Confectionary giant Cadbury Schweppes has become the first employer to target graduates through a ‘blog’ that gives a taste of day-to-day life at the company.
The company is taking advantage of an explosion in online diaries – 30,000 ‘weblogs’ are created every day, according to web monitoring firm Technorati.
Under the scheme, current employees from across Cadbury’s are encouraged to write freely about their experiences on the graduate training scheme. Their weekly blogs are posted on the company’s graduate internet page for potential recruits.
Anthea Marris, Cadbury’s graduate resourcing manager, said the company had been looking for a way to make the graduate website more interactive.
The legal implications of blogging were highlighted earlier this year when a Waterstones employee was dismissed by the bookseller for writing derogatory comments in his online diary.
To address the legal issues, the blog entries at Cadbury’s are passed to HR, which checks them for commercially sensitive material. However, Marris stressed that there was no further censorship.
“We never reject something, but if we have to make tweaks we explain them [to the author],” she said. “If we censored them it would stop them coming back.”
But blogging might not be all it’s cracked up to be. New research from advertising firm DDB London reveals that more people know the meaning of ‘dogging’ – having sex with strangers in public places – than ‘blogging’.
Marris said a lack of understanding of what blogging meant was not a worry for Cadbury’s as its target audience was well-versed in how the internet worked.
go to www.personneltoday.com/27756.article for more on the legal dangers associated with blogging
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