When Hard Rock Café Hired 120 People Through Facebook in Four Weeks

When Hard Rock Café ventured out to open a new restaurant in Florence, Italy in the spring of 2011, they faced a bleak task of hiring 120 people in four weeks. Here’s the thing ugly truth about recruiting – even if you’re hiring only one or two people, a four week deadline can turn out to be quite hard to hit. Since Hard Rock had no existing restaurants, then in Florence to draw staff from, it meant starting all over again. Everyone from managers to busboys had to be sourced, interviewed, hired and then trained. On a happier note everything ended well and in less than 30 days. Hard Rock not only found high quality employees that fit their company culture, but they also did it all through social media for $2,000. A cost tenth of what it normally spends for filling the slots at new locations with external help from Work4, a social media based hiring system. Hard Rock created a Facebook page first, where they posted all openings. They ran all of their recruiting advertisements via Work4 which targeted people who were local Hard Rock fans. Hard Rock received more than 4000 applications where they interviewed around 1000 individuals and filled up the slots – all in four weeks. Wicked enough? Not yet. Hard Rock treated everybody who applied for the jobs with a coupon for a free drink and everyone who got interviewed with a coupon for free meals. This meant that Hard Rock had Italian fans itching to get a taste of its incredible service even before they had officially opened their first restaurant in Italy. Post Hard Rock’s recruitment campaign; the Florence venue had more than 25,000 Facebook fans and that too in a matter of eight weeks. Work4 CEO and founder Stéphane Le Viet who developed a system that uses the company’s already established network explains in detail how the technology works: Social Media Your New Best Bud: Work4 enables organizations to add a careers section to their Facebook page. Want to know the best thing about it? Assuming that your brand happens to have 10 times more traffic on your Facebook page than your corporate page, you’ll hire within the next 10 minutes! No jokes there. Job seekers can hunt down jobs, apply, and see which of their friends are already working for that organization. (It provides an opt-in option for current employees, so you don’t need to worry about breaching your current employee’s privacy.) Hunt’em Down via Job Advertising: When users fill out their Facebook profile pages, Work4 uses that information to target individuals who fit the bill for the jobs you are advertising as an employer. This is segmented by location, job experience, interest and that’s only the tip of the iceberg. As opposed to depletion of time and resources on a widespread campaign, you get to see your job posting appearing in the news feeds of the local applicants who are qualified for the position. For instance, if you’re looking for a graphic designer it will only target individuals with that particular experience and qualification in that specific region. Hence, it will only be those individuals seeing the jobs. To cut it short, you get to save on your time and cash spent. Facebook as a Searchable Database of Profiles: We all know the difference – LinkedIn is intended for job hunting, Facebook for is most certainly not. However, there’s no reason not to take the high road here. Work4 pulls Facebook’s social graph and extensive user profile information which includes education, job title, experience, companies worked for etc. Work4 utilized the data gathered to turn it into a massive candidate database. Referrals, that’s what friends are for: When you post a new job, Work4 will notify your current employees, if they have friends who fit the criteria. If someone is fit for the position, the employee can share that job post through a simple click. It might look a little insane. But considering the success of this social media recruitment initiative, we’d say it’s not a bad idea to welcome your next hire through Facebook!