This is a Guest Blog By: Zenobia Madon, GM Talent Acquisition, Philips India (@zenobiamadon), Hussain, Mohammed Mansoor, GM Talent Acquisition, Philips India (_mansoor1) and Gautam Ghosh, GM HR and Social Media, Philips India (@gautamghosh). Am honored to publish it as an contribution from my colleauges, who make me proud and are leading the way on the topic of this blog at Philips India 🙂

Our experience with Social Media & Employer Branding (Brand building) has been very interesting and fruitful. During our 2012 annual HR strategy workshop – Yashwant Mahadik (@indianyash) shared his learning’s, forecast and vision about Social Media & HR and encouraged the team to come out with ideas and strategy to leverage Social Media in HR. Over the recent years, Philips India HR team has significantly transformed HR in the company and we have developed and built some top-class HR practices and programs to create value in business and the time was just ripe to leverage Social Media to share and learn. In response to Yash’s challenge and vision – Philips India, HR team’s journey in the space of Social Media started about a year ago – we realized that Social Media platforms are a great way to share what is happening at Philips India with our target audience. Objective was to share some of our exciting and cutting edge, practices, initiatives and events at Philips India with an aim of communicating our value proposition and continue to build a strong employer brand. Social Media is an exciting new white space, some of us also looked at it as an unknown animal with green horns.

Very quickly a core team sprung up to champion this initiative. We began our journey this time last year, with the launch of our We are Philips India Facebook page, (which was launched by (@AbhijitBhaduri) and we to refreshed our presence on LinkedIn and leveraged our company’s global relationship with LinkedIn – to not just recruit from it, but also learn and share from this platform. Then we planned on leveraging other platforms like Twitter & WordPress.

The more we indulged in leveraging social media the more we learnt that, “it’s not an easy task” – you need certain capabilities to do it effectively (and not many of us had those capabilities – what we had in plenty was enthusiasm and drive). Then we explored partnerships and support from Digital and Social Media agencies, most of them were rather inexperienced in context of leveraging Social Media for HR and especially in the area of Employer Brand building. We also realized that there were not many benchmark organizations which had leveraged social media in the space of HR and employer brand building. We therefore decided to chalk out our own path. Decision made was that we will build the capability in-house and learn as we go!!

We initially experimented with different initiatives on Social Media both for the internal (our employees) and external audiences and got some great learning’s (things that work and things that don’t). We also realized that while we had a lot of information to share about the exciting times at Philips, we needed to be cautious about what value add it would do to our external audience and how engaging it would be for them. One thing we were clear, we wanted to build our presence organically and via content creation.

At this point in time @indianyash hired and attracted our co-author of this blog post – @gautamghosh to Philips India and he started off by building awareness and capability of Social Media in the HR team and the senior business leaders. @indianyash was very clear in his steer that, we will build the capability by learning and doing it ourselves. Oh boy!! we did it or are doing it and its so much fun!! We, won’t elaborate on this part much, as a blog from @indianyash himself on this topic seems to be in the oven 

We then moved on to Twitter and the excitement and the learning journey was accelerated. We created a Philips India HR Twitter account and got the entire HR team (70+) on to Twitter. The team getting on to Twitter was awesome fun and the turning point. We had all of kinds – we had some early adopters who took to twitter like ducklings take to water and there were some cautious ones who observed and watched and gradually got on to it. The twitter world welcomed us with open arms. Very quickly, we all got hyper connected with the rest of the HR and Social Media stalwarts on Twitter.
We attended our first twitter #tag chat on invitation from @indianyash who was chairing it for the month of April 2013 (#IndiaHRchat hosted by our friend @tanvi_gautam) which was a fantastic experience. The pace of the chat, exciting discussions and multiple re-tweets which some of us received was invigorating. The #tag chat which was scheduled for an hour seemed to pass in a jiffy. We were dumbfounded by the millions of impressions we made and now we look impatiently forward to the next one every month. This encouraged the team to further explore twitter and we learnt a lot about Twitter.

Within a few months we were very familiar with the various platforms and started leveraging Social media for our HR initiatives. We designed & introduced a one of its kind initiative, #PhilipsHRtalks on 22nd April which was a huge success and created a lot of buzz. The session trended on Twitter, we got about 935,000 impressions and the video of the session which was shared on Youtube has got over 2000 views.
It is encouraging to hear from Industry leaders and HR thought leaders how impressed they are to see the @HRPhilips – HR team at Philips lead the way in leveraging Social media in HR. We also found it extremely easy to get visibility amongst our Global team, on some of our initiatives via both Twitter and ConnectUs (our internal social networking platform). The momentum and transformation was such that we all started to utilize our internal company social networking platform eagerly and effectively.

Another recent initiative which we conceptualized and launched recently is #CampusJournos, which is currently in progress. CampusJournos is an exciting initiative launched by Philips India to engage with MBA school students across India via Social media. The initiative is completely managed by us in-house, it is hosted on WordPress and is promoted via Facebook and Twitter. We have received an overwhelming response to Campus Journos from the MBA students across many business schools in India, since launch. We have received over 67000 views and 305 entries in its first week of Launch, which is very heartening for us. All this at no extra cost or budget.

In addition to above, we have vibrant and engaged alumni networks, who contribute actively to social media conversations about Phillips. We have encouraged active networking and peer-to-peer discussion around topics relevant to personal or professional development. In fact at Philips, Philips Alumni Group is an example of leveraging social media for re-attracting regretfully lost employees and this has been one of our robust channels of recruitment. In addition, our active involvement on select Philips LinkedIn Groups (e.g. Innovations in Marketing, Innovations in Healthcare) has helped us engage & learn from likeminded passionate functional experts. We do realize that we can further leverage LinkedIn and we are at it.

At Philips, we believe that every employee is a brand ambassador. And the best way to build or strengthen our brand is via employees – who can contribute to building the brand – inside out. To that effect, we encourage @HRPhilips to be active on social media sites such as Twitter and share their perspectives on a wide range of subjects. This exercise has been one of rich learning and fun – and has also provided the world-at large a glimpse into the knowledgeable and informed Philips employee and its rich culture.

We make no mistake in accepting that, we are still learning and it’s a journey. But the excitement and fun we have had in the past one year and the success we have tasted enhances our belief how powerful Social Media for HR can be!! This is written on behalf of @HRPhilips full team 