Entries Tagged 'Internal employee communications' ↓

At work a few weeks ago, I was asked to answer questions for an upcoming InsideCRM story on the promise of Web 2.0 technologies for human resource departments looking to make internal changes. My focus is really on employer branding and the candidate/employee experience, so I have no idea if my input was ever used, but thought I would post my responses here on EXCELER8ion as well to see what our little community has to say. How would you answer these questions?

1. How would you define Web 2.0, especially as the concept relates to technologies that might be adopted in an HR setting?
2. What sorts of solutions are now available to HR shops? How do these technologies differ from more traditional offerings?
3. What improvements could technologies based on Web 2.0 possibly bring to a corporate HR department?
4. Do you have any other thoughts on these or related issues?

Here are my responses:

How would you define Web 2.0, especially as the concept relates to technologies that might be adopted in an HR setting?

Web 2.0 is a term used to describe the tools that people are increasingly using to connect to one another and share opinions, insights, experiences, perspectives and more. The information that is shared can take many different forms, including text, images, audio, and video. This ‘user-generated content’ and the web sites that contain it are often grouped into the term “Social Computing” or Web 2.0 web sites. Popular social mediums include social networking web sites that allow two-way communication, message boards, as well as videocasts and podcasts, blogs, wikis, social search and tagging, and rss are connecting people and distributing information in new and efficient ways.

What sorts of solutions are now available to HR shops? How do these technologies differ from more traditional offerings?

Utilizing the web 2.0 principles of authenticity, collaboration and participation – solutions are being developed at a rapid pace to allow companies to easily incorporate real first hand stories into their career web site and within social networking groups such as those on facebook. As compared to more traditional offerings, web 2.0 is about communicating, not advertising. Creating, publishing and distributing authentic information about an organization creates opportunities and forums through which to directly connect with customers, employers, or talent. Utilizing these principles will introduce a level of transparency, authenticity, and credibility into how an employer is perceived. Building employee social networks or participating in social networking sites, such as LinkedIn and facebook, allow companies to communicate with customers and candidates where they already spend time online.

What improvements could technologies based on Web 2.0 possibly bring to a corporate HR department?

The authentic information that is generated and shared through social web sites can powerfully influence the overall perception of a company and give the audience, customers, as well as potential job candidates, a deeper and real understanding of an organization as an employer - greatly affect their consumer and employer brand. Concepts such as Social Search, tagging and ranking could be introduced into the career site. Social search results that are validated by the candidate community help to highlight the pages that they found most useful:

• Tagging: Candidates could tag content themselves based on words that they would use to describe the content. It will create “bottom up” categorization, which will be more relevant to the candidate community.
• Audience Rankings: Candidates rate the importance of content, pages, announcements or news, which will make it simpler for other candidate to uncover what is important and create a mechanism to provide feedback to the employer regarding where the career site user interests really lie.

HR specifically would benefit from utilizing evolving applications and tools that use concepts from web 2.0 such as social bookmarking and social networking to enable the sharing of information; collaboration; sharing information across different units and to help the important information bubble to the top - but within a secure framework.

New ‘web 2.0’ mash-up technologies are enabling the aggregation of data from multiple data sources, saving time for the HR staff by putting their most important information and common reporting tasks at their fingertips and adding insight to their most important work in order to work facilitate better decision making processes. Such data aggregation mash-up tools help bring disparate data point together (ATS Metrics; Job Board Metrics; Career Site metrics; Employee Research Data etc) and summarize existing data into useful new forms that promote analysis and informed action.

Do you have any other thoughts on these or related issues?

When making a career choice, candidates are searching for real “behind the scenes” information about a potential employer and they are often willing to spend the time to look for it. Web 2.0 tools and principles enable employers to make there career site that authentically communicates their employer brand and provides a window into the “employee-experience”. It has never been easier to literally “show” candidates the employee-experience by incorporating social features into the corporate career web site. 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.

Hat Tip: Geek And Poke

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.

We are living in an age where we are finally seeing the rise of what is being called the prosumer - a consumer who is actively involved in the design and manufacture of products, no longer a passive player upon which preferences are pushed upon, rather - consumer that is part the process. Duncan Riley on Techcruch discusses prosumer in a recent post:

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.

If you’re ready to dive in - read my earlier posts on Employer Brand and a Corporate Un-Careers Site as well as Top Ten Tips for starting a Recruiting Blog.

In my last post I discussed how a corporate blog impacts employer brand by enabling prospective job candidates to find out more about a company than they typically find on the careers section - even if the corporate blog doesn’t overtly speak to recruiting or specific employee related issues.

In fact, except in some standout cases, it may be that the blogs that aren’t focusing specifically on recruiting will be viewed as more authentic by potential job candidates than the true recruiting blogs.

It is possible that the Fortune 500 companies that are allowing their employees to blog about their job, their function and their company openly and honestly (and with integrity) may actually have an advantage over the ‘recruiting blogs’ that represent the voice of a recruiter whose job is to sell top talented candidates that may be a match on working at the company. Despite this possible advantage - most corporate blogs fail to acknowledge this and forget to take simple steps like providing links to job search; benefits info; day in the life profiles etc.

In my opinion, the ideal situation would be a blog where both voices are represented - the recruiter that can offer up information about who they are looking for and why, as well as employees that are empowered to blog about their jobs and company. At some point in the process of engaging and connecting with readers - the reader may very well decide to explore job opportunities at the company. Doesn’t it only make sense to provide a link at the right time/place that says something along the line of:

“We understand the value of our people. Would you like to discuss the possibility of working together? Click here to learn more”

Why doesn’t this happen more often? It is related I think to companies still learning what it means to truly have a recruiting culture. That it is the job of every employee to seek out and recruit top talent to work along side them. Only when this ideal is coursing through the veins of a workforce do you tend to see a blending of corporate communications and process with recruitment communications.

Before I continue looking at the Fortune 500 blogs and evaluating whether or not they are using their corporate blog to recruit talent, I should take a step back. I would say that simply BECAUSE these companies have blogs - they are impacting their employer brand and attracting prospective job candidates whether or not that is the intent. Not that this is unique to blogging. I believe that ALL corporate communications impact employer brand and present an opportunity to attract talent and engage employees - they make an impact whether they were meaning to speak to that audience or not.

If companies have already decided to remove their veil and are partially (or more fully in the best examples) exposing themselves via a public forum like a blog - WHY NOT include a careers message? It could be as simple as a link to ‘job search and apply’ - to as open and transparent as full discussions with interested readers about company values, beliefs, and work environment.

Virtually everyone that is new to social media in the business of recruitment marketing jumps to the notion that companies just aren’t willing to give up control of their brand and open up their juicy insides to possible negative comments. While most companies I come into contact with aren’t ready to just start blogging - I am shocked that more aren’t at least monitoring what is being said in the blogosphere from a recruitment and retention stand-point.

It usually takes about 5 minutes of explaining that social media actually enables companies TO REGAIN CONTROL of their brands before eyes begin to light up. Once I explain that blogging platforms allow the moderation of comments to prevent spammers and vulgar content - minds open up a little to the possibility that a company could actually ADDRESS and participate in what is being said about them by providing a forum for two-way communication and interaction.� Great companies will learn that it is OK to let go of traditional employer brand control, and utilize forums like blogs to allow their employees to openly represent the company with transparency, authenticity, and most of all, integrity.