Job seekers’ behaviour on corporate websites, especially graduates, is probably not what you’d expect. Listening to the research that Max has done would lead you to re-evaluate where you focus your online careers efforts. And when the job-seeker does get to your content, the thing they really value is authenticity.

It’s a brave company that allows employees to be authentically themselves while representing the corporate brand. And yet, in this new world of social media, this may be the best way to attract potential candidates, by conveying the corporate culture in the natural voices of current employees.

Max believes that social media and networking technologies are in the middle of – or perhaps only at the beginning of – changing massively how organisations connect with everybody, especially jobseekers.

He talks about actions some of the more adventurous companies are already taking, and the opportunities for firms to steal a competitive advantage by taking the next step forward.

Do listen: the interview is full of valuable pickings gleaned from the coalface of careers communication: the way candidates view companies; how they use the corporate website and social media in practice; and the reality of recruitment pressures.

I’ve broken the interview down into smaller pieces, so that you can quickly find particular points you’d like to hear about. I’ve also included the whole interview and a transcript.

Part 1: Change, choice and channels

Key topics:

• ever-increasing choice of channels
• wide-spread availability of information about people’s experiences within companies
• reduced trust in employer communication

Soundbite:

“The world has changed from one where corporate communications could control the brand, control the message… all they can do these days is really engage, participate and influence.”

Part 2: Facing the fear and doing it anyway

Key topics:

• where to start
• overcoming the corporate fear of:
  • conversational overload
  • brand-threatening conversation
• the benefits of social media for promoting employer brand

Soundbites:

“[some companies] lock their pages down so that students can’t engage… that’s actually a big turn-off and I think massively limits the power of the medium.”

“Having sat on that side, planning those activities, I know full well what the concerns are… but the reality of it is quite different”

“If you’re talking about [communicating with] university students, then really Facebook has got to be one of the primary platforms, because [of the] 650 million people […] and all university students, pretty much, using it”

“In the year that Ernst and Young began its Facebook activity, they had a massive jump up the Universum rankings, I think they got to the top, or very close to the top.”

Part 3: Employer differentiation and corporate culture

Key points:

• importance of people in conveying culture
• using home-grown advocates to connect
• using LinkedIn to connect: know your audience

Soundbites:

“By the time [students] have seen three or four [milkround] presentations, they can’t remember who’s who, or what’s what! And what they fall back on, and this is why face-to-face continues to be arguably the most important channel, is ‘Did I like the people?’ ”

“The reality is, if you empower an employee to speak on your behalf… they’re not going to say negative things. They’re going to be positive”

Part 4: Employer Brand and Values

Key topics:

• relationship between employer brand and corporate brand
• relationship between employer brand and corporate values
• how best to use advocates to communicate values

Soundbites:

“There’s value in trying to understand who you are, and trying to express that. But there’s a real danger that it becomes very manufactured [and that is] an increasingly big turn-off to candidates who really are interested in authenticity.”

“If you let employees talk about their experience authentically… those things [values and culture] will shine through.”

Part 5: Employer brand online: corporate website vs Facebook

Key topics:

• behaviour of students in usability tests of the corporate website
• migration of the careers site towards Facebook

Soundbites:

“[On their first visit] university students pretty much didn’t go to the careers website… They did come and visit the site for one thing, and one thing only. And that’s to make an application… They wouldn’t come back at all unless they got some kind of positive response from us.”

“There’s a number of studies that show that if you’re two clicks away from Facebook, you lose half the people.”

“The web is shrinking, apart from social, which is great. And you see a trend now where you see big employers actually moving their careers site, almost lock, stock and barrel, into Facebook”

Part 6: Evolution, ethics and expenditure

Key topics:

• evolution of the employee profile
• Facebook, privacy and ethics
• where to put the corporate budget?

Soundbite:

“The single most powerful thing is campus events… this is an opportunity with social to really viralise your content and your messages.”

“So when you go on campus, and you’re going to do a campus event, for goodness sake, take some pictures, post some pictures up, get people tagging themselves. Encourage candidates to do it. And actually, because the more authentic it is, the better, actually: shoot some video. Get some vox pops saying, ‘What do you think?’ ”

Here’s the whole interview, in case you’d rather listen to it end-to-end; and the transcript, for those who prefer to read.

Many thanks to Max for taking the time to talk to Paul.

Who were we speaking to?

Formerly Global Head of Employer Brand at Credit Suisse Max Heywood has spent the last 10 years running Talent Attraction programs for Investment Banks, previously JPMorgan, HSBC and UBS.

His experience is centred in graduate recruitment but also includes experienced professional recruitment, internal mobility initiatives, HR and employee communications, HR systems and HR transformation programs. He began his career as an account manager at EURO RSCG, and went on to successfully co-found his own digital marketing agency, before moving across to the client side to manage global agency partnerships and run recruitment marketing operations.

Max is an enthusiastic advocate of Social Media for recruiting, and has been active across all of the major social networks for some time.

 Employer Brand, Culture and Authenticity: Interview with Max Heywood

He reflects on how he caught the digital wave, which corporate sites he rates, and offers some key lessons in getting into social media from a corporate perspective.

Do take time to listen. It is a long and discursive interview with some great tips, well worth listening to in its entirety.

I’ve broken the interview down into smaller pieces, so that you can quickly find particular points you’d like to hear about. I’ve also included the whole interview and a transcript.

Part 1: Looking back: junior reporter to digital leader

Key points:

• Learning lessons from newspapers
  • targeting content for specific audiences
  • building content on a schedule
  • storytelling and simplicity
• Taking advantage of technology shifts
  • text editing to desktop publishing
  • internal comms: print to intranet
  • external comms: product focus to strategic editorial management

Soundbite:
“We started with a site which was a niche product for PLC stakeholders, and what we have now is the company’s biggest storytelling machine… The majority of the audience now, which is quickly growing, is not your shareholders, or your analysts, or your fund managers, or your city journalists: it’s everyday customers who come into contact with Aviva and want to know more about us”

Part 2: What characterises the best sites today?

Key points:

• role of content in transparency and trust
• releasing corporate content into the wild
• connection of trust with social technologies
• a content strategy that helps elevate the content

Soundbite:
“We did some user experience studio stuff with a fund manager. He was asked “How do you use corporate websites?” … He said “My team, that’s their job. I used to do it. We pore over sites like this because that’s where the information is. And we make judgements about how successful it is, and whether we can get the information, and things like that, which gives us a barometer on how healthy we think the company is”

Part 3: The websites that stand out

Key points:

• significance of the peer group – and eating each others lunch
• comparison across industries, and in different countries
• best big companies…
• …and learning from the little ones

Soundbite:
“Major companies get stricken sometimes by this legacy. They’ve been around a long time…”This is the way we do it round here”… When you look at these new companies, they’re not often hamstrung by this… I am fascinated by the way they would tackle similar things, the agility of flexibility they’ve shown… Those are real rich pickings for learning, education, knowledge”

Part 4: Social behaviour, and the need for future planning

Key points:

• the internet in your hand
• expectations of the future
• significance of individual’s choice in communications

Soundbite:
“The real big ticket thing is actually planning about 3, 5, 7, 9 years time. Because my daughter, if she goes into further education, by the time her and her ilk come out into the big wide world of ugly work in their early twenties, say, they are going to be bringing a technological driven level of expectation that’s unbelievable. So they’re going to be saying:

• “I want to be a customer of yours and I do things like this so what have you got? How can I do it?”
• Or “I want to be part of the community so I’m interested in these things so how do I….?”
• Or “I’m going to be working for you so what kind of tools have you got that can help me do my job for you better?”
• Or finally “I might be a shareholder, so… I don’t want to turn up physically. I don’t ever want to walk in your office but I want to be part of your business and have a connection with you.
• So what have you got? Oh you haven’t got that. Well perhaps I’ll go over there because they seem to have got it and that fits with me.”

And I think every business should be thinking about this change that’s happening.”

Part 5: How Aviva built up experience in using social media

Key points:

• experimentation and courage
• getting it right… and wrong
• understanding the sense of connection and passion

Soundbite:
“We had the opportunity to support a round the world sailor called Dee Caffari … we used what was then called the Aviva Challenge as our laboratory… an opportunity to understand how this thing worked, why people find it interesting, why they engage with it and its implications for more corporate communications through your dot-com.

…The other thing I think is just being brave”

Part 6: Communicating with shareholders

Key points:

• the next step online for retail shareholders
• webcasts and transparency
• expanding the appeal of the corporate investor site

Soundbite:
“Retail shareholders are one of the areas that companies can really mine and I think they would like to take part in this as well…The Holy Grail is that someone recommends you to their friend or family. A shareholder might say “I really like this company because they keep me informed, the share price is good, the dividend is good…” – all these other things that are the decision maker – “But actually I really like the way I feel engaged in with the company, communicated to, part of it, opportunity to vote online for the AGM, see the workings of the meeting, do anything really.” And I think that’s a potential growth area”

Part 7: Selling the social media strategy

Key points:

• “Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should”
• learning from companies outside the industry
• increasing time on site…
• …or making it easier for them to get what they need and leave

Soundbite:
“We started to think about Twitter and in 14 months we’re now just hitting through the 1,000 [followers] mark. And then you look at the make-up, who’s bothering about this? Why would we do it? Well because other people, whether it’s analysts or journalists, are electing to get their news like this. They might have RSS, they might have signed up to our email drop from dot-com. But their behaviours are perhaps changing.”

Part 8: Getting into Facebook with a major brand campaign

Key points:

• raising brand awareness
• connecting with key influencers…
• …but enabling everyone else to participate
• connecting social networks and big business
• interesting tools that may – or may not – be the next big thing.

Soundbite:
“For a company like Aviva and its 53.4 million customers around the world (quite a sizeable number in the UK), it’s not too much of a stretch to work out that many of them will be on Facebook. So thinking about “Right, are we ready to have, say, an e-commerce motor and household page?”, perhaps Aviva is not, and many insurers might not be ready for that, but thinking about “Well where we should be in three years with this?” If we’re seeing this growth and Facebook are pretty definite they want a billion subscribers within perhaps another two years and given their current rate of progress would you bet against it? No. ”

Here’s the whole interview, in case you’d rather listen to it end-to-end; and the transcript, for those who prefer to read.

Many thanks to Stuart for taking the time to talk to Paul.

Who were we speaking to?

Stuart Bartram led the development of Aviva’s online corporate estate for 11 years.

The global insurance company has been considered among the leaders in FTSE 100 digital corporate communications. Its online communications challenge is a complex one, balancing the demands and opportunities of a dynamic consumer brand and an extensive global portfolio of websites.

Over recent years Aviva has embraced social media, personalisation and specific content for mobile devices within its evolving digital strategy.

Reporting to Aviva’s global brand development director, Stuart was at the heart of this strategy with his team also playing a key role in developing the digital presence for Aviva’s first global brand campaign: You Are The Big Picture.

Before joining Aviva Stuart spent 10 years as a journalist.

Married with two daughters, he lives in Norfolk and is a governor at Norwich University College of the Arts.

Stuart is on LinkedIn and Twitter.

 Interview with Stuart Bartram: Catching The Digital Wave

Maybe retailers do have an advantage: but how do you communicate your bricks-and-mortar brand online? And how do you communicate your brand in an online space which you don’t control?

Do listen: Adrian and Paul consider the websites of a variety of different companies—from Iceland and John Lewis, RyanAir and Greene King to Rolls-Royce and British Airways—and discuss how your corporate brand values are communicated by the things you do (or don’t do) online, whether intentionally or not.

I’ve broken the interview down into smaller pieces, so that you can quickly find particular points you’d like to hear about. I’ve also included the whole interview and a transcript.

Part 1: Brand expression online

Key topics:

• brand and brand expression
• need for a clearly defined brand
• parallels with retail: it’s the detail – look, feel, engagement

Soundbites:

“[The brand is] the positioning, the proposition and the personality… the expression is how that positioning, proposition and personality is then expressed verbally and visually”

“Firms have to have a clearly defined brand and a clearly defined sense of self – then it is much easier to express it”

Part 2: Making it explicit

Key topics:

• the website and the brand
• providing brand expression tools

Soundbites:

“Those organisations that really understand their customer and are used to engaging with their customer are better at translating their brand into the online community”

“If you look at John Lewis, Tesco and Iceland… each one of the brand experiences delivered by those websites is in line with what I would expect, knowing about those brands”

Part 3: Brand across the web estate

Key topics

• corporate site vs retail site
• consumer vs B2B

Soundbites:

“Companies can afford to be a bit braver because people who shop in Sainsburys for example are also shareholders and analysts and we don’t necessarily have these sharp divisions in our lives. I think the messaging can be slightly different, and I think there may be some subtleties in the tone of voice”

“Some of the corporate and the B2B sites are behind some of the more communicative consumer sites”

Part 4: Getting it right

Key topics:

• getting it right: content, social media and tone of voice
• managing the site for an audience
• demonstrating corporate values in practice

Soundbites:

“The most successful web-only brands – or digital brands, if you like – have been founded on a function… I just wonder if that trends gone too far… and that not enough of the brand comes through in the experience”

“Sometimes website content is overly controlled and you end up with something that is kind of bland, and you don’t notice the difference between one company or another”

“A lot of these corporate sites… you don’t get the sense they’re being actively managed for an audience.”

Part 5: Branding in a difficult economic climate

Key topics:

• rebranding in an economic downturn
• repositioning the brand for customers and for staff
• repositioning for emerging markets

Soundbites:

“The time to look at your brand is when your market’s changing dramatically, when the organisation is changing dramatically, or in particular when your brand is out of sync with the business strategy and out of sync with consumers”

“Do you take a different approach because there’s a downturn? Only insofar as you take a different approach to your business. I mean the purpose of brand is to reflect the business strategy.”

“The number of organisations that have looked at their branding [in the last year] has gone up exponentially.”

Part 6: Brand, social media and mobile

Key topics:

• being there as branding: making the deliberate choice
• brand and employee behaviour
• blogger engagement
• mobile content: less is more

Soundbites:

“Those firms that really have strong brands: in the sense of brand, their people will do the right thing.

“Social media is only an amplification of what always went on… but I think organisations do need to embrace it”

“If you can get the American constitution on one page of paper and the Ten Commandments on one page of paper then why can’t you get the key points about an organisation on X number of mobile pages? I think it helps focus the mind and could be an aid to getting stronger brand presence online”

Part 7: Making the emotional connection

Key topics:

• future of brand experience
• learning from other digital disciplines
• importance of alignment with values and personality

Soundbites:

“There is an opportunity for better use of sound and video and colour and pacing… when you look at what television and cinema achieve in emotional connections through visual and sound stimuli I think there’s quite a way for websites to go”

“Don’t just update the website because you think you need a sort of image makeover; it needs to be founded in the organisational change and the organisation’s values and personality”

Here’s the whole interview, in case you’d rather listen to it end-to-end; and the transcript, for those who prefer to read.

Many thanks to Adrian for taking the time to talk to Paul.

Who were we speaking to?

Adrian is an experienced brand consultant and client director with many years experience working at leading firms such as Landor, Siegel & Gale, Ziggurat and Uffindell. He is now an independent brand consultant.

Adrian is experienced in conducting brand research, brand positioning, brand architecture, naming and creative briefing projects together with brand implementation programmes.

He has developed brand strategies and architecture solutions for a wide range of international clients including BP, RBS, National Bank of Dubai, Swiss Re, Telstra, and British Airways.

 Corporate Branding Online: Interview with Adrian Day

Paul (Corporate Eye CEO) talked to Mallen Baker about the importance of identifying the different audiences for your corporate responsibility communications: about providing them with the information that interests them; about creating the opportunity to engage with them and to discuss the issues that matter.

I’ve broken the interview down into smaller pieces, so that you can quickly find particular points you’d like to hear about. I’ve also included the whole interview and a transcript.

Part 1: Tailoring content and conveying authenticity

Key topics:

• understanding the different audiences
• tailoring content for those audiences
• conveying authenticity and generating trust

Soundbites:

“The key distinguishing features between a good report online and a mediocre one are a couple of things. First of all is that the company is clear about who its audience or audiences are… and the second part is the integrity of information and the authenticity of the voice that you’re hearing.”

“If you care about your audiences, you use a medium and an approach that they will relate to as your starting point.”

“Consumers see through the fluff very quickly. And all of the polls show that they’re becoming more and more cynical about the claims that companies make in the environmental and ethical space.

Part 2: Communicating commitment

Key topics:

• the Centrica report interviews
• CEO commitment; embedding sustainability in the business
• discussing issues that are in the public domain

Soundbites:

“[they] had the courage to step up and say ‘We are prepared to be placed in an area that’s just slightly outside of the comfort zone’ ”

“Whenever there’s a controversy in the press relating to a company the first thing that I will do is go to their website and see what they say about it… the mind boggles just how often the answer to that question is ‘Nothing'”

Part 3: Authenticity and audit

Key topics

• third party commentary
• collaborating with the audience to solve a problem
• using neutral spaces to exchange ideas and information

Soundbites:
“Having trusted third parties who have had the time – and the incentive presumably – to look carefully at what the company’s doing and to talk to them, and then to give their own reflections, good and bad… that generally plays pretty well”

“The other thing that provides authenticity is when people not only are admitting that something has gone the wrong way this year but actually seek to engage their audiences with problems that they face that they haven’t yet worked out how to solve”

“It’s shifted the focus a little bit from ‘the company is the star, the company is the centre of the universe’ and puts it into a position where there are sustainability issues and the company is one of the actors… one of the creators of environmental consequences alongside the rest of society”

Part 4: Audience and integrated reporting

Key topics:

• integrated reporting
• importance of the audience
• interim sustainability reporting

Soundbites:

“integrated reporting could be … a very positive thing, and potentially a dangerous thing in equal measure.”

“The encouraging thing is that… it will lead you to be clear about the communication that you send to one of your key audiences… the danger, the downside, is if you begin to believe that that integrated report is what you produce for all of your stakeholder audiences.”

“Many of your direct stakeholders do not get their information from reports.”

“Where you are engaging your customers or your supply chain or your employees with what you are doing and what’s happened, then the more up-to-date and current that is, and preferably more of a discussion and two-way flow that is, then the more likely you’re going to succeed.”

Part 5: Social media and CSR

Key topics:

• the right social media mindset
• going to where the audience is
• expanding the audience for CSR

Soundbites:

“You can’t have a discussion with a corporate entity. You can only have a discussion with a human being or a highly trained parrot.”

“One of the big challenges for the companies who are used to corporate communications and to being faceless – except for maybe the CEO in certain contexts – is that they find it very difficult to shift to a medium where it’s personal.”

“If you really want to engage the people who are your stakeholders… you need to go to where they naturally gather. And social media potentially creates tools that enable you to do that.”

Part 6: Trends in CSR communication

Key topics:

• conflicting trends in CSR communication
• legislation and innovation
• the human element; stories

Soundbites:

“The evolution of corporate responsibility reporting or sustainability reporting to date is completely unsustainable in itself, ironically, because… the current state of the art doesn’t connect with audiences.”

“The trend has been more and more GRI reports, more and more standardisation. And I start to see a counter trend now, which is from the leading companies [who are starting to say] “We’re going to find ways that actually communicate better with some of our key audiences… we’re interested in finding the way that works.”

“It’s the human element, the story. … and it is the most elusive element because it requires you to be prepared to corporately communicate on a human level. That will always be a minority sport. But I think there can be some very, very good rewards for those who will pick up the intelligence about how it’s done well and give it a go.”

Here’s the whole interview, in case you’d rather listen to it end-to-end; and the transcript, for those who prefer to read.

Many thanks to Mallen for taking the time to talk to Paul.

Who were we speaking to?

Mallen Baker is a writer, speaker and strategic advisor on corporate social responsibility and Founding Director of Business Respect. He is responsible for the Business Respect email newsletter on CSR, which is the longest running CSR internet newsletter in the world.

He is a regular columnist and contributing editor with Ethical Corporation.

Mallen was formerly the development director with Business in the Community, where he was responsible for developing BITC’s approach to marketplace issues, which includes how companies manage issues that arise around their core products and services. He produced the Marketplace Responsibility Principles working with a leadership team of CEOs from major companies headquartered in the UK.

He initiated the Business Impact Review Group – the group of 20 companies who developed a common approach to CSR reporting, and was responsible for the work of the Business Impact Taskforce which produced the landmark “Winning with Integrity” report.

Mallen chaired Kingfisher plc’s Stakeholder Advisory Panel 2007-2010, and was a board member of CSR Europe 2006 – 2008.

 Authenticity and Audience – Being Human: interview with Mallen Baker

Often there’s a gap – particularly for graduates – between the time of recruitment, and the first day of work. How do you keep that relationship fresh?

And then again, at the end of employment: how can you keep communication channels open?

In this interview, Matt Berry explains how social media can be used to extend the conversation at both ends—and, indeed, to connect/reconnect employees with the company:

“alumni and onboarding… there’s a lot of potential, and the reason is that these networks are about relationships and communicating, and that’s what these tools are for. They’re designed to build a network and to communicate with people.

“the key in all of this: it’s about initiating a conversation. It’s still got to be a quality conversation

“with social media—and this is something that a lot of people underestimate—you must constantly turn the handle to engage”

Paul and Matthew talk about Centrica’s experience of extending relationships with candidates, employees and alumni through social recruiting techniques… do listen, this interview is crammed full of insight and information about how one of the largest companies in the UK manage social media recruitment.

I’ve broken the interview down into smaller pieces, so that you can quickly find particular points you’d like to hear about. I’ve also included the whole interview and a transcript.

Part 1: Social media and recruitment

Key topics:

• Facebook, interns and graduates
• LinkedIn, professional hires and the advantages of being a direct recruiter
• targeting on LinkedIn
• importance of investing in skilled social media people

Soundbites:

“We have up to 500,000 applicants per annum… so trying to find a simple way of getting messages out to that fairly large audience is not easy, but social media lends itself very nicely to that”

“‘RateMyPlacement’, for example, is very important around the summer placement in the intern programmes because via that feedback and word of mouth via our participants we are building a reputation in delivering a great work experience. We encourage all our summer placement to leave their views on those ratings sites…”

“one of the big benefits we see in LinkedIn is that certainly half to three quarters of anyone [professional hires] that we would hire is already on it”

“when we do our executive recruitment [LinkedIn] would be the place we start no matter what”

“social media doesn’t just happen. It is an interactive thing by its nature and it needs some skilled people to really get full advantage from it”

“We have our applicant tracking system … linked in to Facebook, so you can physically tap into any job in our organisation in the UK from our Facebook page”

Part 2: Social media and onboarding

Key topics:

• social media and decision-making
• using social media for support
• control, pragmatism and the front line

Soundbites:

“it’s about trying to put information where people are already… our graduates, four or five years ago, were creating a Centrica 2007 intake Facebook page. We didn’t. And we couldn’t stop it if we wanted”

“so we just started tapping into that, giving them a framework… we’ll have induction days which we completely schedule via these groups, and they communicate, talk and support each other”

“one of the things we’ve recently built is an onboarding site, specifically for anyone that joins our business the moment they say ‘Yes, I’d love the job’. And one of the key things there is linking people into our social network”

“we can’t stop people saying what they say anyway but at least we know what’s being said, which is of huge benefit”

Part 3: Social media and alumni

Key topics

• risks and niche knowledge
• maintaining relationships with talent
• sharing internal information with alumni

Soundbites:

“We’ve got some demographic challenges where we have to think a bit more flexibly about how do we capture some of that talent”

“not to have some mechanism to keep in touch is a bit of a risk, particularly where some of these individuals have such niche knowledge that’s very hard to replace”

“we’ll always be doing projects or elements of work that will still be of interest to that professional community”

Part 4: Social media and referral recruiting

Key topics:

• social-media-enabling the referral process
• tracking and transparency
• engaging internally to get people to embrace it

Soundbites:

“social media is an underestimated tool for referral programmes”

“It’s not how do we engage the external marketplace, it’s how do we engage the internal marketplace”

“we make sure that any role we have running an internal person can look at it and within […] two clicks they can share that job with their friends. So you could send me a link […] and I could apply straight away, and that would also help the business track the fact that you were the person that had introduced me”

“the external team now handles all internal recruitment as well… that team is now directly talking to all of these candidates. We would have 5-10,000 applications internally per annum, so we’re making sure that we’re the hub of all that communication”

Part 5: Social recruitment governance

Key topics:

• social media policies, freedom and message control
• presenting a coherent front to the external candidate world
• avoiding the cold-call scenario
• merging of the social media and recruitment platforms

Soundbites:

“we have a social media policy of course which is a fairly straightforward thing […] social media is part of everyone’s lives. Use it but use your common sense”.

“The big challenge with social media – or one of them – is that if you don’t keep your content relevant and fresh and up-to-date then there’s no reason for anyone to look at anything that you’re doing”

“it’s about the engagement activity that would get you interested to come in rather than pushing hard to push opportunities at people”

“Businesses will have to get more mature in the social media space, which is going to take a little bit of time. I think it’s an opportunity to make the process a bit more engaging. But I don’t think it’s going to make life easier.”

Here’s the whole interview, in case you’d rather listen to it end-to-end; and the transcript, for those who prefer to read.

Many thanks to Matthew for taking the time to talk to Paul.

Who were we speaking to?

Matthew Berry started his career as a chemical engineer in the steel industry covering a number of operational, technical and management positions.

With a desire for travel, Matthew moved from Australia to the UK and worked as a Search and Selection consultant for European energy and process industries.

For the past 8 years, Matthew has worked with Centrica in a number of HR roles and is currently Resourcing Director for the Centrica Group.

 Social Media: Extending and Connecting the Recruitment Conversation