As some of you know, Shannon is a Vice President at Bernard Hodes, the online recruitment marketing agency that makes next generation careers web sites and the like. Shannon was very fortunate to hire some former Jobster talent this year and one of those people was Adam Einiger. During a recent video shoot for a client the video and client team were testing the cameras when they asked for someone in the team to get on screen for the video and mic check. This is Adam’s version of a mic video/audio check…
I don’t know about you, but I really enjoyed his rendition and I’m pretty impressed by Adam’s creative side (awfully important at an agency where creative solutions are a must). I asked Shannon for a few words about what Adam does and she gave me this…
“Solutions Provider, Interactive Producer, Sales Engineer, Magician, F-bomb dropper, flip-flop wearer, new daddy, all around straight up good guy!”
There’s only one thing missing as far as I’m concerned with this content and it’s easy to fix. Get it front and center on the main Hodes web site. Hodes has some good video content on their site but I feel this content is better because it isn’t staged and it demonstrates (rather then telling) a creative mindset, technical ability, and a healthy culture.
While it’s a great example of personal branding it also represents a fantastic employer branding opportunity. I hear many people lament that they don’t have any good employee video to put on their careers sites. When was the last time you searched on Google and YouTube for your company name or the names of employees with the mindset of finding valuable content you can leverage? Right, social media has much better uses than as a recruiters tool to bust recent college applicants with wild Frat party pictures!
Just because the video isn’t about how great your benefits are doesn’t mean it won’t work when placed in context of an employer branding theme. More and more, there is fantastic employee generated content that employees would be only too happy to have featured in a positive light on your corporate site. Just ask and ye shall receive.
Boomers are an interesting lot - and there’s a hell of a lot of them. A good combination for employers, marketers, politicians, and web 2.0 startup companies looking to build vast piles of money from them, win their favor, or harness their expertise in the work place. There’s a post from yesterday on the New York Times titled “New Social Sites Cater to People of a Certain Age” and it’s a good read for anyone wanting to get a 50,000 foot view of newer social sites like eons, and multiply.
“…there are 78 million boomers — roughly three times the number of teenagers — and most of them are Internet users who learned computer skills in the workplace. Indeed, the number of Internet users who are older than 55 is roughly the same as those who are aged 18 to 34, according to Nielsen/NetRatings, a market research firm.” - sourced NYT
So what’s going on with online social networking tools in this crown jewel of market segments? In a word - lots.
“The older demographic has a bunch of interesting characteristics,” Mr. Kedrosky added, “not the least of which is that they hang around.” - Paul Kedrosky, a venture capitalist and author of the blog Infectious Greed
Said another way, online Boomers don’t suffer from shiny object syndrome (ohhhh, that’s pretty, let’s try that!) like younger generations are famous for. Even as an entrenched Gen X’er at 38 I no longer look at a BMW without having the accompanying thought that you give up a lot of hard earned cash (see: freedom) to drive around in a pretty car. I sure as hell didn’t do that when I was in my 20’s. Web companies, employers, investors and venture capitalists are all seeing the direct benefits of catering to Boomers and for good reason.
There’s anecdotal evidence now with early web companies in the space that their instincts on Boomer’s stickiness is well founded.
“Peter Pezaris, president and chief executive of Multiply.com Inc., based in Boca Raton, Fla., said he believed that older customers were stickier than younger ones, but said the evidence so far was anecdotal. He said 96 percent of the company’s active users returned each month, a statistic that he said impressed the venture capitalists who considered investing in the site.” - Peter Pezaris CEO Multiply
In the job search engine space we have the boomer focused RetirementJobs.com, a niche Boomer version of CareerBuilder or Monster. RetirementJobs.com published some interesting research last year that corroborates some of the news featured in the New York Times piece.
“RetirementJobs.com research shows that on top of experience, workers over 50 stay in jobs longer, waste less time at work, and relate better to companies’ older customer base. Employers are increasingly luring 50+ workers given that half the U.S. workforce of 130 million people is scheduled to retire, or take a retirement job, in the next 15 years.”
RetirementJobs.com polled their users and pulled out some interesting charactertistics.
Right at the top is flexibility and lifestyle integration. Freedom. From looking at these numbers you’d have to conclude that Boomers no longer agree with their youthful battlecry so perfectly echoed in Kris Kristofferson’s Me and Bobby McGee - “Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose.”
Like any other generation Boomers have their own unique needs and desires and they need their own kind of pad to hang out in online. I believe that the only thing holding them back from being just as addicted to social networking sites as our younger generations is a relevant hang out. Get relevant and people will get connected.
Blogs. Tumblr. Twitter. Vlogs. Google. FaceBook. Syndication. Jaiku. Pownce. YouTube. Myspace. User-Generated Content. Indigenous Content. Del.icio.us. Online Community…. Data streams flowing via RSS, ATOM and furiously converging to create a River of Reputation…. a River of Relevance.
I started playing with Slideroll yesterday and ended up creating this slide show regarding how Employer Brands are affected by ‘Rivers of Reputation’.
This is a work in progress meant to get across the concept of the decentralization of the Employer Brand via the flow of easily accessible information regarding your brand that is being generated by individuals everyday. Let me know your thoughts.
When asking employees why they like working for a company, one of the most common refrains is “because of the people, my co-workers, we are like a family”. Any recruitment advertising copywriter can attest to this and, after reading such feedback in the creative brief, will promptly roll their eyes and then try to find a new way to “spin” this age-old sentiment.
“Join Company X, and you not only get a great job, but you also gain a family”
Trite as it may be, employees are expressing a sentiment that is widespread and based in truth. The workplace is a community. A community made up of people that you often see more than your own family. There is an undeniable group cohesion that resembles “family” that the work company-employee work contract generates.
When making a career choice, candidates are searching for information about a potential employer and if they will spend time to look for it. Use your career site as a venue to publicly display your community of passionate employees. Lead the search results by authentically communicating your employer brand and providing a window into the “employee-experience” on your career web site. Openly illuminate your employee-experience by incorporating social features into your corporate career web site and encouraging employees to participate in online communities where your candidates are spending their time. Don’t fight the decentralization of your employer brand… *enable it*.
Controlling the flow of information to employees, customers, partners etc, used to be easy with newspapers, TV, radio, print, email, and the like. Today, your brand is being watched, augmented, and de-located. People are writing their own stories, thoughts, ideas, and developing new products and services using social media technologies. These simple technologies and services: Blogs, Wikis, Forums, Tagging, Podcasts, and RSS are connecting people and information in new ways, conversations, faster than you can say oh shit. (via Advancing Insights).
Companies try to hide what it is *really* like to work for them like they are a secret society that you get to have no real knowledge of until you are accepted and initiated. There is the reality of a group being its own worst enemy, and a need exists to balance the idealistic view that companies will suddenly open up and allow completely public free speech, with the freedom and open spirit needed to create a thriving online community.
Effectively communicating what your company’s community believes in, and what it is driven by, will determine the kinds of people you attract and keep. When it comes to communicating what the real employee experience is and helping to foster a public online community that potential candidates can explore when researching your company - do not put your head in the ground and fear your employee experience being public - embrace it and handle it with grace.
The next generation of corporate career sites need to completely invert the funnel and begin to engage visitors on their terms - with immediate access to information that is real and important to them. Career sites will HAVE to incorporate two-way communication and distribute their content through the innumerable web-tubes in order to create opportunities to directly connect hiring managers and recruiters to passive talent where they live online. This also means that companies have to come to terms with the fact that
“C2.0″, as in Careers 2.0. - the next generation of Career Sites and Intranets that enable dialog and collaboration, closed corporate social networks, and employee communities will define and build Employer Brands in the future.
many of the interactions between talent and company will not begin on the corporate career site at all as people increasingly utilize social media and Google in order to gain access to *authentic* information and gain access to windows into the soul of a company. As any reader of EXCELER8ion knows, my tireless mantra is - “C2.0“, as in Careers 2.0. - the next generation of Career Sites and Intranets that enable dialog and collaboration, closed corporate social networks, and employee communities will define and build Employer Brands in the future.
People are increasingly using “new technologies” that make it easy to publish content to the web to share opinions, insights, experiences, and perspectives with each other. For the uninitiated, the applications and web sites that enable this user-generated content are often grouped into the term Social Media. Authentic user content that can be generated by anyone (and everyone) and shared through social media. This content can powerfully influence overall perception of a company and their employer brand. In my experience, Social Media has a bad rep in the corporate HR world - and yet this is with social media tools that people are connecting, building relationships, and the sourcing of talent is happening.
The word is a combination of producer and consumer that perfectly describe the millions of participants in the Web 2.0 revolution.
This revolution that we are witnessing doesn’t stop because we are talking about employer brand and recruitment. I am calling the ‘prosumer’ of the employer branding / recruitment world - the “Career Prosumer” - an individual that actively produces content, participates, and engages with prospective employers - often outside of the careers site on a corporate blog or in a social network. Career Prosumers will not necessarily always use or relate to the sites that we create in the ways that companies expect them to.
Providing platforms and forums that seek out and *encourage* such real user generated content introduce a level of transparency and credibility into how a company is perceived. Participating in social networking sites, such as LinkedIn and Facebook allow employers to communicate with talent where they are ALREADY spending their time. Want a live example? Check out this Facebook group that was just started by my Twitter bud, Chris Brogan, called Grasshoppers. The description of this group:
Grasshoppers are motivated, talented people with a shared belief that helping others comes back in good ways to everyone involved. From friendsourcing (finding help with business or personal projects through friends) to building a network of colleagues for future collaboration, Grasshoppers is a group that hopes to answer the question, “How can I help?”
Talent sourcing is becoming intertwined with “Friendsourcing”. In a way, this is no different that how it has ALWAYS been. Referrals have ALWAYS been the number one source of hire - now we are just making our friends and networking differently. What’s new here is that we’re using the network effect of the Internet so your message is amplified a thousand times over and can reach the furthest reaches of the world, or right next door where your hidden candidates live, as in within a 20 mile radius of your headquarters. The latter is often overlooked due to the vast reach of the Internet - we forget that the Internet is one of the most efficient self-selecting people connectors ever seen. People self-select around interests, passions AND LOCATION. What’s better, an online Ducati motorcycle group or an online Ducati motorcycle group that’s based in your area where you can meet up for group rides? (Yes, Julian and I are going to get a Ducati, and yes I am going to take riding lessons). Chris distributed a message to all of the Grasshopper group’s member asking them Go to the Discussion Board for the Group and post Job Wanted or Job Opening threads, and start populating them.Top companies understand that and will create a “recruiting culture”, ensuring that their recruiters and hiring managers spend their time building relationships where candidates already live - not the other way around. So often in life, we are just going through the motions instead of really driving our reality, driving our business, really engaging with real people, with real talent. I can name only a handful of companies that are overtly using social media for the purposes of connecting to and engaging talent in their employer brand and yet we are witnessing the development of ‘Un-Careers Sites’ - as employer brands and messaging can now be easily found, aggregated, but not controlled on dozens, hundreds, and even thousands of sites across the web. Aggregating that content for easy consumption for interested individual, and becoming an active participant in the creation of that content, is the key to engaging the Career Prosumer and understanding C2.0.
When asking employees why they like working for a company, one of the most common refrains is “because of the people, my co-workers, we are like a family”. Any recruitment advertising copywriter can attest to this and, after reading such feedback in the creative brief, will promptly roll their eyes and then try to find a new way to “spin” this age-old sentiment.
