A great way to share your culture and employees on social media is by giving them the opportunity to create amazing and creative content for your corporate channels. Rebecca Brookson and Leesha Bush-Anderson at TTEC share how they collaborated with their interns to create a social recruiting campaign to celebrate National Intern Day.
It’s clear that the best social recruiting content highlights your employer brand and features your culture, values and people. And the more thought and creativity you put into your effort, the more success you’ll have. While you need to lead the effort, you can also outsource some of the work.
This is exactly what Leesha Bush-Anderson and Rebecca Brookson and their teams from TTEC did last year with their social campaign around National Intern Day. Not only did they showcase their interns in order to develop awareness of their intern program to college students, they gave the interns the keys to these channels and let them lead the strategy.
Having presented this strategy at December’s RallyFwd Virtual Conference, Leesha and Rebecca shared details about their team’s campaign, the planning, execution and results. We hope it can inspire you to leverage your employees to create fun, engaging, authentic content for social media that will captivate your audience on social media, bring awareness to your employer brand and impact your hiring efforts.
To start, let’s meet Rebecca, Leesha and TTEC!
About the experts
Rebecca Brookson, Sr. Manager, Talent Acquisition Marketing and Communications, TTEC
Rebecca Brookson is Sr. Manager, Talent Acquisition Marketing and Communications at TTEC and took a non-traditional path to her current role, having started with a degree in criminology. Working at a halfway house, she discovered her passion for helping people find jobs and feel empowered about their future which led her to a career in Recruitment Marketing.
Leesha Bush-Anderson, former Global Sr. Manager, Social Media at TTEC, started in the music industry. She marketed artists for a major record label before transitioning her career into recruitment and then Recruitment Marketing.
Leesha Bush-Anderson, former Global Sr. Manager, Social Media, TTEC
TTEC is a customer experience and technology services company. While not necessarily a household name, the company is behind some of the world’s most iconic and hypergrowth brands through their technology and people. Having just celebrated their 40th anniversary, they have 65,000 employees, and a Recruitment Marketing team of about 50 people, all around the world. As part of their in-house Recruitment Marketing team, they have a dedicated team of 6 social media specialists and managers in different regions.
Rally Note: TTEC won a 2022 Rally Award for Best Use of Organic Social Media in Recruitment Marketing.
Conceiving an internship campaign
TTEC has always had traditional internship programs, but in 2020, they developed an internship program for leadership development. In creating this, they knew they needed to elevate their brand on campuses across the U.S. to get rising seniors to take notice of the opportunity and apply.
The program launched in the remote world of 2020 and was run virtually. Then, last year, they were able to move it in-person to their headquarters in Denver. With so much excitement around having this program live (literally), they wanted to do something special to celebrate and feature their current interns while promoting the program to potential applicants.
National Intern Day was launched in 2017 by the early career platform WayUp as a day for employers to celebrate and thank their interns, recognizing them as future leaders of the world. Leesha, Rebecca and the team were aware of this holiday, and this became the perfect opportunity to bring focus to their program while creating a campaign that was fun and unique.
After some discussion, they made one change to this holiday: they elevated their celebration from Intern Day to Intern Week in order to showcase more people. They realized that the best way to authentically and effectively create a campaign around their internship program was to use the interns themselves, for the following reasons:
- Interns are great brand influencers and ambassadors. They’re excited and enthusiastic about the organization they’ve joined.
- They’ll broadcast the program across their networks. Because they’re so excited about their role, they want to share it with their network. They’ll also do a good job of showing, in detail, the day-to-day of their experience.
- Other interns will connect with them. When you’re hiring for any entry-level role, interns are a great way to highlight what it’s like to be at an early stage career. Entry-level candidates who are ready to join the organization right away will feel connected to the culture and atmosphere.
- They understand social media and how it works. Current interns are Gen Z and digital natives, so creating social content comes naturally to them. They don’t need to figure out, for example, how TikTok works!
Once Leesha, Rebecca and their teams decided to pursue this campaign, they first wanted to make sure it was viable and reached out to the current cohort of interns to gauge interest in the project. The response was overwhelmingly, “yes, we absolutely want to participate!”
Leesha scheduled a Zoom meet and greet with the interested interns to begin engaging them in the campaign. Leesha shared, “We encouraged them to help us brainstorm, asking them what cool things and new trends they thought would be good to showcase during National Intern Week.”
Leesha and her team created a week-long, detailed calendar of content and events for social media. They established that they’d be using TikTok, Instagram, Facebook and LinkedIn. They knew, through their own research, that these were the channels that their target candidates live on.
They also customized their strategy per platform. Leesha explained, “We wanted to make sure we’re meeting our audience and their expectations for each channel. We didn’t want to just duplicate every event on each channel. We thought through what we should be doing on TikTok vs. Instagram vs. Facebook. The content needed to be different.”
Rally Note: To learn how to launch your own Recruitment Marketing campaign, register for our Virtual Bootcamp: Recruitment Marketing Campaign Strategy
Creating the social content for interns, by interns
Besides the KPIs that were set (around reach and engagement of the content on each channel), Leesha and her team focused on their goal of truly featuring the interns and their experiences, so they developed and created all the content that would be featured on the corporate social channels.
They created a few pre-packaged videos in different styles. One day-in-the-life video, created by an intern named Rebecca, got a lot of engagement on TikTok, with questions and direct messages from potential candidates saying they were interested in the roles available and asking how they apply. Leesha shared, “This video does such a great job with connecting to our audience and showing exactly what a day-in-the-life looks like for an intern at TTEC. It also really highlights our employer brand for potential candidates.”
@tteclife Follow Rebecca Qian’s day as a #TTECintern #internlife ♬ Aesthetic – Tollan Kim
A day-in-the-life video by an intern named Rebecca, posted on TikTok.
Another intern, Shannon, did a takeover of TTEC’s corporate Instagram for an entire day, posting consistently with fun stories, reels and an Instagram Live.
Shannon’s Instagram takeover featured posts shared throughout the day.
Shannon’s Instagram takeover was both the first event scheduled for National Intern Week, but it was also the first time TTEC allowed anyone to completely take over their Instagram channel. What’s great about this content is that Shannon kept it engaging, posting different types of content throughout the day, including both video and static images, as well as showcasing other interns in her department. The Instagram takeover had very good reach and engagement, with lots of comments and likes.
In addition to prepackaged content and takeovers, there were also live events as part of their schedule on Facebook and LinkedIn Live. They each featured a panel of interns speaking about their experiences, why they chose TTEC for their internship and what they planned to achieve in the future once the internship was over. The only difference between the Facebook and LinkedIn versions was the interns that were featured.
The video recording of the LinkedIn Live with 4 interns speaking about their experiences at TTEC.
Leesha set timelines and deadlines for the interns to hold their photo or video shoots and get her team the content for the campaign. They built in enough time to make necessary edits and everyone involved (especially the interns) did a great job delivering the creative assets and meeting deadlines.
Ultimately, TTEC used and highlighted interns in ways you don’t generally see. Leesha, Rebecca and their team loved working with the interns, and the interns loved participating, getting to show off their talents and personalities in new and unique ways.
Launching the social campaign
Internal Launch
Once the planning was done, they launched the campaign internally so that the entire company knew what they were working on and could elevate the content.
All the content that the interns created was intended to be shared and amplified by employees. The social media team already provides weekly content to staff for them to share through their personal social accounts, and adding National Intern Week content was a no brainer. Employees were provided with content and links that they could easily share with their networks. All it required was that they add their own text when sharing.
To promote internally, links were shared with all TTEC employees. They’re encouraged to share with their networks through their personal social media accounts.
External Launch
To promote National Intern Week externally, the social media team created a few different promotional posts about the week and the content that would be presented. These posts started going out 1 week before National Intern Week with posts, teasers and stories throughout the corporate channels. The goal was just to get their talent audience on each channel aware of National Intern Week, excited about it and registered to attend the events.
This is one of the promotional posts sharing the full schedule for the week giving their talent audience a chance to plan the events they wanted to attend:
A promotional video with the schedule of events for National Intern Week.
The team also created special promotions for the live events that would take place.
Promotions for the Facebook Live and LinkedIn Live events that were taking place as part of National Intern Week.
Given how much attention videos get on social media, TTEC created special teasers for National Intern Week promo as well, also sharing just 1 week prior.
Video promotions shared the week before National Intern Week. These were posted on Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram and TikTok.
Results of the National Intern Week
Overall, National Intern Week at TTEC was a big success, effectively showcasing the internship program and getting the desired results of lots of engagement and internship applications.
National Intern Week was a big success for TTEC. It met the two main goals of showcasing the current interns and building brand awareness of the internship program.
The main metric for their success was that in July (the month that National Intern Week took place), engagement increased by 40%, month-over-month, on all of their corporate social channels due to this campaign. Between National Intern Week itself and the promotional content the week prior, they saw a big increase in shares, comments and likes.
The live content on Instagram, as well as the Facebook and LinkedIn Live events, brought in the highest viewership on social media for the entire year.
Another success is that they created evergreen content that can continue to be used. Leesha explained, “We can use this content throughout the year and for years to come. And that’s really important when you are creating such a complex, intensive and short campaign. We were able to create content that can be used beyond this one week to help us continue to attract new talent.”
There were some challenges that the team encountered and has learned from for the future. One of the biggest challenges was that they turned National Intern Day into a full week. Because they didn’t just want to publish general posts on each platform, it became much bigger than anyone had originally planned. Leesha explained, “We wanted to make sure that the content was very intentional and would engage with our audience. And creating such intentional content for an entire week took a lot of time and preparation.”
Their second biggest challenge was developing and managing all of the interns’ tasks within the established timelines. They had to make sure the interns were collaborating on their own and with the social media team, as well as making sure they understood exactly what needed to get done. And, this was on top of the interns existing day-to-day work for their specific departments.
Leesha said, “These interns were very busy. We don’t have the old-school type of internships where they’re just getting coffee. I wanted to make sure that the interns understood how much we appreciated everything that they were doing. Part of that meant giving them realistic timelines to create and deliver the content to us.”
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This strategy brought Leesha, Rebecca and their team a big win for their Recruitment Marketing department. They brought positive attention and brand awareness to their internship program while increasing their reach and engagement on social media. They’re already planning for National Intern Week in 2023 and working to make it even more impactful!
TTEC’s campaign shows how much opportunity there is to creatively tell your company’s story and how much engagement it can get by your talent audience. It can be especially powerful when you give other team members a platform to share their experiences and enthusiasm for your company.
Thank you Leesha and Rebecca for sharing TTEC’s strategy with us! To see more examples and inspiration for how you can create a dynamic social campaign with your employees, watch Leesha and Rebecca’s RallyFwd presentation on demand.
