Social Media and Recruitment at Walmart Asia (1)

We can be much more targeted too. If we want to hire someone from a specific organisation with a specific skillset and they happen to have a profile on LinkedIn, we can reach out to them, talk to them very quickly.

After that, of course, we've got to go through the same old process of having to assess their capabilities, desire and aspirations more closely, and see if they fit with Walmart.

In summary, LinkedIn and other tools help us find and qualify people faster to be able to bring them into our process, which is still relatively consistent with how we've always recruited-incorporating a series of interviews and assessments with different people at the organisation.

How would you illustrate this-Using social media being more effective than the traditional ways of recruitment.

It helps a great deal for when you don't know anything about a marketplace, like when you're going into a new market-as we were with e-commerce in China, an area we had no prior experience in. LinkedIn and other social media help us immensely when we were putting together a team. They helped us to draw a map of key people and companies and titles and the job descriptions of people who are active in the market, so we could have a view into what a potential recruitment process may look like. With social media we could go in and take a look at some target organisations, and where people have got their profiles posted, and have a good look at them before we even start doing some recruitment.