HCL Technologies goes social to recruit with #CoolestInterviewEver

IT major HCL Technologies has launched what it bills as the first ever global Twitter recruitment campaign titled #CoolestInterviewEver. Starting 10 February, HCL started conducting a series of ‘interviews’ exclusively over Twitter, offering the winning candidate an opportunity to work on a year-long strategic project with the company’s top management.

The campaign partners are ITSA Brand Solutions and FrogIdeas.

#CoolestInterviewEver, which began with a 30-day teaser campaign to test waters, is being run as a three-part process. In stage one, candidates will be shortlisted based on their responses to questions being posed on the social media platform. This will be followed by a two-day TweetChat with HCL’s HR executives, again through Twitter. From a 100 shortlisted applicants, the top five will participate in one-on-one interviews, post which one would land the consulting project of his or her choice.

"The launch was phenomenal. Within a few days, people started making fan sites, there were memes made by applicants and fans to get us to tweet on the weekend. Participants started blogging about #CoolestInterviewEver and promoting it to their followers, which further amplified the success of the campaign. Consequently, tastemakers and influencers joined the wagon, with their tweets and blogs helping bring in even more participants," said Jatin Modi, co-founder and CEO, FrogIdeas.

Apurva Chamaria, director and head, global brand and digital marketing, HCL Technologies, said, “At HCL we always believe in creating ‘best in class’ or ‘first in class’ global campaigns and the #coolestinterviewever remains true to the spirit. We have pushed the boundaries of twitter as a platform and the response has been enormous. Both ITSA and Frog Ideas has done a phenomenal job of bringing the campaign vision to life.”

The campaign has clocked the total global engagement of 1,13,575 (as on 17 February), including replies, tweets, re-tweets and favourites. "Organic reach of the campaign has been phenomenal. Spread across 102 countries , there was coverage of 220 million individuals. Asia has been the most responsive continent," informed Chamaria. The number of participants has crossed 70,000  with people who were not on Twitter joining the platform to participate, he added.

"It was one of the most innovative briefs I have received from a client. Our challenge was to meet this exciting brief with an equally exciting engagement campaign. The objective was to prepare the ground for the innovative interviews by developing the content for the microsite, and then to invite the audience with e-mailers, tweets, banners and posts. We developed short films that were designed specifically for the twitter audience. We thoroughly enjoyed co-creating with Apurva's team at HCL and the highly talented FrogIdeas. We are proud to have been part of this campaign. Every campaign we are doing with HCL is teaching new things," said Emmanuel Upputuru, chief integrated officer, ITSA.

“Over the past decade, HCL has built upon its ‘Employees First, Customers Second’ management philosophy to unleash the innovative thinking of empowered employees,” said Prithvi Shergill, chief human resources officer, HCL Technologies. He added, “This social media campaign is an extension of our employee-centric culture, designed to uncover new talent in the IT field while strengthening our position as a progressive organisation utilising new age media to refresh the recruitment process.”