February 2014 | By Christopher Goodfellow

FROM FEBRUARY 2014's RECRUITER MAGAZINE

Christopher Goodfellow spoke with co-founders Manda Crowder and Mark Rice

When a company’s name evolves, usually there’s a change in actual wording. But the three incarnations of recruitment and employee engagement communications firm andSoMe’s name represent the changing dynamics of recruitment advertising, from the creation of a specialist boutique agency to the latest approach to online recruitment.

In this instance, the name andSoMe reflects the development of expertise in social media to the point where this activity accounts for 90% of the agency’s output. 

“We’ve evolved with the way recruitment’s changed. We did the traditional, and then we moved into digital and social media. Now we’re the only ones that are predominantly social media. Everyone does it as part of what they do, but it’s such a big part — it’s integral to everything,” Mark Rice, who co-founded the company with Manda Crowder, tells Recruiter.

This acknowledgement of the business’s evolution was marked by a subtle change of the name: the ‘S’ and ‘M’ in andsome were capitalised, and it’s now pronounced “and so me”, rather than “and some”. 

As the founders describe it, the offering’s become “a partnership with businesses to promote themselves and to engage with potential candidates and their own employees across social media platforms”. 

The client list includes companies like Sony Playstation, luxury hotel chain The Dorchester Collection, restaurant Le Manoir and retailer Arcadia. andSoMe’s recent work with Boots provides a good case study to how this works in practice.

Crowder says the retailer has a high awareness of the importance of being a digital brand and that the “majority” of Boots’ recruitment advertising currently is social: “Social media isn’t just about recruitment; it’s about engaging the people and speaking to a wider audience about what you’re like as an employer. It’s not about selling the jobs anymore; you’re selling ‘you’ as an employer.”

The key to this kind of engagement is to join in, or hang out with the people you want to target, rather than shouting at them. Part of the recent Boots campaign involved targeting fashion and beauty bloggers who frequent social media platforms Instagram and Tumblr, along with their fans, using hashtags like #bbloggers and #fbloggers. To attract their attention, haircut shots and advice based on Boots products or services were posted, and then such discussions became a vehicle for talking about jobs. 

As with most of its campaigns, andSoMe took over the company’s social media channels. This involves a lot of trust on the part of the client. But without this level of control Rice and Crowder say they can’t offer the kind of reactive service needed to meet the demands of today’s active and passive candidates.

Their model offers clients the benefit of managing the social media presence out of hours and the ability to tailor messages to breaking events. This could mean tweeting about Manchester-based management jobs for café chain EAT when Alex Ferguson announced his retirement, but it also meant handling 200-plus inquiries when a customer site went down over Christmas.  

The recruitment channel is usually separate to a company’s general social media accounts to avoid confusion, but still represents the whole of the business. “You’re representing whoever the company may be. You learn a lot about people and why those people want to work for you as a business,” says Rice.

andSoMe was launched 15 years ago as ‘andadvertising’ when the pair left the large agencies they were working in to focus on client relationships — “It was about working together, rather than just being a supplier,” says Rice — an approach they thought the space was lacking. Even at this stage, several years before the launch of Facebook and Twitter, its campaigns were geared towards creating ideas that were easy to share. 

An early project was working with Pret A Manger in 2001. To target managers working for other food retailers, yoghurt pots were sent to them as ‘messages in a bottle’. It was a bold move to target them directly and reactions were mixed, with one company returning the product filled with gazpacho soup.

However, the campaign generated a huge amount of word-of-mouth and national newspaper coverage. The campaign, which also involved a small number of print advertisements, led to 80 managers being recruited over a year to help cater for Pret’s rapid expansion. 

The name was changed from andadvertising to andsome in 2008 to mark the shift to digital and increased focus on employer brand. “Recruitment and employer branding has changed so much over that time [from when the company launched to 2008]. It’s not really advertising anymore; it’s about brand, it’s about engaging people,” says Rice. 

The transition away from print dominance was difficult for advertising agencies because it was unclear how the business model was going to work when the focus was on free, or low-cost digital adverts. Keeping andSoMe to a six-person team made it easier to take advantage this structural change. “We’ve been the size we are now from the beginning. There’s no grand plan to become a big empire, get bought by anybody else or to grow through acquisition,” says Crowder.

This team “lives in” the social media space on a day-to-day basis, allowing them to constantly learn about new tools and what’s being shared. This is a process that in-house recruitment teams may find difficult committing time to, says Rice.

A recent example is a campaign to recruit a cookery tutor for Le Manoir aux Quat’Saisons, Raymond Blanc’s two Michelin-star restaurant and hotel in Great Milton, Oxfordshire. In spite of having a strong brand, the company had tried without success for eight months to find a cookery tutor when andSoMe took over. 

The tactic was to use the Twitter feed @RBCookeryTutors to commentate on and provide details about Blanc’s TV show The Very Hungry Frenchman, joining in with the discussion while it was being aired. This took advantage of the company’s brand to promote them as an employer and provided the perfect audience for the campaign. 

“We would put occasional things about coming to work for the school because of his [Blanc’s] passion,” explains Rice: “We did that for five or six weeks and we had lots of engagement with chefs who wouldn’t have even thought about applying. The first night that ran we had a direct message from a chef that saw the Twitter stream, and he was the one they ended up taking on.”

What does andSoMe recommend to firms to take advantage of social media? Rice balks at the suggestion of providing his top tips, saying the current fad of writing lists on how to use social media is counterproductive.

“There are always ‘10 top tips to do this’, how you should tweet. You should ignore those; you should see what other people do and don’t copy, but learn and try things yourself,” he says. 

“There’s this over-reliance on case studies,” Rice continues. “You can potentially learn from them, but people tend to rely on them to back up their own argument for doing something. That goes back to the old ways of using media; it’s not like that at all.”

When pushed, he provides a couple of ideas about what recruiters need to avoid, such as scraping lots of content and putting it under the company’s banner, an approach that andSoMe often finds in accounts it takes over. 

Another of Rice’s pet hates is scheduling, which involves a tweet being written and set to go live at a later point. This is obvious to social media users, he explains, and ruins the kind of engagement these campaigns need to succeed: “You don’t have to be a visible human face, but the way you react can show the personality of that brand.”

In terms of the latest state-of-the-art tools, Rice says it’s important to be aware of what’s around and be ready to take advantage of it. The Boots Christmas campaign used six-second video-sharing platform Vine, which was launched a year ago, to provide easy-to-share messages from Boots employees, for example. 

Rice says that regardless of the approach the crucial thing to remember is that social media provides a space to try new ideas. 

One of andSoMe’s first experiments was using Twitter to recruit runners for ITV. 

The award-winning campaign used three characters’ names with underscores between them, asking the audience to fill in the story lines (eg. Tyrone ___ because ___ Molly ___ Kevin.). It caused lots of discussion online and led to more than 900 applications.  

“We were fortunate to have a client that was open to new ways of doing things. You put suggestions forward to them six years ago, and it was a trial for them and a trial for us. That was the first time people started recognising what you could do with it [Twitter]. It was using it in a creative way, which no one had ever really done at that stage.”

The passion for experimentation has given andSoMe the edge — not only in their own evolution, but in guiding their clients to adapt and thrive as the nature of recruitment advertising itself changes.

CVs

Mark Rice

1998– present: andSoMe

• Creative and community director 

• Co-founder

1995–98: Bernard Hodes UK

• Creative director

• Managed a large creative team producing employer branding and employee marketing

Manda Crowder

1998– present: andSoMe

• Client service and community director

• Co-founder

Company profile

Founded in 1998

Head office in Shoreditch, London, UK

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