Cheezhead Recruiting News and Opinion

As you can imagine, recruiting for British Sky Broadcasting’s Sky Digital, the biggest subscription TV provider in the United Kingdom, requires a specialized team of talented individuals with a knack for assessing the best candidate sources.

Therefore it’s no surprise that Sky’s recruiting team can be found on multiple social networking channels, including Facebook and Twitter. I reached out to one of Sky’s recruiters, Helene Williamson, to talk about how a company like Sky is adapting to recruiting challenges during a worsening economy and what other recruiting tactics Williamson’s team is eager to explore.

Helene, talk about Sky, how many employees are there, and what kinds of positions you staff for.

Sky is the biggest subscription TV provider in the UK. We’ve been around since 1989, and our operations span Pay TV, TIVO-style PVRs, broadband and telephony as well as online content and Internet TV.

We employ around 14,000 staff, and about two-thirds of them are contact center or satellite engineers. We also recruit heavily in the technology space. Web is a big growth area for us, and we also spend time sourcing broadcast and entertainment professionals. We also have one of the biggest in-house creative teams in Europe.

We do a huge amount of volume recruitment into our contact center roles, and the challenge here is to get broad messaging in diverse and often fairly small geographic locations. We need to balance this messaging with a brand that sits well with highly skilled technology and creative professionals, so talent attraction is a huge challenge for us.

Speaking of challenges, what are some specific obstacles your organization has faced during these tough economic times?

The economic downturn means we’re focusing more on innovative sourcing methods, brand building, and maximizing our internal talent pools and staying lean and cost-effective as a recruitment team on return on investment of the channels to market and job boards we use. It’s also a great time for us to focus on graduate recruitment. As the key sectors of banking and consultancy scale back their graduate programs, it means lots more top future talent in the marketplace.

The flip-side is that we’re also spending more time probing the motivation of candidates in our selection processes. Like any employer, we want to know if we’re first choice, or just the best of what’s available on the job market.

Talk about some innovative approaches to sourcing your team has embraced and other recruiting tactics you would like to explore.

We’re at the very beginning of our journey with sourcing innovation, and although we have a lot of curiosity and ambition we’re definitely experimenters, not experts. What’s great about working on Sky’s talent team is that as we’re still quite a young company, and there’s a lot of room for us to grow ideas and try things out.

We’re huge fans of Twitter as a way of opening up two-way conversations and letting people know who we are and what we’re up to – what it doesn’t work for in our experience is the “I have X job” school of recruitment communication. People (Tweeple?) seem more interested in the kinds of work we do, projects we’re working on, and keeping it personal.

It doesn’t feel authentic to us to use social media to sell rather than communicate. It’s also a great tool for us to gauge what matters to people in our target markets and industries.

We’re starting to get smarter about SEO and our overall online brand, and our aim for our internal job site, www.workforsky.com is for it to take a more interactive route eventually. In the meantime, we’ve tried hard to use employee profiles to keep our communication real and personal.

We’ve been using Facebook to recruit for some time, but our approach has been really targeted towards small groups on individuals (PHP developers in Scotland, for example) rather than a big bang approach. We also find it really useful for onboarding, and our graduates have a Sky Grads group that lets them stay in touch with each other before they join us.

Something we aren’t using yet but would like to is YouTube. There are tons of possibilities to share our content and watch and communicate with great creative talent here. This is definitely on the 2009 to-do list.

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