Clever use of Pinterest: attracting talent
One of America’s most well-known department stores has decided to reach out to job seekers using Pinterest. Macy’s has a fairly active official board, where pinners can see some of the store’s merchandise on their favorite virtual pinboard. This newer career-oriented “macys_exec_jobs” Pinterest page has the potential to sell the company before an applicant even goes to their website or pens an application.
It’s a low-risk venture to find new employees, but will it pay off? The page currently has 170 followers, including repins from CareerBuilder. When clicking around, one can find a range of pins such as “San Francisco Living,” “Sleep Comfortably,” and “Stay Fit.” Most interestingly, the page lists profiles of 11 of their Executive employees.
Pins about bedding. Wait, what?
While there are 10 boards on the page, it seems as though only a couple of them actually pertain to employment within the company. The “Merchandising” board has a YouTube video that explains a bit about their buying and planning careers. When you go over to the “Careers” board, you’ll find the same video. It appears that the company is taking this opportunity to showcase some of its department profiles to entice interested parties, which is to be expected.
The aforementioned board labeled, “Sleep Comfortably,” contains 18 pins of bedding. Just bedding. They’re nice. However, they don’t necessarily make me want to dust off my resume. Something else that caught my eye was the, “San Francisco Living,” “New York Living,” and “Atlanta Living” boards. Each contains pins of the respective cities’ main tourist attractions. Perhaps the thought behind these is to draw attention so that the seeker would be interested in relocating for a career, if necessary?
There is still the “Fashion,” “Stay Fit,” and “Macy’s” boards which have pins that somewhat correlate to their title, but not necessarily to the theme of acquiring a career within the company. Honestly, it seems as though they are more page fillers than material pointing to employment.
The final verdict:
Using Pinterest is a novel idea for attracting talent, and may inadvertently lure a few potential candidates… but in this case, it doesn’t look to be the most effective means of grabbing the attention of otherwise interested job seekers.
