The next award winner in our coverage of the TA League Awards is Flipkart, winning in the category of the best company practices for employer branding. For Flipkart, building a strong relationship with talent is what defined its Employer Branding. 

Business Challenge

For an organisation like Flipkart, which has rapidly grown from a mere online bookstore to one of the largest e-commerce websites in India, the core challenge was two-pronged. For creating a robust employer brand, the company had to first articulate the factors that established Flipkart as an ideal employer in the e-commerce startup space. Articulating the exact reasons for being a strong employer brand became a challenge as the company sought to convert its employer brand into a much larger and expansive talent brand, which had a consistent meaning for all stakeholders. This, in turn, posed another challenge for recruiters as it required them to adopt methods that were oriented towards building a strong relationship with their talent pool and relinquish the traditional hiring methodologies i.e. head-hunters, job boards etc. With an aim to establish itself as a Talent Brand, the company sought to revamp the way recruiters looked at talent acquisition and branding activities. 

Solution

In order to establish itself as a strong ‘talent brand’ and forge strong bonds with their talent pool, Flipkart decided that their recruiters should learn to treat prospective candidates as consumers. This translated into implementing the idea of ‘Making Recruiters as Salesforce’.  To achieve this, the first step was to articulate the employer brand experience in order establish a clear understanding of it within recruiters. The recruiters were then trained on how to make social hiring a working reality for the company, which started from creating a complete social profile, actively participating and leading in both social and offline events, engaging through blogs and creating robust engagement channels with the talent pool. The other initiatives that were undertaken to support this were private one-on-one conversations between recruiters and a few selected candidates, identifying bright candidates, carving opportunities for them, establishing unique employee referral programs using social media channels like Facebook, LinkedIn and twitter to get referrals, and participating in key industry events to ensure that the employer brand was distinctly visible.

Impact

The social media strategy implemented by Flipkart helped in achieving tangible results in terms of improved employer brand perception as better hiring, which went up from 4 per cent to 18 per cent through digital channels. This was the result of the recruiters being able to ‘sell’ the company to attract the right talent; even on the channels dominated mostly by passive talent. It also helped in building active engagement through employees and regular social updates, strengthening the company’s talent brand perception.  Flipkart’s social followership has gone up by 200 percent since the launch of their social activities. There has been a significant shift in talent flow for specific skill sets in tech and campus hiring. The company’s Talent Brand Index, a key company measure to assess brand perception, also increased by 5 percent.  

(The TA League Awards 2016 saw more than 200 applications, out of which 5 won across five different categories. A four-month process, it consisted a total 15 applications from companies across industries being shortlisted, out of which 3 in each of the 5 categories were shortlisted by a 6-member Jury. The shortlisted 15 finalists in the five categories presented their company’s Best Practices as a case for selection to the jury on the eve of the Awards ceremony, followed by the Q&A session. After intense deliberation and debate, the jury members finally decided on the winners within each category.  Here we present a brief snapshot of Flipkart, the company which won TA League Award for having the best employer branding in reaching out to a diverse talent pipeline.)