Industry: Telecommunications
Employees: 90,000+
Locations: 130 locations across EMEA, North & Latin America and Asia Pacific
Employee Connections Microsite: https://nokia.career-inspiration.com/
The Challenge:
Nokia needed to raise their brand profile by boosting candidates’ knowledge and perception of the company, whilst improving the candidate experience from initial awareness through to onboarding. Taking a culture-first approach to talent attraction, Nokia has worked on a strategy led by employee advocacy and employee-generated content to place them as the employer of choice in their industry.
But why is employee advocacy so important for Inclusive Hiring?
Employee advocacy (company promotion through its workers) is useful in more ways than one. Having employees vouch for business practices adds credibility: did you know that 85% of people trust recommendations from people they know, compared to only 15% believing corporate messages? Employees may not be personally known by candidates, but they humanise a brand through becoming a familiar face that candidates can rely on to be the spokespeople of truth; demonstrating whether or not inclusive initiatives are a tangible reality.
Having employees advocate for your company not only improves talent attraction, but also has additional benefits such as increasing employee engagement and encouraging business growth
And so, the importance of employee advocacy cannot be understated. Nokia has realised and reaped the rewards of this initiative.
Clinch Employee Connections Solutions Used:
Nokia implemented the Candidate Engagement features of Clinch Employee Connections, encompassing our always-on discussion platform, virtual events, chatbot and video content. Together with the application of our Employer Branding features, which include SEO and social media plug-ins, candidates are more engaged with Nokia careers site content, resulting in improved conversion of high-quality, diverse talent.
Background:
Nokia is a telecoms giant that has remained highly regarded for decades, both as a successful business and employer.
So, how have they done it? The key to relevancy and longevity, as with any organisation, is the building of a solid talent pipeline that ensures the brightest minds continue to inform business practices. The tricky part is engaging with top talent to join a company year-on-year. Nokia wanted to take a culture-first approach in engaging talent by harnessing the power of employee advocacy to attract and nurture candidates globally using a few different tactics, one of which is the Clinch Employee Connections solution.
Nokia knew they needed to update their careers site to create authentic, persuasive content for prospective applicants. They wanted to showcase diverse candidates and share this content across their key recruitment channels. The Employer Branding Team implemented Clinch Employee Connections in 2019 and have since seen over 150,000 page views across nearly 800 candidate-to-employee discussions. They have also so far conducted four Live Chat events on key recruitment topics, which have generated over 450 questions and answers between candidates and employees.
The Nokia platform allows candidates to interact directly with employee insiders to discuss various topics surrounding life at Nokia. Candidates can view and put forward questions for employee advocates to answer – giving detailed, authentic, honest responses to candidates. Nokia has leveraged this to fulfil candidates’ ever-changing need for knowledge by consistently addressing candidate concerns before a content gap can form.
Dynamic, relevant content by way of employee advocacy is a brilliant way to immerse top talent into their inclusive company culture before they even apply, and reflects the tenacity of the employer towards the candidate (and employee) experience.
But don’t just take our word for it, here is what Sandrine Halleux, Global Social Employer Brand Lead at Nokia, said about our suite of tools:
“Candidates use Clinch Employee Connections because they want to have a direct line of communication and a conversation with our employees on various topics such as company culture, life and work at Nokia, career tips and development, recruitment and job opportunities at Nokia. It’s a two-way conversation vs. a one-way input. This enables them to ask specific questions they have on their mind and then allows us to re-leverage and repurpose that content.”
Main Challenges and Solutions:
Despite being a well-known telecom giant with global brand awareness, candidates sometimes have a limited perspective of Nokia’s offering
One of Nokia’s challenges is that candidates have a limited understanding of the Nokia purpose, which is “To create technology that helps the world act together”. Nokia aims to create, help and shape a better world. Nokia believes technology is central to the solution: responding to climate change through more efficient use of resources, restoring productivity growth by digitising physical industries, and using technology to provide more inclusive access to work, healthcare, markets and education. Nokia is more than their mobile phones, they are the movers and shakers within 5G network infrastructures. They want to position themselves as such within the candidate market to boost talent engagement with their brand and position themselves as the employer of choice.
Nokia decided to connect candidates with employees to provide a better understanding of the scope of what they do. Through integrating the Clinch Employee Connections platform onto their careers site, they allow candidates to connect with employee insiders 24/7, creating employee-generated content year-round which supports their mission. They utilise Live Chat events to further this goal: a Live Chat in October 2020 titled “Working with world speed record-breaking 5G technology in Nokia” allowed candidates to ask specific, industry-related questions directly to the employees that know it best. It also generated a number of high-quality discussions for future candidates to benefit from when browsing the platform.
Diversity and Inclusion in Tech
Nokia decided that putting stories from female and BAME employees at the forefront would allow candidates to understand their commitment to a culture of inclusion where employees find themselves working within global teams of colleagues that bring a rich diversity of thought, ideas, and innovation.
Fifteen employee ambassadors, or Insiders, have been selected from a variety of backgrounds to represent the organisation and share their stories with candidates. Insiders were selected with the intention of showcasing a representation of the whole workforce, including harder-to-fill roles. Insiders receive comprehensive training from the Clinch Client Success team on how to provide quality responses to candidate questions that create relevant, authentic and persuasive content.
Since launch, there have been nearly 800 questions with over 2,000 employee responses. A stand-out question pitched by a candidate, “What is it like to be a woman engineer at Nokia?”, has garnered over 2,100 views and received 11 responses from a number of Nokia Insiders in a variety of roles. This has boosted Nokia’s SEO efforts immensely, with this question showing as the top suggestion on Google when searching for “woman engineer Nokia” out of over 1 million results (30/04/2021).
The combined effect of generating authentic discussions and hosting relevant live chats is the cultivation of better relationships with candidates, whilst reducing recruiting costs from candidate ghosting through proactively engaging diverse candidates from awareness through to onboarding.
The content produced on the platform, generated through both candidate-to-employee Q&A and live chat events (which are also later published to the discussions pages for future candidates to reference) is reused on other Nokia recruitment channels, including:
Job adverts: With the content gap persisting on job descriptions, they’ve linked the platform on each job advert. This increases the visibility of relevant, authentic content – priming candidates to talk directly to employees in the role they’re considering applying for.
Regular re-engagement emails: These emails, which are automatically sent from the Clinch Employee Connections platform, target candidates with relevant content based on their activity on the platform to re-engage with them. These generate an open rate of 56% and a click-through rate of 34%, both significantly higher than industry average for recruitment emails.
Social Media Sharing: Nokia has understood that employee insiders require a global, social stage to share their stories and boost awareness of the Nokia experience. The talent team are able to leverage the content created on the platform to share in posts across the Nokia social channels, inviting candidates to ‘Meet our Insiders’: see example here.
SEO: As the content on the platform is constantly updating and there is such a variety, the discussions generated rank highly in Google searches. This drives organic traffic to the website and increases impressions and clicks to optimise the discussion pages for search engine rankings.
Results:
Following the fast and easy deployment of Clinch Employee Connections on the Nokia careers site (consisting of simply inserting one line of javascript code) and thorough training of Insiders, Nokia began to see results right away.
Since 2019, Nokia has had 40,000+ unique users visit the platform with over 150,000 page views (May 2021). With 72% of candidates stating that their impression of the firm improved and 92% voting the content helpful, their goal of widening their talent pool and improving candidate experience continues to be met.
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 Nokia, the NHS, TeachFirst, Mars and more have chosen the Clinch Employee Connections way of improving recruitment experiences.
