How Thomson Reuters used Instagram to attract candidates

4 mins, 10 secs read time

Social media is a necessity when it comes to employer branding these days. Candidates are actively participating in brand voyeurism. They want to know how it feels to work for a company even before they apply. According to a report done by SkillSurvey, “80% of talent leaders globally agree that employer brand has a significant impact on their ability to hire great talent.” Our response to this at Thomson Reuters was to help candidates picture themselves working out of our offices around the world.

Thomson Reuters provides professionals with the intelligence, technology, and human expertise they need to find trusted answers. We enable professionals in the financial and risk, legal, tax and accounting, and media markets to make the decisions that matter most, all powered by the world's most trusted news organization.

Our global employer brand team is made up of a team of two, and manages the corporate social media recruitment strategy, job board initiatives, brand awareness strategy, and region-specific go to market strategies. Our primary goals for 2017 are to increase our presence on social media through advertising and generate a strong brand presence in the US and Canada.

Want to learn more about how we ran a campaign on Instagram to attract candidates? Read on!

Thomson Reuters on Instagram

Our #featuredfriday campaign has garnered 30% of the likes for our Instagram account in the last year. That’s almost 9,000 likes from only 42 posts! We have only had the Thomson Reuters Instagram account for about a year, and we now have over 10,000 followers. This is in many ways thanks to the #featuredfriday campaign and the broad audience it has allowed us to reach.

As employer brand marketing professionals we need to ensure that we’re providing an authentic view into our culture. Imagery is a great way to engage candidates, and if done right, is genuine and authentic. That is how we created the Thomson Reuters concept of “#featuredfriday.”

In the same way children love when they get to go to work with their parents and see what they do, candidates love getting an inside view of where they will be spending their work week.

The campaign

Every Friday we feature an external or internal photo of one of our offices. We operate in over 100 countries, with over 45,000 professionals worldwide. Every single photo has been taken by one of our employees. For the caption, we include the number of employees who work at that location, and encourage people to join our team. SimplyMeasured reports that “posts with a location receive 79% more engagement.” We always hashtag the location and the features within the photo.

This image of our London, UK office is our third most engaged with post on Instagram. We used hashtags that we knew had a lot of engagement, but most importantly, also described the photo.

Keys to success

User generated content (UGC)

• Gathering content from your employees can be difficult, but it only takes one great shot to encourage them to participate. Every Friday we see comments on Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook saying “When will you do our office?” Someone from the employer branding team reaches out to those employees via email to ask them to submit a photo so that we can have their office featured in the future.

• Hunting and gathering is the key to UGC. You’re going to have to dig through the posts of your employees to find content when you start, but it will get easier as employees become more aware of the content that you’re posting.

• UGC typically gets more likes than your carefully crafted and designed content.

• Always give credit to your employees. It will make them more inclined to share.

#workingatTR

• We created a unique company hashtag for our employees to use when they want to share content about working at Thomson Reuters. This is how we find most of our content for #featuredfriday

• You have to send emails, create blogs, and mention the hashtag to every employee you speak with to generate awareness. That’s how a corporate hashtag grows its wings.

• There may already be a hashtag that your employees use, so ask around first and have the people who use it help you market it to your other employees.

Through our #featuredfriday campaign, we’ve realized that candidates truly care about an authentic viewpoint into what it would be like to work at Thomson Reuters. It’s also been a great initiative internally as many employees want to see what other offices around the world look like. In the future we’re hoping to add video footage to show internal and external viewpoints from the office.