Hürriyet becomes only Turkish company eligible for global conference

LONDON

Hürriyet became the only Turkish company found eligible to attend in the TalentConnect conference, organized by global professional social network Linkedin to create a platform to discuss best human resources policies. 

A total of 17 Turkish companies applied to tell their stories, but only Hürriyet took the pass card. 

Hürriyet’s Human Resources Director and Member of Executive Committee Tuba Köseoğlu Okçu spoke at the conference, which was held in London on Oct. 21-22 with the attendance of 1,500 people. 

“Hürriyet launched a digital transformation process in 2012 through a new project called KAFKA. This project aims to increase the share of income from digital activities in the total income of the company. To achieve a digital transformation, we needed to attract young talents with digital experience, but as this target group did not associate the Hürriyet brand with digital activities and knew the brand as a strong [hard copy] newspaper. Therefore, these people did not see Hürriyet as a place to make a career in digital fields. As the HR department, we needed to enable Hürriyet to gain a digital employer brand,” Okçu said, regarding Hürriyet’s hiring campaign. In order to attract the desired pool of candidates, Okçu explained, Hürriyet turned to less traditional methods: Facebook and LinkedIn. Special content was created for Hürriyet’s Facebook page, targeting 18 to 25-year-olds, while new LinkedIn content was generated targeting the over-30 age group.  

She also added that they contacted several Turkish people working at Silicon Valley in this process. 

“We organized small-scaled meetings through which our chairperson met them and we tried to convince them to come back to Turkey. According to data from Linkedin, Hürriyet takes part in the top 10 number of employee candidate applications in its category,” Okçu noted.