Best Practices: United State Navy Uses Multiple Facebook Pages to Attract Recruits for Niche Careers
Many organizations use Facebook as a tactical recruitment tool, but for the U.S. Navy it’s a strategic weapon. Of all the Armed Forces, the U.S. Navy has the most complete and thorough social media recruitment strategy. Well known for their website, the Navy also has had huge success with its stand alone “influencers” recruitment social network, NavyforMoms.com.
Today, the Navy can be found all over social media – http://www.navy.mil/media/smd.asp. Many commands and local recruitment centers have their own recruiting presence in social media. It’s the Navy’s Recruitment Command’s efforts that really impress though.
So, what’s the business case for the Navy’s use of social media to recruit? First, the Navy needs lots of healthcare professionals. Doctors and nurses are ever more difficult to recruit these days. The Navy has to get in front of possible healthcare professionals before they even become healthcare professionals. Secondly, even as the Navy is the second largest branch of the U.S. Armed Forces, it has the smallest of the budgets. Social media for the most part is the least expensive tool in their recruitment arsenal. Lastly, the Navy needed some innovative tools to get in front of job seekers with particular niche skills and interests. Here is where we see the magic.
The Navy has four critical recruiting areas that there is almost always a shortage of: healthcare, nuclear physicists, lawyers, and civil engineers. When the Navy realized that it wasn’t sufficiently getting their career message in front of the up-and-coming Gen Y audience, the organization turned to its advertising agency partner, Campbell-Ewald for help.
At a recent Social Media for Recruitment in Government and Defense conference, Campbell-Ewald’s Navy lead, Dave Linabury explained it like this. The strategy started by building a series of microsites for healthcare and other niche professions that drove traffic to the Facebook page, which eventually drove possible recruits to Navy.com to enlist. After just a few months, the team realized that Facebook itself drove enough traffic for these specialized professions that the microsites weren’t really needed.
What made these pages successful can be summed up in a couple of points. First, the Navy put its specific recruitment message in front of its intended audience in the places online (social media, Facebook) where the upcoming generation of job seekers was present. Too often organizations try to make possible recruits play on the field they have created themselves instead of going to meet the audience where they already play. Secondly the Navy recruited, within its own ranks, specialists already doing these niche jobs to act as page moderators and put a real face to the job for prospective recruits. If a future doctor went to the Navy Healthcare Facebook page he/she could chat directly with a current Navy doctor. Today, the United States Navy Recruitment Command has eight niche recruiting pages on Facebook. Instead of forcing an audience of job seekers with a myriad of different interests to a crowded and colluded general recruitment page, the Navy gives these folks the attention they need to stand out in the recruiting crowd. See the links below to visit this arsenal of Facebook recruiting pages. Navy Healthcare
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The U.S. Navy also maintains a very effective MySpace page. Although not as involved as its Facebook strategy, the Navy does a great job of putting its recruitment message on MySpace in a way that is easily accessible to the MySpace audience.
http://www.myspace.com/usnavy
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