Unilever ramps up social networking for recruitment

Unilever has agreed a five-year HR BPO contract with Accenture to expand the manufacturer’s recruitment activity into social networking.

The contract extension will see outcome-based targets as well as the traditional service level agreements. The BPO caters for 130,000 employees in over 100 countries. The services will be delivered through Accenture’s Global Delivery Network, across the US, Europe and Asia Pacific.

Accenture said it will increase the use of social networking to support Unilever’s search for talent. The service provider has been using social media to recruit staff for a few years.

In 2010, Accenture announced plans to recruit 50,000 people, with 40% sourced through social media and websites such as Twitter and LinkedIn.

In the UK, Accenture decided to set up its social media recruitment initiatives in-house with existing workers developed as experts and used to train others. It uses social media sites such as LinkedIn and Twitter for recruitment.

LinkedIn is widely used by corporations and the recruitment sector to find hires. It has a platform aimed at the recruitment industry known as Talent Advantage Suite and supports business's in-house recruitment teams as well as recruitment agencies.

Microsoft saved thousands of pounds recruiting technical staff through LinkedIn rather than hiring a headhunter, tasked with finding nine workers with niche IT skills to work on a security project a Microsoft recruiter decided to use LinkedIn. 

"Finding nine techies with skills in the rare Assembly and X86 software languages is not that easy and traditional methods would not work," a Microsoft recruiter told Computer Weekly.