learning a new skill.

Siemens piloted with 15 recruiters from seven different countries (US, Germany, India, UAE, France, Italy and UK). VideoMyJob ran a series of virtual training sessions to accommodate the various time zones. Siemens quickly built up the number of recruiters who had a license. Some recruiters took to it like ducks to water, and some not so much.

Siemens experienced an initial surge of really great videos, and then momentum started to flag. It became clear that the pilot needed a dedicated resource to drive and manage it, so the challenge was handed to Charis Kurz, a Siemens Recruitment Marketing Specialists based in Munich. Charis took the project on with great passion and commitment, and this is one reason why Siemens have come as far as they have.

The pilot, take two

Charis created this video for a recent event (Australasian Talent Conference 2018) at which this case study was presented in Sydney, Australia.

As Charis explains, the challenges are varied and it requires dedicated resources to drive adoption throughout a global community of 300-odd recruiters. 

The reach metrics

There is no industry benchmark click through rate (CTR) for video job ads yet - but the Siemens CTR performs well when compared to the average click through rate for rich media display advertising of 0.30%. Nor is there is a video job ad benchmark for view time, but an average view time of YouTube advertising videos under two minutes is 30% again compares favourably to the Siemens average of 50%.

There are limitations to these statistics. All of Siemens recruitment videos are published to the Siemens YouTube channel (110,970 subscribers, 90,862,126 views) and the unique link can be shared anywhere the recruiter chooses to promote the opportunity. One of the challenges of getting meaningful statistics is that native video on LinkedIn – where Siemens recruiters do most of their organic sharing – provides only basic data on views and demographics, and no statistics on click throughs. So the statistics gathered from YouTube significantly under-represent the total reach of video.

The real impact

Of course, there are statistics - and then there is real life. Just because people are watching recruitment videos does not mean job seekers are acting on them. What is really important to Siemens is whether using VideoMyJob is having a direct impact by helping them to recruit the right people, in the right place, at the right time. Direct feedback from recruiters has revealed many success stories worth celebrating.

• A video job ad targeting Engineers with experience in industrial automation was online for 43 days, directly resulting in three hires.
• In a market where average time-to-hire is about 45 days, a video job ad targeting Digital Engineers helped the recruiter fill the role in 23 days.
• A video job ad for an Electrical Site Manager in the UAE, a region that can be challenging to recruit for, garnered almost 40,000 views on LinkedIn. Within a couple of weeks the recruiter was interviewing two excellent candidates.
• Another Middle East success story – 13 days after posting a video job ad for a Civil Project Manager in Egypt, an excellent referral was made, and another two weeks later an offer was made to the candidate.

There are more anecdotal success stories, but it has been difficult to truly measure the overall impact. But if we review the four key reasons Siemens wanted to pilot video mentioned earlier, the global team are moving the dial on all of them.

In Denmark video (see right) has captured the imagination and the support of hiring managers, and they are seeing results from getting involved in the pilot (see below).

Where a job ad includes video, 180% more applications are being received than when video is not used. And these are the right applicants. 

But the feedback from the recruiters on the ground is even better:

They are reaching the right candidates, the professionalism of the talent acquisition function has been enhanced, the hiring managers and candidates love the innovation, and time-to-hire has improved. 

The future

Many recruiters are afraid that technology will take their jobs. Teresa Collis believes differently. Used in the right way, technology and A.I can help give us the time we need to do what only we can do – be human and connect. Recruiters that embrace new technologies are the ones who will ‘future proof’ their jobs.

Very soon having a desirable employer brand and A.I that serves candidates timely and relevant information will no longer be a differentiator in the war for talent – every company will have these. What will make a company stand out is the ability of recruiters to authentically and genuinely connect with talent. And for companies as big as Siemens, this must be achievable at scale.