Customer stories

How Thermo Fisher Scientific Found Top Talent on Its Own Terms

Illustration of scientists in a lab

You’ve heard it a hundred times by now: developing an attractive Employer Brand is an essential part of growing your business. Sometimes, however, that’s easier said than done. 

How do you appeal to talent using your Employer Brand, for instance, when you’re trying to hire talent from across a wide variety of industries? Or when that talent has a wide (and often non-intersecting) range of interests, needs, and concerns?

Scientific supplier Thermo Fisher Scientific found themselves grappling with exactly this problem. The way they used LinkedIn and activated their employees to solve it is a perfect example of how to build an Employer Brand for growth, even when your brand has to accomplish a lot at once.

This is why Thermo Fisher needed to transform their Employee Brand. Check out the infographic below to find out how they used LinkedIn to do it, and what made them so successful:

Why: Thermo Fisher Scientific needed to raise greater brand awareness outside of the scientific community

With over 70,000 employees and annual revenue exceeding $40 billion, Thermo Fisher Scientific is a world leader in serving scientific pursuits, which span many categories. As such, Thermo Fisher hires not only top talent for science-related positions, but also for thousands of roles in IT, software, finance, quality, and more.

The sheer scale and breadth of Thermo Fisher’s hiring needs are daunting. 

“We struggle with brand awareness outside of the scientific community. It would cost us millions of dollars to build talent brand awareness in all the marketers we’re in,” explained Thermo Fisher Global Employer Brand Leader Adrienne Sullivan, “We’re in over 600 locations across the globe. To scale and localize in each of those markets is a challenge for us.” 

At their scale, Thermo Fisher Scientific had become a single brand that had to think about how to attract and acquire literally hundreds of discrete Talent personas.

To do that, they aimed to develop a comprehensive Talent Brand that could attract all of these different personas simultaneously, without breaking the bank, with focused messaging for each one. 

How: Thermo Fisher Scientific uses employee advocacy to let their talent shine

With the help of LinkedIn Elevate (which has now been incorporated into Pages), Thermo Fisher Scientific had a revelation. They already had everything they needed to appeal to their many different talent personas: they had the talent they already hired for those positions. 

LinkedIn’s employee advocacy platform provided Thermo Fisher Scientific with a steady stream of curated content from LinkedIn Pulse and Newsle. Employees could comment and share these posts for easy social activity, while also creating focused, relevant conversations around their work.

Other industry talent connected with Thermo Fisher’s employees would see and interact with this content, giving Thermo Fisher a natural way to attract that talent according to the subject matter most pertinent to them. 

“We’re getting high quality, highly experienced professionals engaging with our content and ultimately converting to a hire,” Sullivan said.

Though Thermo Fisher’s work with LinkedIn Elevate initially focused on talent acquisition, it was so successful that it began providing additional benefits. Thermo Fisher’s employee advocacy wasn’t just connecting their business out to their talent personas – it was also helping Thermo Fisher’s internal sales and marketing teams better understand their own audiences.  

The analytics and demographic data provided by LinkedIn Analytics showed Thermo Fisher what content was working and what wasn’t. This, in turn, allowed not only the Talent Brand team but also the external sales and marketing teams to adjust focus, collaborate with shared data, and work together to produce the kind of content that performed across their many audiences. 

“One of my pillars for a successful program is internal partnerships and understanding the power of those partnerships,” said Sullivan.

What: Thermo Fisher’s Scientific’s Talent Brand takes off

The employee advocacy program Thermo Fisher launched with LinkedIn Elevate exceeded expectations and had a tremendous impact on their ability to acquire top talent across industries. Their data found that 18% of hires worldwide engaged with their LinkedIn Elevate content—versus an average engagement of 12%. 

They didn’t just see the results in numbers, either. Hires remembered Thermo Fisher’s content and frequently brought it up during interviews. 

“We receive feedback from our recruiters and our hiring managers that the candidates they’re speaking with are commenting on content they see when they’re doing research about Thermo Fisher,” Sullivan explained. “So that’s really exciting to see.”

As departments within Thermo Fisher began experiencing success with employee advocacy, it prompted a cascading effect: other departments across the company joined in to collaborate on creating and boosting more relevant content. 

According to Sullivan, this made all the difference. After collaborating with Thermo Fisher’s internal marketing team on content strategy, the LinkedIn Elevate program Thermo Fisher started to bring in new, qualified hires and ended up boosting their overall reach by 62%.

For more success stories on how the world’s biggest brands have used LinkedIn to reach the top, keep up with the LinkedIn Marketing Solutions blog.