Six teams from Recruitment and Selecting Effective Employees (MGMT 413) worked on a semester-long project to hone in on creative ways to build the Payless brand on social media and to help prospects find their perfect “fit” at Payless.
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| Students from the winning team, the Wheel Deal, with HR reps from Payless and Prof. Venkat Bendapudi |
The six groups were also required to recruit an additional team member to help them build these social media plans, which helped the students learn what worked and didn’t work to get others interested and involved.
“Through our recruitment process I learned it was a little more difficult to reach out to the student body than I had actually realized it would be,” Serrano said. “While recruiting we had to look for a member who would complement the skills of the other members and pull the team together.”
In developing the social media plans groups tapped into networks such as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Pinterest.
“Pinterest is a newer social media and less crowded with job postings than obvious networks like Twitter and Facebook,” Serrano said. “It’s only four years old with more than 50 million users, so using this as a recruiting site could put them ahead of the game.”
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| A team pitches its ideas to Payless HR reps |
Payless awarded the top three teams with monetary prizes, although it wasn't just the winners who learned from this experience.
“My favorite part about the project was creating a product from scratch that was our own ideas and something that a company could actually take with them and use,” Serrano said.
