Social Media Interview

For my social media interview, I interviewed my current boss at Baird. I currently work as Recruitment Marketing and Branding intern and my manager, Kristen Chang is Talent Acquisition and Branding Manager. We fall within the Talent Acquisition business unit in the HR department but a lot of our job consists of social media management and content creation. I am the main liaison between our team and the Marketing and Communications department (M&C) . I could have interviewed our Social Media specialist at Baird, but I felt as though Kristen would be able to provide some unique insights to the management side of things, as well as working with the social team to push content out.

On our formal social media staff in M&C, there are about four people that manage all of the accounts. On our social media staff within TA we have myself, and Kristen. The M&C team manages our IG, FB, and TW and Kristen and I manage our employment brand accounts like Linkedin, Glassdoor, Handshake and more. We work with the M&C team to get our content put out on IG/FB and TW. From the TA team, we have about 12 external posts/month that go out on all channels focused on attracting the best talent to Baird. These posts include: associate testimonials, general recruitment graphics, culture related content, and advertisements for our university program content. When asking Kristen what a typical day looks like, she said the most important thing is planning posts out ahead of time, to make the day to day easier. Things can get confusing and stressful when we are scrambling to get content out close to the posting date. Our social media specialist has to manage all of the requests coming in from all the different business units, so it is important that we schedule placeholders on the social media calendar a couple of months in advance.

Kristen got into this position because recruitment marketing has become an emerging field in recent years and she always had a passion and interest in the marketing side of things. She was passionate about finding ways we could use social media to get the word about Baird, and attract candidates. Social media has played a huge role in depicting Baird as an employer of choice, especially in this tough market that we are currently in. Kristen said that managing all of the content, and keeping up with our competitors can be tough, but it is all really fulfilling and interesting work, “Never a dull moment” she said.

Her favorite part of the role is being able to show a more personal side of Baird to our audience, and making connections with candidates through the content we are putting out. The most challenging part of her role is managing our accounts, building out new and exciting content- all while maintaining her role as Talent Acquisition manager. She wears many hats within the team so sometimes it can be difficult to juggle all of it at once. Her hope is to build out our small team in the next few years so we have more capacity to get everything we want done.

Her favorite platform is LikedIn because we have an enterprise account, meaning we can really build out our brand page and interact with potential candidates. It is almost like having a secondary website to showcase all Baird has to offer. We have also found that we get a lot of traffic on that account and many people apply and find out about Baird through that page- we get most of our candidates through this platform.

Our social media team in M&C uses Khoros as our social media management tool, and we have account access in order to put our content out there and gain insights regarding analytics/reporting. We have also delved into paid content, and we work with an outside agency to get a lot of those sponsored posts out. Kristen plays a large role in recommending the posts that our firm should be putting money behind etc. and is very strategic when it comes to reaching out target audience-finance track individuals, college students, etc.

When asking Kristen advice about individuals getting into this field- she says that you have to be okay with a lot of things coming at you at once. Although we don’t have to deal with all the business unit requests- there are a lot of teams within the company that want more exposure on their jobs, or want their culture related content displayed on our employment brand channels. After working with our Social Media Specialist for over a year now, I now have an understanding of everything she has to deal with on a daily basis. She also deals with extremely high volume requests, and it can be really difficult to juggle everything at once. This job requires a lot of strategic planning and you have to be okay with things going wrong once in a while-it's all part of the process.

Overall, it was really great to be able to learn more from Kristen, and her unique perspectives. She has a lot to manage, and definitely does it all with grace. I feel lucky to be able to learn from her, and support our employment brand efforts.