How The Shoprite Group bolstered talent acquisition and increased brand awareness with a comprehensive LinkedIn strategy
SUCCESS STORY
With over 3,500 stores across Africa, The Shoprite Group is the continent’s largest fast-moving consumer goods retailer. Since first entering the market in 1979 following the purchase of eight stores in the Western Cape of South Africa, the retailer has become the country’s go-to supermarket for quality goods and services at affordable prices.
The Group is now the largest private-sector employer in South Africa. Its core business remains in food retailing, complemented by furniture, pharmaceuticals, hospitality, ticketing, digital commerce, and financial and cellular services. The retailer's embedded customer-first approach is entrenched in its core supermarket business as it continually strives to make grocery retail more affordable and accessible to its customers, who live in one of the most unequal societies in the world.
In its relentless pursuit of innovation, the retailer launched its one-hour on-demand grocery delivery service in November 2019, leveraging its large brick-and-mortar footprint as micro fulfilment centres. Today Checkers Sixty60 is South Africa’s number one grocery delivery app, with more than 4.5 million downloads. The Group also introduced its unmatched Xtra Savings rewards programme in 2019. With over 29 million members, it has become the country's biggest rewards programme with personalised offers and instant cash savings at till point.
With its headquarters based in Cape Town, the Group’s purpose is to uplift lives every day by pioneering access to the most affordable goods and services, creating economic opportunity, and protecting the planet. As the cornerstone of the retailer’s momentum, its purpose fuels opportunities for its over 160,000 employees, and the communities in which it operates.
THE CHALLENGE
Expanding the reach of owned content for current and future employees
While The Shoprite Group’s supermarket brands Shoprite and Checkers are household names in South Africa, the business’s scale and technological prowess can be overlooked. As a result, the retailer faced challenges in talent acquisition, with potential employees unfamiliar with the Group’s scale and associated opportunities for career growth within the business. Talent acquisition was also faced with finding scarce skills in the market, and its teams mostly used recruitment websites and agencies to advertise vacancies.
Additionally, the shrinking traditional media landscape, coupled with newsrooms becoming increasingly junior, highlighted the Group’s need for owned platforms to engage with external audiences and potential talent. LinkedIn offered its talent attraction and corporate communications teams a valuable platform to showcase the company’s various technological advances and innovations to current and prospective employees, to boost awareness of available career opportunities within the Group and ultimately to attract the best available skills in the market.
THE SOLUTION
Prioritising employer branding to align with scarce talent needs
Career searches are one of the key traffic drivers to The Shoprite Group’s corporate website, and LinkedIn is continually in the top-10 web traffic referrals. LinkedIn Pages presented itself as an attractive opportunity for the retailer to raise awareness of the brand’s values and its rapid technological growth, but also showcase the business segments that aligned with their scarce talent needs.
Within LinkedIn Pages, the Life tab allowed the Group to convey an authentic feel for the company, join the conversations that mattered most to its community, grow its target audience and engage current and prospective employees. Their presence on the platform aimed to spark curiosity and keep the retailer top of mind by sharing more about its business and social endeavours while subtly highlighting the areas where it is most ardently recruiting.
From the start, the Group developed a clear strategy and roll-out plan. The implementation was an iterative process. If content didn’t engage, it was monitored, assessed and altered until its performance improved. The changes also happened by aligning business needs and mirroring this with content. The Group’s engagement with LinkedIn paved the way to be more proactive, for example setting up internal measures to make sure everyone was aligned about the retailer’s recruitment needs.
Overall, the retailer found that its partnership with LinkedIn saved its talent acquisition team time, expanded candidate reach, and enhanced talent acquisition’s overall quality, making it an invaluable tool for its recruitment efforts.
THE RESULTS
High levels of engagement
• 100,000 more followers in a year
• 28% success rate using LinkedIn Recruiter
“LinkedIn has become the premier destination for people interested in The Shoprite Group to engage with our corporate brand. It is an important channel in our content strategy and overall corporate communications plan, as well as a valuable tool for employee advocacy.”
“LinkedIn has been an important partner in our drive to establish ourselves as a home for scarce and critical-skilled talent in South Africa. This case study reflects on the partnership creating a platform for collaboration and human connection that positions us more effectively in the talent market.”
About Shoprite Group
With over 160,000 employees, The Shoprite Group is the largest African retailer and the biggest private sector employer in South Africa. Its portfolio comprises over 25 brands, ranging from the Group’s core business in food retailing, value-added retail services and offerings, such as financial services, digital commerce, pharmaceuticals, hospitality, and furniture.
Resolute in its commitment to being Africa’s most accessible, affordable, and innovative retailer, the Group has heavily invested in its technological capabilities, anticipating and meeting consumers’ ever-changing needs and wishes.
INDUSTRY:
Retail
No. OF EMPLOYEES:
160,000+ employees
HEADQUARTERS:
Cape Town, South Africa