How EY Uses Social Media for Employer Branding

We’re sure you’ve heard of EY, it is, of course, one of the largest professional service firms in the world, headquartered out of London, previously known as Ernst & Young (or E&Y). EY is one of the “Big Four” accounting firms, along with Deloitte, KPMG, and PwC.

What you may not know is that they are very good at recruiting talent via social media and in particular Facebook. We have decided to take a look at what makes their social recruiting strategy special and to see what we can learn along the way. Let’s start with the biggest network of them all, Facebook.

Career website:

The EY career website is welcoming and well-designed to help people find exactly what they’re looking for. Instead of having a career page talking only about the company, several categories are clearly available, giving EY the opportunity to communicate in the most personalized way depending on who they are targeting.

Whether you’re a student/recent graduate, an experienced worker or an executive, EY chooses to talk to you directly in order to answer your specific questions/needs. This strategy gives a lot of clarity and also shows the diversity of the company in terms of employees.

Before going into social media, one of the most important things is to define how you will choose to communicate and then make it coherent everywhere. One company, one message. That’s what EY did by following the clear targeting of its career page.

We also noticed that EY have a site which is solely about job search (aptly titled EY.Jobs), nothing about what it’s like to work for the company just a listing and search facility for open positions. This will come in handy once a candidate has decided to move forward and apply for a job with EY.

Facebook:

Ernst & Young is mainly focusing on Facebook to reach students and graduates; it’s the best place to target the young professional demographic. The Facebook Career page was created as early as 2006. Its strategy was immediately oriented towards students and graduates, the goal was to build a relationship early on with them, to get them to learn more about the company and its career opportunities. The UK page currently has 36k “likes” and is growing by the day.

People can directly engage on the Facebook wall with the EY team, discovering the company’s values in a fun way through photos and videos at the same time.

Here again, the strategy is to answer every target’s question. Each tab gives more information about EY, whether you’re experienced or a student. For example, under the student tab, Q&As are available to answer every question a student/graduate may have, along with tests and videos. Through a direct approach, the company puts a face to their unique job experience, explaining more about the “Intern Experience” for example.

The page is a real open window of how it feels like to work at EY and therefore what the company is looking for in their candidates. It’s both about attracting potential recruits and making sure the right people apply. Ideally, the best people in the marketplace will have a look here and recognizing themselves in the company spirit.

To keep things fresh, the page runs campaigns such as the EY Global Quiz, where potential candidates can find out how well they are suited to work in a global company. Here’s how it looked like on the UK Careers page:

This is a great example of how to attract students and get them interested in the company, its activity, and its job opportunities.

Twitter:

On Twitter as well, Ernst & Young’s goal is to be relevant to its audience. Several accounts have therefore been set up depending on what content is shared. General news is shared on the @EYnews Twitter account. People who are following  @EY_CareersUS, or @EY_CareersUK can stay connected to career opportunities. Twitter is the perfect way to get people interested in seeing more of EY on Facebook, YouTube or their website and therefore drive more traffic to those other platforms.

If we look at the students/graduates strategy, other accounts are set up: @EY_StudentsUK, This is of course strictly for internships and graduate jobs.

This distinction is again a unique and targeted way to reach the right audience. Finally, in the US, a campus hire is tweeting about is jobs at EY through another account, @EYStaff promoting the real daily job experience there.

Diversity is just one of the things our people have in common. Find out how we're building a #betterworkingworld https://t.co/lyOipg2Wkb pic.twitter.com/dgwnpeX6qx

— EY Careers UK (@EY_CareersUK) August 3, 2017

Conclusions:

• Target your audience to reach them effectively: clearly identify the profiles you are looking for.
• Don’t be boring on social media: stay fresh and try to get people involved in a creative way (Facebook contests and quizzes are good examples).
• Be consistent in everything you do: from your career page to your Twitter account(s), stay on message and keep the conversation alive with anyone who might be interested in joining your company.

Hope you enjoyed and please share your thoughts on this in the comment section below!