Industry: Manufacturer of confectionery, pet food, and other food products and a provider of animal care services
Employees: 130,000+
Locations: 110+ locations across EMEA, North & South America and Asia Pacific
Employee Connections Microsite: https://mars.career-inspiration.com
The Challenge:
Ultimately, Mars’ goal is to produce employee-generated content that can be repurposed year-round in order to elevate their employer reputation. In turn, they aim to improve the efficiency of their employee advocacy efforts, ensure they present a true and authentic image of life at Mars and therefore increase the conversion of highly qualified candidates.
Clinch Employee Connections Solutions Used:
Mars implemented our Candidate Engagement features, encompassing our always-on discussion platform and live chats. Together with the application of our Employer Branding features including SEO and social media sharing, candidates have more content to engage with, resulting in candidates being better prepared for the recruitment process and improving the conversion of high-quality talent.
Background:
Mars is one of the leading global manufacturers of confectionery, food and provider of pet care services, making them a well-known household name. Despite this, they still face challenges when it comes to communicating their employer brand to candidates.
Mars was founded in 1911 when Frank C. Mars started selling sweets from his kitchen in Tacoma, Washington. Since then, Mars has built an iconic empire around candy (Mars Wrigley) yet, there is a lot more to them than chocolate bars. Mars Petcare is one of the largest arms of their business and seen as leaders in the field, alongside Mars Food and Mars Edge.
They have grown from Frank C. Mars, alone in his kitchen in Washington, to 130,000 employees in 80 countries around the world. With high expectations for further growth, Mars wants to re-adjust the candidate perspective from Mars as a candy brand to Mars as a game-changer and thought-leader in their respective fields.
Advocating for sustainability, gender equity and human rights has earned Mars the title of one of the World’s Most Ethical Companies, making it no surprise that they are also shaping a positive environment within their walls.
Driving away from old-age corporate strategy, Mars wanted to take a new look at their Employee Value Proposition (EVP) and adopt a modern approach to their employer brand. Recognising the value in their own family history, Mars has positioned themselves as a proud, family-owned business and introduced ‘People’ as the main pillar to their EVP.
Mars’ Approach to Employee Advocacy:
They are upping their game in Employee Advocacy by using employee-generated content (EGC) across their careers sites, candidate email nurturing and employee social media.
Mars focus on three different employee channels:
- Associate Advocacy
- Ambassador Advocacy
- Senior Leader Advocacy
They chose the Clinch Employee Connections Platform to help assist with all three. This ranges from telling the Mars story and the authentic side of what it’s like to work at Mars, to sharing thought leadership content via role-specific discussions and creating EGC which can be shared across employee socials.
By integrating Clinch Employee Connections, an AI-powered discussion platform, into their career site they are able to initiate discussions between candidates and their Ambassadors. This opens up a library of first-hand stories on a range of different topics for candidates to browse through. Associates have provided tips on what the company values as well as speaking about the day to day responsibilities of specific roles.
Alongside the discussion platform, they have access to an entire suite of employer branding, candidate experience and talent attraction tools to help them up their game. For example, Mars is able to see data on the hot topics for candidates at any one time and react appropriately by repurposing the relevant platform content and sharing it across social media platforms with a single click.
Main Challenges and Solutions:
Raise Brand Profile: Reaching New *Google Search* Heights
When looking to apply for a job, what is the first thing you do? According to a LinkedIn survey, 75% of jobseekers consider an employer’s brand before applying for a job, and 69% of candidates would not take a job with a company that has a bad reputation. When it comes to top talent, they need to be able to easily find the company information important to them: as it’s impossible to fit everything into one job advert, they are bound to go searching for these details elsewhere.
Our platform helps drive SEO efforts by ensuring the information candidates need is at their fingertips. This, therefore, empowers them to make the most informed decision on their career. With Clinch Employee Connections, Mars is able to develop search engine optimised content to ensure that their career site ranks above their competition. Clinch Employee Connections ensured that these curious candidates returned to their careers site, with 14% of platform traffic sourced directly from organic search.
For example, a candidate needs only search “Mars career advice” to see this page ranking first out of 68 million results — above the careers site and above Glassdoor (2023).
But how does this work? Providing candidates with employee-generated content through Clinch Employee Connections creates extremely relevant recruitment marketing content. This content is constantly generated as candidates have new questions and continue to view discussions between other candidates and employees too.
Mars can move away from competitor research and chasing perfect employer branding towards providing candidates with the specific content they’re after. The searches candidates are performing on the Clinch Employee Connections platform indicate the type of things they would otherwise be searching for on Google, allowing Mars to understand exactly where their candidates’ interests lie. With this insight, they can share the most popular content on their other recruitment channels, further driving their SEO efforts.
More Engagement with Candidates
Alongside the SEO efforts, there is the benefit of the bank of content that the Clinch Employee Connections platform helps build up. In the recruitment market, the content gap for candidates is huge: 57% of candidates reported that companies didn’t share the key content they’re after, like day-in-the-life information, on their careers site (Talentboard). The granular content produced on the platform covers such a range of topics, indicating that each candidate has different interests and needs when it comes to their prospective employer.
You can see below the breakdown of the variety of themes that Mars candidates are asking about.
By keeping track of the content that gains the most traction and repurposing it, Mars is able to engage top talent.
With 81% of Mars’ candidates finding the platform content helpful, it is clear that candidates appreciate not only the opportunity to ask the right questions but that the answers from Associates are impressive too. The views speak for themselves, with over 2,278 views on the most popular discussion (2023), “What are, in your opinion, the main advantages of working at Mars?”, which features an honest, interactive dialogue between multiple Associates from a variety of job roles.
Results:
Since implementing the Clinch Employee Connections solution for the markets in France, the UK, Germany, USA & Canada, Mexico & the Southern Cone and Brazil (consisting of inserting one line of javascript code into a page on their careers site), and training of their Insiders with the Clinch Customer Success team, Mars saw results straight away across the markets.
Since their launch in 2019, the platforms have impacted over 26,000 unique users with over 122,000 page views (2023). By turning to their employees to demonstrate to candidates what life is truly like at Mars, they are able to engage with candidates in ways they hadn’t before and generate authentic, impactful content, elevating their employer brand.
Due to the platform’s success in these markets, Mars is now exploring launching the platform in other global markets: initially the Netherlands and Middle East & Africa.
Clinch Employee Connections re-energises your recruitment efforts using employee advocacy
Clinch believes that the key to winning the war for talent is storytelling.
Employee stories can be harnessed to improve the informative value, engagement, and appeal of recruitment content that helps to inform and attract top candidates. Your employees’ experiences can be shared via online discussions, live chat events, video content, and social media integrations. This improves the candidate experience, employer brand, talent acquisition, and speed of recruiting.
Companies such as The British Army, Teach First, Nokia and more have chosen the Clinch Employee Connections way of improving recruitment experiences.
