BNL (BNP Paribas) is pushing Social Media on their Italian Careers Page

Social Media in HR is a trending topic all over the world. Bloggers and companies look for good practices in Employer Branding and Recruiting – mostly in their own country. It might be better to take a look across borders and to take into account and identify first movers or remarkable initiatives there, too. Currently being in Italy, I passed by a branch of BNL – Gruppo BNP Paribas and decided to check out their careers website.

I mentioned BNP Paribas earlier on my blog as they host a platform called “BNP Paribas Backstage” which is a social network-like FAQ. Moreover, they have about 5,800 fans on their “BNP Paribas Ace Manager“-Fanpage, a online business game also serving as recruitment channel. The French bank points to its subsidiary’s careers page with today’s news article “Web 2.0 Recruitment at BNL“: In Italy, they changed the appearance of the BNL careers page in order to place their Facebook and YouTube channels prominently. The whole site is now centered around Social Media activities – visitors will even be greeted with a video.

The video explains why it makes sense to attend the BNL Recruiting Day. Employees and executives present a short statement while the most important points are visualized next to them. Afterwards, the BNL employees are introduced briefly. The video finshes with links to both Facebook and YouTube so that you might even explore these platforms before proceeding to the careers page content. This is a quite courageous step as BNL – to a certain extent – accept a loss of control in terms of sending Employer Branding messages compared to using their “own territory”, i.e. their careers page. On Facebook, students will find about 4,300 fans of “BNL Job” who actively engage and ask questions or comment on events.

The careers page offers direct access to functional elements and additional insights such as a video about the company values (same style as the introductory video). It is pretty easy to upload or update your CV for the Recruiting Day as it is only one click away on every subpage (see picture on the right). A remarkable one among the subpages surely is “Progetto Contatto Lavoro” on which BNL describes how they have completely changed their Employer Branding and Recruiting strategy during project work with a group of students. They started to put emotions and experiences of current and future employees in the center of attention in order to leverage on the positive attitude of employees already present in the company. In 2009, a survey had shown that 87% of employees would recommend others to work at BNL due to its strength, reputation, ethics and innovation capability. So why not use it?

Source (last three screenshots): job.bnl.it