Siemens Taps Tumblr as Recruitment Tool
The Tumblr, The Manager’s Call, invites participants in the Siemens Graduate Program to debate topics like business, workforce and career.
The Tumblr, The Manager’s Call, invites participants in the Siemens Graduate Program to debate topics like business, workforce and career.
The Siemens Graduate Program, a two-year program aimed at recent college graduates aspiring to careers in management that originated in 1922, has teamed up with social media agency, We Are Social, to launch a global recruitment campaign, The Manager’s Call.
The campaign uses Tumblr to identify the “brightest minds” in regions around the world while driving interest in the engineering and electronics conglomerate and positioning the Graduate Program as a “cutting-edge career opportunity for the managers of tomorrow,” the agency says.
The Siemens Graduate Program has 220 participants this year.
The campaign, which runs from June to September, aims to create debates across a range of topics such as the future of work, the workforce, business insights and career insights.
Every week includes a different subtopic within these topics, such as Generation Z.
“The specialty of the campaign is it’s a global campaign, so every week there’s at least one perspective from another continent,” says Thomas Hirschmann, account director at We Are Social.
English is the official language of the campaign.
Graduate Program participants can upload posts to Tumblr based on the selected topics each week. Each post is tagged with the writer’s location, as well as a hashtag describing the subject, such as #roleofwomen or #socialrevolution.
The campaign is managed by We Are Social, which is represented by “The Manager,” a figure that is leading and following the discussions.
Participants are awarded points for commenting, as well as when others like their comments.
Medals are awarded each Sunday to the week’s top participants.
At the end of the campaign, those with the most points and medals will have a chance to win a place at an exclusive Q&A session with a Siemens manager and a personal career-coaching session.
According to the agency, the campaign also allows anyone to get involved by introducing a gamification element – users can tap into the discussion via their Facebook logins.
Hirschmann says We are Social has direct monitoring every week and Siemens managers are awarding participants.
“They’re very aware of what’s going on, so it’s a really, really nice way for interested people to get awareness at a very early stage – even before applying for the Graduate Program,” Hirschmann says.
It is accessible via a tab on the Graduate Program’s Facebook page or on the program’s website.
The Graduate Program has 9,300 likes.
Hirschmann says the content streamed on Tumblr is also accessible via Facebook.
The Graduate Program comprises three eight-month work placements at one of Siemens’ 1,700 locations with at least one spent outside of the candidate’s home country.
“The Siemens Graduate Program is a really old program that originated in 1922 and the idea was that Siemens discovered relatively early that they need to grow the next generation of managers for internal positions and what they did was set up a program to cultivate the next generation of people,” Hirschmann says.
Facebook advertising is focused on new graduates and those about to graduate.
“Over the last few years, they learned the behaviors of graduates, youths are changing. They’re more into social,” Hirschmann says. “Using this platform, they decided to use the social web as a recruitment tool.”