Interview Transcript, Edda Van Winkle

Welcome to an Talent Acquisition Channel special feature on TotalPicture Radio, recorded at the SelectMinds Annual Client Conference in New York City.

SelectMinds enables companies to revolutionize the way they acquire talent, by leveraging the social networks their current and former employees have already built to generate high-quality referral and rehire candidates.

The SelectMinds product suite, AlumniConnect and TalentVine leverage an organization’s most valuable asset – their people. With SelectMinds technology, companies can recruit top talent not only from within their employees’ social networks but also from their own private secure employee and alumni networks. These referral-based environments drive recruitment, new business development, brand evangelism, and ultimately — business growth.

Welcome to a special Inside Recruiting Channel podcast from the SelectMinds Client Conference in New York. This is Peter Clayton reporting, and joining us today is Edda Van Winkle, Senior Manager Corporate Communications at CSC – a global technology company based in Falls Church, Virginia, with over 94,000 employees in more than 90 countries.

Peter: Edda, welcome to TotalPicture Radio. For those not familiar with CSC, tell us about your company and services.

Edda: CSC is a $16 billion global IT services providers. We support large complex projects like delivering cloud computing, cyber security or healthcare IT for government and commercial organizations around the world.

Peter: You joined the CSC in 2008. What is your role within the organization?

Edda: I am on the corporate communications team, specifically focused on internal communications and alumni relations. But my goals internally are to really drive employee engagement, retention and satisfaction.

Peter: Those are three big things, let’s face it.

Edda: Definitely.

Peter: As I said in the introduction, CSC is a very, very large global enterprise with over 90,000 employees yet, it’s not an instantly recognized brand like a GE or IBM or Microsoft. How do you communicate your brand and admittedly complex services, especially in your recruiting efforts?

Edda: While CSC has been around for more than 50 years, our marketing efforts are really quite new; really beginning about 3 years ago with the re-brand of our company. So to drive brand awareness we have a clear PR strategy. We are currently in the process of refining our digital and social media strategy. Then we also run internal campaigns to really engage our employees in being brand ambassadors.

Our messages stress that at CSC, you have the opportunity to be a part of work that matters. That’s one of our key messages internally. You can make a real impact on the way businesses and governments around the world operate. So whether it’s improving the quality of healthcare, providing better patient care, or moving technology functions to the cloud, or even protecting the world’s most sensitive data. We’re really stressing that at CSC, you can be part of work that matters and that’s something that carries really well externally.

Peter: Yeah, I’m sure it does, because CSC was recently awarded the large contract with the Environmental Protection Agency, and Newsweek has ranked CSC in the Top 100 Greenest Companies in America. Your company helped Denmark digitize its land registration process going 100% paperless. So you are big in sustainability and does this is help in recruiting? Is giving a very diversified organization a common goal and a purpose around sustainability help try to create some sort of community with your organization?

Edda: Absolutely. Corporate responsibility has been a very mobilizing force inside and outside our company. Increasingly, clients want to work with companies that not only have experience in implementing innovative and cost effective sustainable solutions, but who are actually practicing it within their organizations. We know that clients want to do that. At the same time, people also want to work for organizations that take sustainability seriously.

We have a culture that really loves giving back to the community where they live and work and whether that’s through charitable organizations or through green initiatives. There’s a lot of energy and momentum around our green efforts and our employees are proud of our achievements. Again, it’s a key differentiator for us.

Peter: I guess that really does help in creating some kind of a community when you are in so many different verticals, in government work, in private sector work, doing work in the medical field, and doing in energy, you’re all over the place.

Edda: Definitely. I think we engage our employees in also taking innovation to the next level within our sustainability solutions. By doing that, we’re actually engaging our employees in helping drive those forward.

Peter: Innovation is one of those concepts du jour within corporations; everyone wants to be innovative today, but how do you go about doing that in practice? How do you go about saying to your employees, we want you to be innovative?

Edda: Something really fun and very interesting that we did last year is we actually used a tool called IDM Management. It’s an ideation product. We went out to all of our 94,000 employees asking them, what can we do to take CSC to the next level, how can we accelerate our growth? We asked for them to actually contribute their ideas. From all of these ideas that we collected, we actually distilled them into five objectives. They were actually funded by our company.

Since then, we’ve actually funded those five objectives that ideas that were supported from our employee base. They’re the closest to your clients. They know what’s happening within the industry, they come up with the ideas and we can actually use that to support our business.

Peter: How do you go about communicating to the employees all over the world which of these ideas are being adopted and how do you get that message out to the employees that you are actually doing something and taking some action based on the ideas that they’ve generated?

Edda: I think through consistent communications. We ran this program globally. We told them that we were running it. We generated a lot of excitement. We got a lot of participation. Then it was through follow up, telling them which ideas were selected, and the selection process was through senior management, as well as some other folks around the company and then reporting back out to employees saying, here’s the process that we took and here’s what we ended up with. Thanks to you, you all were a key contributor in helping us find these objectives to help drive growth.

Peter: Tell us about your social media strategy at CSC, are you using Facebook, are you using Linkedln, do you have Twitter, people out there tweeting, do you have a community manager that’s working with you and getting the CSC message out there? How are you adopting all of these new social media tools or are you?

Edda: Yes, we are. It’s really exciting. We’ve really embraced social networks and communities. Again, we’re almost in the process of refining a digital marketing strategy. Internally, we’ve actually got an Enterprise 2.0 platform for collaboration. We used a software product called Jive that has had tremendous adoption. We have nearly 70,000 of our 94,000 employees using this product.

Peter: Wow, that’s pretty impressive right there.

Edda: It is huge and very exciting. Externally, we have our presence across Twitter, Facebook, and Linkedln but we actually have a clear strategy for all of those platforms. We’re not just out there doing social media just to do social media. We actually use Twitter for our media. All our CSC news tweets are directed to reporters.

Facebook – our strategy is, the Facebook presence for current employees and then also, potential new hires. All of it is around work life and that type of cultural engagement.

Through Linkedln it’s primarily for business development and staying connected to our alumni population.

The other that’s pretty exciting is that we also recently launched the CSC Meaningful Use Community, which an interactive online community for US healthcare providers. This is for providers who are looking to implement meaningful use of an electronic health record so that they know – they’re discussing the best practices around how to stay compliant, they’re meeting government mandates which is coming very soon, and this has been really exciting. We’ve gotten a lot of adoption there as well. This is an external community where we’ve got CSC collaborating externally with other folks within the industry.

We know social media is integral to collaboration and innovation. We strongly support our employees as they have these open dialogues and exchange ideas.

Peter: That’s really exciting. You’re so right, you are engaging a community; you’re not pushing to stuff out one way and not allowing people then to communicate back to you, which I think is so critical in this whole social media space. If you’re not creating a conversation, you’re really not in social media.

Edda: Right, absolutely.

Peter: In July of 2010, you launched a CSC alumni network called InTouch, which is of course powered by SelectMinds (we are at the SelectMinds Conference). Can you tell us why CSC decided to invest in the alumni network and what some of the early results have been. I know you’ve only had this running for less than six months, but tell us a little bit about what you’ve learned in that period.

Edda: Like our employees, we know our alumni are a close knit innovative, and really highly networked group. They have a strong presence and influence actually across our industry. We launched InTouch as another channel to help strengthen those relationships across the industry in giving us greater influence across all of our client and prospects. We want to help them stay connected and then also build this powerful referral and talent pool.

Some of the early results, to date we’ve recruited thousands of former employees and then also hired actually dozens of candidates referred by alumni. We’ve seen the program already making an impact.

Peter: That’s fantastic. Are you using InTouch globally?

Edda: Not yet. That’s something that we’re really excited about. We plan to expand the program worldwide next year. So right now, InTouch is just open to US alumni.

Peter: How have you gone about promoting this to your alumni network and encouraging them to start using it?

Edda: We actually have about 40,000 alumni across Linkedln groups. We advertised a launch through those groups and we’ll be continuing to promote the program through that channel as well. We used the Tell a Friend Campaign a lot, which encourages employees to also share the link as well as alumni to share the link to bring others on board. We’ve run a few incentive programs to really encourage alumni to spread the word.

Peter: What are the benefits to your alumni in using this platform? What’s in it for them?

Edda: We think the greatest benefit is giving alumni a trusted community to reconnect with their former colleagues and then making a connection to expand their professional network. It’s really all about the connections.

As we all know, networking is integral for any new job or business development opportunities. So InTouch is another channel to help facilitate that relationship building.

Peter: Edda, how is your HR and recruiting departments mining the data that’s coming into the InTouch network?

Edda: Well since we’re fairly new, we’re currently tracking the referrals and rehires and then reporting back to HR and our leadership just to demonstrate the ROI from the program. But as we get more established with a larger alumni community, we will start to engage recruiters in the program to provide them another channel to source their talent. We’ll also be implementing SelectMinds TalentVine pretty soon. We’re excited about that. That just gives alumni another opportunity to refer candidates using their social networks.

Peter: In speaking about metrics, are you tracking anything other than the amount of hires that you’re able to get off of the network?

Edda: Yes. We really want to make sure the program is valuable, so we’re tracking content and traffic trends so that we know what employees are looking at and what they find most valuable and we can continue to bring them the right content.

Peter: You had mentioned that you’re looking to expand the InTouch network in 2011. What other goals do you have in mind for making this even a more valuable tool for your organization?

Edda: Definitely the expansion is one of our key goals. We are going to really focus on bringing alumni on board from Europe, Australia, India, and Asia next year. Then in addition to that, we are ramping up our alumni referral programs, so through TalentVine we hope to really drive a significant number of candidates to the system.

Peter: Who manages all of this?

Edda: That would be me. We have a very small team – myself and another… we’ve got about two folks that are dedicated, or part of their positions are dedicated to alumni relations.

Peter: Are you planning in expanding that out as you start expanding across the globe?

Edda: Yes, absolutely.

Peter: I would hope so, yes.

Edda: Yes, definitely.

Peter: But it is pretty impressive what you’ve been able to accomplish with just a very small team in a very short period of time.

Edda: You know, and I think it speaks to our alumni. Our employees stay with CSC for a really long time. They are very close knit group. As they leave the company, they really have that affinity and that connection and they want to reconnect with us. It’s exciting that we have this program in place.

Peter: There really does seem to be a trend towards the so-called boomerangs, the people who have left coming back into the organization. I guess InTouch has a great way for you to really do that engagement with your former employees and bring them up to date on what’s going on and let them to connect with their friends, right?

Edda: Exactly. I think because folks stay with the company so long, they do have great experiences. Even if they’re going on to further their career, they definitely look at CSC as a potential place for them to be again.

Peter: What is your policy towards the use of social networks? I mean, are your employees blogging? You mentioned that you have a very active Facebook community and Twitter community. Is anybody allowed to use these tools as an employee? How have you managed that?

Edda: We are actually in the middle of refining our social media policy right now. Again, we do embrace social networks and communities, because we have that internal platform that operates very much like Enterprise 2.0, we do encourage our employees to communicate using social media. We have policies and folks need to abide by the standards and business conduct and such but it’s definitely… we know that everyone’s going to do it, so we need to support it.

Peter: I think that’s really smart and especially the fact that you do have policies out there that the employee... Again, I think to me, if you’re hiring adults, which I’m assuming you are, and these are dedicated employees as long as you give them some guidelines and the usage of these things, it seems to me to be in everyone’s benefit.

Edda: Absolutely. Employees are obviously the best voice in carrying the brand. So I think we want to help enable them to do that and they want to do that. They want to share their experiences with others. That only helps CSC in the long run.

Peter: I’m thinking about what Jeremiah was saying earlier this morning about social networks and they don’t scale, right? They do not scale. So you have to have people actively involved in these to make them beneficial.

Edda: Definitely. They are our best essentially marketing tool. So we fully support them.

Peter: Is there anything I haven’t asked you that you’d like to share with the audience?

Edda: I think you’ve covered it. I think we’re just really thrilled to have this platform to welcome our alumni back to the CSC family.

Peter: Thank you very much for taking time to speak with us today on TotalPicture Radio. It’s been really nice meeting you and learning about CSC. I think one of the coolest things you guys have done is reprogram the Hubble Telescope.

Edda: Very cool, yeah. We are in every major industry, so it is exciting. We have a lot of cool projects.

Peter: Thanks again.

Edda: Thank you.

We’d like to thank SelectMinds clients CSC and Corporate Communications Senior Manager, Edda Van Winkle for her participation in today’s conversation. Visit Edda’s feature page in the Inside Recruiting Channel on TotalPicture Radio. That’s totalpicture.com to voice your opinion.

Working with the world’s biggest brands to acquire top talent and manage alumni, SelectMinds leverages the promise, yet simplifies the complexity of doing business on the social web. It’s social networking with a purpose. Visit selectminds.com to learn more or call 1-877-276-3978.

This is Peter Clayton reporting. Join our Facebook community to join in the conversation and subscribe to our newsletter on our home page – totalpicture.com. Our interviews link your business with your customers and prospects.

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