In our first episode of Top 50, we sit down to interview Valeria Savani van Woerkom, a Talent Sourcing Recruiter in EMEA for Covance. Valeria shares her story on how she leverages social media to connect with top talent. She fully embraces social media in her role especially since Covance has boosted their social presence during the pandemic.
About The Top 50 Series
The Top 50 is the podcast about employee advocacy powered by PostBeyond hosted by Nicole McLaren, Customer Success Operations Manager and Daniel Ku, Director of Marketing. This podcast explores how the top 50 users of PostBeyond leverage employee advocacy to amplify their brand message. We analyzed over 36,500 professionals using employee advocacy to uncover their social media habits, how they built their personal brand and more. Hear from a handful of the top 50 users to uncover their personal stories and insights.
About Our Hosts
Nicole McLaren, Customer Success Operations Manager
Nicole McLaren is the Customer Success Operations Manager at PostBeyond. She joined the team a little over a year ago, and has developed a keen interest in exploring data to improve user experience and optimize program performance. Nicole’s interests outside of work include painting, trying new foods and listening to niche music genres. Ask her what she’s listening to today! (edited)
Daniel Ku, Director of Marketing
Daniel Ku is the Director of Marketing at PostBeyond and has spent the past several years bridging the gap between companies and customers through social media. Daniel is on a mission to help marketers get onboard with social selling, content marketing best practices, and employee advocacy. Outside of work, Daniel likes to practice his squat form, listen to podcasts and tell bad jokes.
Episode Transcript
Daniel: Okay, awesome. I’m just going to kick it off with the questions. Valeria, can you describe your role and how you got started in your role?
Valeria: Sure. Well, for me, it’s kind of a funny story. I started studying Hospitality Management originally from Venezuela. After I graduated, I started working as a receptionist in a hotel but I found out it wasn’t my dream career and I decided to change. That’s when I started working within the HR department as an HR analyst. After three years, a little bit to my country’s difficult situation and that I wanted to specialize in HR, I came to Spain about four years ago. First, while completing my master’s, I worked in two consultancy companies as a 360 recruiter. But I wanted to experience a little more on how it was to work with the final client and decided to apply to a Covance position, which was called Talent Sourcing Recruiter. At that time, it was quite new, the sourcing position to the market. Right now, it’s more norm to everybody. But at that time, it was quite new also for me to get to know what did a sourcer do and the difference between a 360 recruiter to a sourcer.
I came to my sourcing position and it’s really interesting and it’s a really fun role where you get to meet a lot of new people every day and get to incentivize new inactive of candidates to join our market and to know a little bit more about the career that they could have within Covance, the drug development business of LabCorp. The fun part about being a sourcer is that you get to do marketing, you get to do HR, you get to do sales, you get to do employer branding, and you get to recruit a lot of new people. Yeah, that’s kind of the story of how I got here.
Daniel: It’s funny that you mentioned that one of the reasons why you like your job is that you get to interact with a lot of different people every day. Then you mentioned kind of the aspect of in your role, you’re doing marketing and sales and a bunch of different things. I’m curious to learn where does social media fit in your day to day at Covance?
Valeria: Sure. For me as sourcer, social media is one of the most crucial tools that we have to get our message out there. I would say, kind of, it’s like my breakfast, it’s my lunch, and it’s my dinner. First thing I do in the morning, I log into my computer, I open my email. Next thing, I’m using LinkedIn, which is one of the strongest social networks, at least for my countries, the three countries that I’m working on. For example, last year, let’s say 70% of the candidates that were recruited by me, came at least directly or indirectly through social media. What I mean with indirectly is that maybe we were in contact with them through social media and later on, we reached to contact with these people through a different media as I said emails or cold calls, et cetera. But social media is one of the strongest ways that we have to keep being the top of mind of each and every single one within our network.
Daniel: That’s crazy that you’ve done 70% of your candidates through social media. I don’t think I’ve heard this before, but I think that’s a testament of how strong your presence is on social media but how powerful of a medium LinkedIn, for example, is for recruiting top talent.
Valeria: Sure. Absolutely.
Nicole: Going off of that, so it looks like it’s really helped you in your role at Covance currently. Social media has helped a lot there. Has there been any other ways that social media has helped you in your role aside from recruiting?
Valeria: Yeah. Well, let’s say for me, I worked for a specific role that’s very demanded in the three countries that I’m working on. Let’s say that for each and every single week, the managers are asking for the same role that I need to recruit in three separate countries. We were talking about 5,500 people that we can be reaching at the same moment. If I just picked up the phone and start calling one by one, you would think there’s not enough time in a week or not enough hours to cover all this market. So, we are not just recruiting all the time. We are spreading a message and we’re trying to get inside everyone’s computer and being top of the feeds each morning when they are in let’s say in the train or in the car in traffic. When they log in, the first thing they see is Covance or they see my name and they identify me as the person who can share new opportunities or what’s going on in Covance. So, not just recruiting. Maybe this is what we are trying to get for, but not everybody is ready all the time to change job. By posting constantly, by being active on social network, you’re staying in the top of mind. So, when they decide to change, the first person they will come to, they will identify you by your picture. They will know who you are and they will try to come to you because they know you are the best person to share the news on how they can start their career within Covance.
Nicole: That’s amazing. Yeah, it’s really creating that social presence and the brand. Do you have any specific success stories that you’ve personally experienced because of your presence on social media?
Valeria: Yeah. Actually, we have many. But last week, we had a pretty interesting one. We had this very difficult roll that we were trying to cover for at least two weeks, and we had this candidate that we had contacted like a couple of months ago, wasn’t interested at the moment, it wasn’t the best time to change. We decided to put him on hold not contact him for this specific position. I just kept posting things online, creating videos, and trying to stay active so people would see that we were still looking for this position. Suddenly this person’s situation changed and he was active again in the market. By logging into his feed, he saw my post that I was looking, wrote to me, I screened him, he had interviews with the manager, and one week later, he was signing a contract with us. That’s the beautiful thing about social media that maybe we hadn’t considered this candidate because we thought he was inactive, but it’s a fast way for them to keep track of the positions that we’re looking for. It’s a fast way for us to communicate and to be in constant contact to a market that’s changing every single day.
Nicole: Yeah, the market is definitely always changing and social media helps that quick turnover. Looking at everything, so it sounds like social media has done really great wonders for helping lift the brand of the company, helping you guys really identify key candidates. From your personal experience in terms of building your brand on social media LinkedIn, do you have any advice for anyone wanting to build their personal brand on social media?
Valeria: Sure. My first advice would be start today. It’s never too late. Some people are a little bit scared of taking that first step, but do it. Do it today. First thing you got to do to start is think about what is important to you and what matters to your audience. You need to decide who you are as a person, what are your core values. In my case, I represent Covance brand as a recruiter, but I also represent myself as a person, as an individual who has his own characteristics. I try to incorporate both of them together to try to spread the message of my brand and also diversify from what’s also out there in the market.
The second thing I would advise you to do is start outgrowing your network, start contacting new people. You need to identify what is your market that you want to attract. In my case, I work with the clinical sector. If I wanted to start building my brand, I will start adding people within my social network that are within the clinical sector, trying to look for people that are really influential like CEOs, people who are really out there in the social media and influencing people in the clinical sector. So, adding them to your network, all their contacts will become your second-degree contacts. So, whenever you post something, you have more chance that these second-degree contacts or these thousands and thousands of people will be able to see everything that you’re sharing.
The third thing would be to start sharing things that really add value to the market. For example, if I as a recruiter, would just start posting every single day like, “I’m looking for this, I’m looking for that and now I’m recruiting this,” I’m not adding any kind of value to the market or any important information or relevant information for my market. What we try to do, I create videos. Once a month I create a video telling a little bit what we’re doing as a company. I speak different languages so I try to do it personally to each country. We create testimonials from our employees, we share news not just from Covance but from the sector. I share information about how to create a career. I know what my target or my market wants and I try to share news that are relevant to them.
Daniel: It’s pretty interesting that you’re creating videos. I think one other thing that really stood out to me was that you know your audience. It’s such a basic concept but so hard for people to grasp. I really appreciate that you understand your audience and you know how to provide value to your prospective audience.
Valeria: Yeah, thank you.
Daniel: The last question I have for you is with Covance, of course, in drug testing and clinical research, I’m certain that the pandemic has had a large effect on Covance as a company as well as the industry. Did the pandemic impact how you use social media? And if so, in what way?
Valeria: Yeah, sure. Well, for me, I work with Spain and Italy and March and April were really tough months for me as a sourcer. My other colleagues were in seen such a difficult situation. We are one of the worst countries, the first ones that really faced all these grieving and being stuck at home and people fearing for their jobs because the economic situation wasn’t so great. We had to completely change our approach and the way we did the marketing of our positions. We tried to take a more sensitive approach. There were two things that we did. The first one is that we changed the way that we were communicating to candidates. We weren’t just going like, “Hey, we have this position.” But our message changed to, we understand what’s going on. We know it’s a hard time. You might not be open right now to consider our position, but we are here for you if you do. If you want to understand what Covance as a brand is doing and LabCorp is also doing to fight against COVID, here you can have some links and check more information. If you have any questions, contact me.
The second thing we did is that we stopped doing strong marketing like selling positions. Our approach came to be a little bit more sensitive. It was more focused on news and information about what us as Covance and LabCorp were doing to fight against COVID through images, through links to some news on what was going on in the market. Well, we have some interesting responses from the market. It was really positive. Maybe we didn’t hurt so much candidates out of this effort, but now, it’s all taking place. These people are contacting us back. They feel like they’re closer to us. Yeah, it was really positive. It was hard times, but the result is being paid up now.
Daniel: Awesome. It’s great that Covance and yourself were able to switch to more informational content and news. I think that adds a lot of value to your audience once again. Kudos to you and your team for doing that.
Valeria: Thank you.
Daniel: Then the last question for you is, we have a lot of users that are typically fearful of social media or don’t fully know how to use it, or just beginning their social media journey. What’s your number one piece of advice for them to help them get started?
Valeria: Well, as I said before, my first advice would be just start doing it today. Start knowing their market, investigating what they want. I know it’s scary to put yourself out there, to take videos of yourself. I know it takes a lot of time and effort to also write articles, but just take a leap of faith and try to put yourself out there. You’ll see some of the responses will be so positive as you would expect but that would take you to understand your market and what they want. Once you see they give great acceptance to one of the things, one of the videos, one of the articles you’ve written, you’ll know what they want and you’ll try to go into that direction. So, just go for it today. Try to do it and you’ll see how pleasing it is to get a positive response from your network and to see your work out there being admired first by different people or your market that you’re trying to target.
Daniel: Awesome. I appreciate the advice. With that being said, I just want to thank you Valeria for your time, for sharing your insight and for being a loyal customer at PostBeyond and using social media in your day to day at the highest of levels. Thank you.
Nicole: Thank you.
Valeria: Thank you. It was my pleasure.
