How IBM Uses Visme to Attract and Hire Top Talent for Clients

Now more than ever social media plays a crucial role in the recruitment process. In fact, Zaippa’s 2023 Report found that 57% of job seekers use social media in their job search, and 70% of managers have had success hiring through social media. So not only are potential candidates in search on social media but company’s can find the right fit for roles there as well.

The downside of digital recruiting, however, is that it can be time-consuming to sift through so many applications. Approximately 70% of respondents of this survey said that one of the disadvantages is receiving “too many unqualified applicants.”

So, when the IBM's Talent Acquisition Optimization (TAO) Digital Recruitment Team needed to find a tool that would help them to do just that, Visme was the perfect tool for the job!

Visme not only allowed the TAO team to create interactive infographics to attract the most relevant applicants to their clients' job postings, but also offered more ways for the team to maximize their talent attraction efforts, as they tested new and innovative approaches to save recruiters the trouble of screening unqualified applicants.

“Visme is something that I would highly recommend. It made us look a lot better in our clients’ eyes because it's something that's visually effective as a marketing tool. It’s a great tool to facilitate sharing that information in a much more visually-friendly and user-friendly method,” Polly Brewster, the Creative Director shares. 

Since being introduced to Visme in 2016, IBM has gained a total of 30+ Visme users across various departments in IBM. With over 3,500 projects created across IBM departments, the TAO team alone expects this number to grow by over 200 projects each year.

Quick Overview

If you’re short on time, check out this quick overview of how IBM’s team overcame this challenge and the incredible results the team achieved with Visme.

To learn more about the challenges they faced and the results obtained after implementing Visme, you can view this visual summary below  or Click here to skip ahead and read a our detailed case study with how each solution was implemented and how the team has grown with Visme since.

Why the TAO Team Choose Visme

Before using Visme, IBM TAO's Digital Recruiting Team faced several challenges that not only affected their workflow but also forced them to find better ways to optimize the team’s efforts and time.

Challenge #1: Visualize Job Descriptions to Engage Candidates

The team needed a way to visualize job descriptions that would drive high engagement from quality candidates. This meant the visuals needed to be eye-catching and authentic to stand out on social media platforms and against competing digital content.

Visme hosts a vast library of customizable templates including interactive infographics. Each template is designed by a professional designer with various use cases and industries in mind. Next to that Visme allows designers and non-designers to craft visuals with its easy to use drag-and-drop editor, AI powered tools and extensive asset library.

“Visme is a great tool to facilitate sharing that information in a much more visually-friendly and user-friendly method.” 

Made with Visme Presentation Maker

Challenge #2: Streamline Job Posting Content Creation

Next, they needed to streamline the process of creating visual job postings for a variety of clients with different needs and brand guidelines. The TAO team didn’t need another design tool; they needed an intuitive content creation platform that would help them create, organize, and scale content.

With Visme, users can create workflows to assign due dates to projects, approve, review, provide feedback directly within a project, add comments, and more.

"We are ensuring each client team has access to their templates and their projects are gated from other client teams. This way everyone has access to what they need/want without having access to that which they shouldn’t. We use the branding and template features to create an easily shareable and scalable start point for all new projects without the need to start from scratch," Polly notes.

Visme also acts as a brand asset management (BAM) tool, making assets easily accessible to each team member. Additionally, Visme offers an AI Resize tool that allows users to instantly resize and repurpose content with the click of a button, saving time, effort, and cost.

Challenge #3: Engage Target Candidates Quickly & Effectively

Digital content is often shared on platforms that are actively vying for everyone's attention. IBM's TAO team needed not only to create amazing visual content but also a way to engage their ideal candidates in a shorter amount of time by eliminating unnecessary steps in the process.

With Visme, the team had multiple options to download, embed or share their content, allowing them to skip unnecessary steps that would have otherwise deterred ideal candidates.

For example, Visme helped the TAO team to turn infographics into clickable landing pages to apply for a role that could quickly be embedded in emails sent to potential candidates. When compared to the traditional method of sending an email, having a CTA that leads to the landing page and then having candidates click to apply, the team reduced friction by removing this additional step with Visme’s download options.

“Before, we were building landing pages, and we had a lot of information on landing pages, with videos, text, call-to-action buttons. Visme took us a step forward. So this definitely puts us a step forward in terms of being able to share information with candidates and eliminating that extra step of having them get an email, click on a landing page, review the landing page, and then opt-in,” Polly adds.

Challenge #4: A Cost Effective Longer-Term Solution

Last, but definitely not least, they needed a tool that was cost effective. The team has an extensive toolbox so they wanted to ensure that whatever content creation tool they invested in would be cost effective and functional for all their needs. Visme’s offer competitive pricing options to suit the needs of its users and teams.

“Visme is a really powerful tool for the price. The great thing is that a non-designer can use it as well. You don't need a professional designer to create really nice graphics. It's an easy-to-use tool with good UX.”

How the TAO Team Uses Visme

In 2016, the team needed to find an innovative way to create job postings for clients. Before Visme the team would spend an average of eight hours to create a landing page for new job postings, now the TAO team spends as little as half an hour creating an interactive infographic for that exact purpose. Once the infographic is designed and ready, it’s embedded directly into an email or shared directly on popular platforms like Linkedin.

“This reduction in cost internally is reflective of the band level and time. Previously a band of 7-8 would work for 4-8 hours. With Visme we now have bands of 5-6 working far less, so Visme’s provided a more affordable resource for less time,” Polly states.

Visme templates and the use of the platform allows the team to turn around multiple elements in a fraction of that time. For a fully templated and processed project, the TAO team can turn around items in 30-60 minutes.

“This helped to reduce cost by as much as 75% and the best results we’ve gotten are from using Visme”

Since then, the team has been finding new and innovative ways to recruit not just regionally and nationally, but internationally for their clients as well. For example, one of IBM’s TAO clients needed to penetrate a new market in the Latin America region and required top talent to lead that initiative.

With the help of Visme, the team was able to gather the client’s employee value proposition and past design collateral, and quickly repurpose and design many assets for the new market. This helped them save time on redesigning items from scratch, all while maintaining brand integrity and consistency across multiple channels.

Saving Time & Better Results for Recruiters

Since the TAO team’s infographics are laid out in a very informative and easy-to-read way, applicants that end up applying for positions are more compatible with the needs of the job listing.

When it comes to recruiting, some people have a tendency to skim reading the job title and whether it’s relevant to them, and apply. By being detailed, the recruiter doesn’t have to waste time screening applicants and figuring out over the phone if they are relevant or lack the necessary skill set.

"Now, more applicants autofilter themselves after they read a few of the key points on the infographic, so we've definitely seen an improved quality of applicants whenever infographics are used.”

Made with Visme Infographic Maker

This helps to speed up the application process and enable recruiters to quickly engage and provide better candidates to their hiring manager in a shorter time frame, this in turn frees up more time for recruiters to focus on more hard-to-fill positions.

Create Scalable Designs & Content

In the initial use of Visme, the team created and improved job postings, finding ways to repurpose them and make them digitally friendly. Today, the team is focused on how to use interactive infographics to reach a broader audience for remote and international roles, while also scaling these designs.

Visme allowed the teams at IBM to create customizable templates for various use cases. These templates became staples, enabling other team members to duplicate and customize them without needing a designer.

Once cornerstone templates are created, they can be scaled and reused multiple times at a low cost while maintaining quality designs across departments.

Another key tool that helped to scale content and maintain brand integrity for both IBM and various clients was Visme’s Brand Kit.

Its sole purpose is to ensure brand consistency across any type of content created on the platform. It allows users to store and manage brand assets such as logos, color palettes, fonts, and templates in one centralized location.

With the Brand Kit, teams can easily access and apply these elements to create on-brand infographics, social media graphics, and more. Users can create a brand kit manually or use the AI-powered brand wizard to create one automatically by extracting the logo, font, brand colors, etc., from their website URL.

This provides designers with quick access to pre-approved brand resources, allowing them to scale content without using outdated or incorrect brand assets.

Another way the team worked on scaling content included assigning specific roles to designers. For example, a client would initially work with a single designer as their primary point of contact, achieving excellent results that led to increased demand. To meet this growing demand, we needed to expand our teams.

This involved assigning specific individuals to manage repetitive tasks while others, who stood out for their creativity and unique project management skills, were assigned to more interesting and demanding projects. This approach ensured that their creative talents were fully utilized.

How Other Team’s Use Visme

While IBM's Talent Acquisition Optimization (TAO) Digital Recruitment Team creates recruitment materials for their clients, IBM’s educational and learning team uses Visme to create training guides, manuals, and materials, used either internally or externally.

The team also utilizes Visme training templates to create and update these various types of content.

Other departments leverage Visme's video functionalities to design fun, one-minute videos for clients to maintain positive rapport.

“It might seem like a small thing, but clients really love these videos. They’re a nice end-of-year gift, and since creating them in Visme costs us nothing, it’s a great  way to give a big thank you to our clients.”

Since Visme’s animations, video effects, and interactivity require little to no design skills or coding, these teams can readily craft these videos and share them with internal clients, who then share them with external clients due to their popularity. Additionally, the team creates end-of-year videos to present their wins or overviews.

As the team or the content at IBM scales, they know they can rely on Visme’s customer success and support team to provide them with additional solutions and turnarounds.

“I have to give a huge thank you to the Visme team which has been immensely responsive and supportive since day one. The professional and working relationship we have with Visme has been amazing. Anytime we have an issue, the response has been great. Any time that there's something new, an update or a rollout, I feel like you are informed and taken care of well," Polly shares.

IBM TAO Team’s Favorite Visme Tools

Creative Director, Polly Brewster loves using project live links. As someone who creates, reads, and manages numerous documents, having the ability to share one web link with others, see real-time updates, and control user permissions—such as setting an expiration date on viewership—offers her more control compared to standard Google documents.

It also ensures that team members aren’t using outdated PowerPoints or documents.

“Sometimes, having an open web link to refer to things is much easier than dealing with another document—whether it’s a PowerPoint, PDF, or anything else,” Polly remarks.

Production Artist Jose Antonio Arias loves the simplified workspace that Visme offers because it allows him to work productively and efficiently with ample space in the Visme editor. He also appreciates Visme’s animated features and characters. Lastly, he values the picture replacement feature: once a picture is dragged and dropped onto the graphic, it automatically zooms in when cropped, allowing for precise designing.

Your Turn

Ready to discover your team’s next best content, client, or marketing solution? Look no further than Visme.

Visme’s intuitive content creation platform simplifies design for everyone, regardless of skill level. Tailored for businesses like yours, it offers a scalable workspace and workflow solution.

Curious about Visme’s capabilities? Experience it firsthand. Request a demo or try Visme for free today.