CA Technologies is a truly great place to work and has an amazing culture. We understand that 92 percent of consumers say they trust recommendations from a person more than the same content delivered by a brand. So we wanted to give our most interesting selling point as an employer, our people, a voice and the encouragement to use it. In this way we could grow our prospective talent pool and allow our job candidates to get to know us better as people, not just as a brand.
Our organization was already using an advocacy platform to help employees deliver company news and events to their social networks. But we felt it was important to have a platform more geared to job seekers to deliver not just company news, but also more personal stories, helpful tips for job searching from 3rd party sources, as well as (occasionally) our key job openings.
We chose QUEsocial as our solution provider due to their expertise in employer brand marketing and their standard functionality meeting our requirements:
Thomas Calculus 12th Edition Textbook and helping material
How CA Technologies enabled employee advocates to attract talent
1. CASE STUDYCA Technologies
CA Technologies expanded their employer brand reach and impact
through employee advocated content marketing on social media.
OVERVIEW
CA Technologies expanded the reach of our culture and careers
content through an employee advocacy program. We understand that
92 percent of consumers say they trust recommendations from a
person more than the same content delivered by a brand. CA’s
employees and recruiters are therefore our most influential advocates
to potential job candidates, and are likely already connected to them
through various social media networks, such as LinkedIn, Twitter and
Facebook. We learned that:
Employee Advocacy success in talent acquisition efforts may be
even more evident than those in consumer goods
Employee Advocacy creates multi-cultural access to your brand
Employee Advocacy is low-cost, high-impact employer branding
How CA TECHNOLOGIES
Implemented an
Employee Advocacy Platform
for Talent Acquisition
ca.com/careers
You have something
your competitors don’t –
Your employees.
2. CASE STUDYCA Technologies
CHALLENGES
After the employer brand at CA Technologies was fully implemented through our careers and culture-focused social
media channels, we experienced slow growth in our audiences. We were essentially publishing world-class content to
a relatively small population – a tiny fraction of the annual new visitors to our careers site. To more effectively reach
our goals to be a top-of-mind employer in the technology industry, we resolved to quickly accelerate our social media
content reach and engagement through an employee advocacy program.
HOW WE DID IT
Implementation of the talent acquisition employee advocacy strategy, along with the accompanying technology
solution from QUEsocial, began with a pilot test to assess best practices at a low cost. We implemented in October
2015, following four steps:
STEP 1: Evaluate the Need
We chose QUEsocial as our solution provider due to their expertise in employer brand marketing and their standard
functionality meeting our requirements:
We started with 80 seats on the platform, which is a little less than one percent of our global headcount, but allowed
a wide range in advocates. Seats were divided amongst a mix of recruiters, HR leaders, executives, marketers and
externally influential tech leaders at CA.
3. CASE STUDYCA Technologies
STEP 2: Optimize Adoption and Engagement
After the list was finalized and approved by key stakeholders and an email distribution list was set up, a “coming
soon” announcement, crafted with a compelling impact message, was sent to all identified participants. Securing
executive advocacy of the program between the first announcements and launch was key to building interest and
buy-in among participants as we prepared and executed key implementation processes.
STEP 3: Create Operational Standards and Content Strategy
Our content strategy consisted of posting one piece of content per region, per workday. A section for QUEsocial was
added to our content calendar to ensure platform-optimized scheduling and copy. Timing for push notifications was
considered to maximize prime time awareness for each region: Americas 12pm EST/9am PT, EMEA 10am GMT/UTC
(5am EST), India 10:30am/Australia 4pm (12am EST).
The content mix considered business objectives for
CA’s employer brand, using a 5“Gives”: 1“Ask” ratio.
- 40% Interview/Resume/Career tips
- 20% Diversity in tech
- 25% Tech industry news/ highlights
- 15% Job posting or CA news
STEP 4: Implement and Train
With our content loaded and strategy in place, we scheduled and prepared for the program launch, which included
three online training sessions (one for each region), which were recorded and loaded into the QUEsocial application
for future reference.
COURSE CORRECTIONS
Throughout the pilot test, we sent periodic emails to the user base, giving them an update on the user scoreboard
results and hiring wins and asking them for feedback on the program. Between this feedback and a post-pilot survey,
we were able to identify some opportunities to improve and implemented solutions quickly. The most impactful of
these improvements was the effort to diversify content source by region, rather than using the same global content
for each region. Overall, users loved the advocacy program and gave high ratings of satisfaction for all categories.
4. CASE STUDYCA Technologies
THE RESULTS
Five months after the launch of QUEsocial, we collected all program data launch-to-date, and the quantitative
results were as impressive as the qualitative feedback from users.
The audience added from 80 seats on QUEsocial gave us an increase of over 1,000 percent to the growth over the
same time period on our owned CA Careers social media channels. This boost in audience for our content resulted in
a 33 percent increase in its total reach. In theory, we can extrapolate this growth each time we add seats to the
program.
With this augmented reach, our employer brand content was undoubtedly more trusted when shared by our
employees, as we saw in comparative engagement data. Articles shared through QUEsocial had 68 percent more
clicks on average than those shared by our careers accounts on social media. As our accounts share an average of 10
pieces of content per day, compared to one per day on QUEsocial, they did receive more total clicks. However,
QUEsocial came close to two-thirds that number, giving our content a 70 percent boost in total clicks.
5. CASE STUDYCA Technologies
To tie these incredible results into a return-on-investment, we compared paid media market rates to the value of
added content marketing through employees’ networks, via the program. We learned that it nearly matched the
market value for CPC (cost-per-click) and CPM (cost-per-impression). When comparing the market value to
QUEsocial costs, we saw a 344 percent ROI in CPC and a 2329 percent ROI in CPM. We estimate that we have saved
in the region of $300,000 over five months, when compared to traditional advertising costs.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
Employee Advocacy for an employer brand builds trust among current and potential candidates
A program can be implemented without cost, but an employee advocacy technology application
is a cost-effective solution for user adoption of and engagement in the program
ROI can be measured when comparing costs as well as qualitative results, such as self-reported
hiring wins
Prioritize a winning content and audience segmentation strategy
Ask for feedback, then improve and optimize before expanding the program to the enterprise