Damon Klotz Shares Tips On Bridging The Digital Divide And Who You Should Be Following On Twitter

This week we had the pleasure to chat with Damon Klotz to talk about how he bridged the digital divide between marketing and HR at Ramsay  Health, and turned the technologically and socially conservative organisation to one where Hospital CEO’s  not only know what twitter is, but use it to engage with employees and potential candidates alike.
You can listen to Damon’s chat with Jenni Nelson below, or read the transcript at the bottom of the page.

What we learnt from talking to Damon

 

  • The best people to communicate your EVP to potential candidates are current employees, so empower them to do so.
  • Be evangelical about social media, sell the benefits and create champions of change in your organisation
  • If you want C-suite buy in, then commit to educating them on the importance of your strategies, how it effects them and how they can be a part of it
  • This space can be overwhelming. If you need help, just ask. Help is usually only a tweet, email, skype or like away.

 

Damon’s Top 15 Recruitment Marketing Leaders You Should Be Following On Twitter

 
For those of you starting out on your recruitment marketing strategy, or who want to up to build on what they’ve started, Damon recommends getting on twitter and connecting with other recruitment marketers.
Here are the top 15 people, that Damon himself gets daily inspiration from, and who you should be following.
You can find a twitter list with all these leaders here.
@BillBoorman
@RyanHoliday
@JasonWRoulston
@wearesocial
@garyvee
@willstaney
@musatariq
@servantofchaos
@pauljacobs4real
@rexster
@stacyzapar
@neilmorrison
@RRHoover
@peoplegeeks
@pmarca
Don’t forget to follow us at @ATCevent

Transcript

 
JN: Damon thanks for your time. We’re speaking to Damon Klotz form Ramsay Health Care. Damon your role is Global Digital Strategy Manager and can you tell us a bit about that role, and how you grew into it?
DK: Sure, so I’ve been with Ramsay for three and a half years now, and when I first started I was brought in to advise the comapny on their digital and social media strategy, and from that I’ve been able to grow that role into what it is now, which is their global digital strategy manager. So for those that don’t known Ramsay Healthcare, they operate private hospitals around the world. We currently operate 212 private hospitals in five different countries. My role is part of their global team, and is about advising the company and working on strategies in their digital and social media space.
JN: Right, so it’s a global position?
DK: Yes
JN: Ok, great. So with that role, does it just cover HR and recruitment? What’s your remit?
DK: No, well I have a bit of a hybrid role, where I sit out with a HR team but report into marketing. I’ve actually got a background in HR which is where I started before moving  into digital, so I do report to the marketing team, but I still have quite a lot to do with HR on a day to day basis.
JN: Ok, so you’re sitting across both functions. And so in that role, it sounds quite interesting, and I can imagine that moving into a digital marketing strategy, what sort of challenges did you face when you took on the role, and how did you go about creating buy-in from people to participate?
DK: Probably the major challenge that I faced was probably reflective of the industry that Ramsay operate in. It’s probably how many times I’ve had to have the conversations about “what is social media?”, “this is social media”, “this is how we’re going to use social media”. I am dealing with a majority of the workforce who don’t have regular access to a computer, and don’t see social media as a work tool. I am dealing with a quite conservative industry as well, so getting buy in initially was about trying to educate both our executive, managers, hospital CEO’s and the wider Ramsay employees on what social media means in terms of health care. That was probably the major challenge. The way I overcame that initially was by having a very large education focus, at the start of my time here. So I spent a lot of time on the road visiting -we have over 60 hospitals in Australia alone – so visiting lots of our hospitals and running social media 101 training sessions. These were sessions that could be attended by both employees and nurses and people within the hospital, as well as running tailored training for the hospital management team and actually giving them some insight into what social media for business actually looks like, what are the impacts currently impacting social media in terms of health care, and what are some opportunities we can gain from using these tools
JN: Ok that sounds pretty full on. Just with the uptake of that, what’s the landscape like now in terms of the use of social media within the organisation? How is it making a difference?
DK: So I operate by myself in this space and so there’s no one else in my team, so I definitely had to focus on evangelising digital and social throughout the company, and getting some champions on board and the way I did that was by partnering with a group of CEO’s from different hospitals, who wanted to get involved and wanted to learn more, so we don’t have individual Facebook pages for the hospitals. We have a global presence for Ramsay in terms of Facebook, but what we’ve actually encouraged is that our CEO’s create a Twitter presence. So I’ll sit down with any CEO who want to learn about twitter and I’ll set them up with a profile, show them the ins and outs, show them how to actually communicate with both hospital employees who are essentially on Twitter as well as their wider community. So we do  now have quite an active group of CEO’s who get a lot of benefit from using Twitter, as well as a lot of internal employees who have been champions of the strategies, and I know that whenever I want to put out a new idea or a new program, I do have people within the company who will help get that out there
JN: So it’s enlisting the champions, is really what you’re saying- and training them. 
DK: Yeah, exactly
JN: That’s great. So, if you were to be coaching a person taking on such a role who is wanting to start and create and establish a digital recruitment brand, because we’re talking to the recruitment industry at the moment, what are 3-5 tips that you’d give to someone to get started.
DK:I think it really comes down to, at the start, who you are working for, and what you want to get out of this process. So some employers might be looking to showcase some of their opportunities in a way they haven’ t done before. If you’ve got a very well known brand, you’re a Microsoft or a McDonald’s or someone like that – most people already have some sort of touch point with your organisation, they have some sort of awareness about it. If you’re an organisation that doesn’t have that kind of public awareness, social media can help inform the wider public about who you are as a company and what you stand for. I think social media is a great tool to have a really valid and true representation of what an organization’s culture is actually like, and actually showcase that. I think it’s important for us to show, not jsut a corporate brochure style social media presence, but empower your employees to actually be a part of that conversation. So if you’re looking to promote your employer brand of your organisation, then i’d definitely encourage your employees to be a part of that process. if you’re just looking to do a marketing campaign for the organisation, you need to look at what social media tools will work best for that. For some people it will just be about getting more candidates, and using different tools for sourcing. It will come down to ‘What is your main aim of using these tools?’, and then look at working out which ones work best to get the outcomes you desire.
JN: So if I could just summerise: first, and most importantly to  to understand and define what’s the purpose, what’ s the objective. If you don’t have a high profile brand, it’s a great way to inform the public about your organisation, and also it’s about enlisting and empowering your employees
 DK: Yeah definitely, because I learnt lots about organisations that I’ve never heard of, that I may never actually work for, but they do a really great job of actually showcasing what it means to work there. I think it really has levelled the playing field in terms of being able to attract talent if you use these tools in the right way.
 JN: Thanks Damon, and just finally, how do you go about measuring the success of your social media campaign. Have you participated in recruitment campaigns?
 DK: We have done some targeted social media campaigns to actually attract candidates from overseas.
 JN: And what are the sorts of things that you look at to measure the success of – whether it’s recruitment or some other objective- what sort of measures do you put in place
 DK: So for one of the campaigns we ran, we actually did quite an extensive employer branding campaign for one of our hospitals in Western Australia where they were looking to target employees from the UK and Ireland about the opportunities available in Australia. They were expanding their services and needed to bring on quite a few new nurses and midwives, so we were able to use different websites and social media tools to showcase what opportunities were actually there. One of the things we’ve done which was quite successful was sit down and actually interview current employees who are actually from either the UK or Ireland who are currently working for that hospital, and put videos up on Youtube featuring them talking about their experience since making the move, and using that content through facebook advertising targeting nurses living currently in the UK and Ireland. So showing real stories from our employees, putting that content up online, then using the tools such as facebook targeted advertising to reach potential candidates overseas. So these tools definitely allow us to have a customized message that reaches the right audience, in a really authentic way, to really think about your content when trying to recruit for hard to fill positions
 JN: Thanks Damon, thanks for your insight and for sharing your knowledge. Are there any other hot tips you want to share before we finish off
 DK: I think this space can be quite overwhelming in terms of how much is actually happening, and how many innovations are happening in that overlap between recruitment and marketing. I found what worked best for me was finding 10-15 people online who are doing really interesting things in this space, and I definitely used tools like twitter and LinkedIn to follow who I think are some of the movers and shakers in this space, and look at what they’re doing. What I found was that some of these people working at companies around the world, are more than happy to share their insights and learning. When it comes to putting together a campaign or trying to keep my finger on the pulse. what I found is that there is already someone out there who has done something similar to what I’m trying to achieve. They’re usually only a tweet, email or skype call away
 JN: Thanks Damon, thanks for you time.
 

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