Companies that will have the greatest success leveraging social media for recruiting will be ones that start inside, where the leadership actively encourages/guides their current employees to connect internally and externally using social media (… or at the very least avert their eyes and don’t block social networks).  Employees should be the most qualified, the most credible, and the best source of information about your company culture, the employment experience and why someone would want to work for you.  By enabling and distributing their stories across the web – companies create a powerhouse of information for job seekers considering working for your company.

You pride yourself on making good hiring decisions, so since you hired them, you should be able to trust them as professionals (I know this still makes many companies uncomfortable, but let’s start with this premise, and maybe that you even already have a social media policy).  So how do you get Employees to talk about their experience online? Educate them.

Are Internal Communications and Recruiting a secret OR not so secret alliance in your company?

In many companies Internal Communications often falls under Marketing or Corporate Comm (and sometimes HR), while Recruitment or Talent Acquisition falls squarely under HR. In my experience, Internal Communications is rarely present at Employer Brand/Recruitment Marketing related meetings (unless their presence is specifically requested). I’ve also observed amazing Internal/Employee Communication Chats that happen all the time on Twitter – but I rarely see any peeps from the recruitment side participating.

Maybe my observations are wrong — but this apparent separation seems to block what could be a friendship made in heaven. Why? From a recent post on The BrandBuilder Blog, Becoming P2P: Principal characteristics of the new Social Business:

Employees of P2P (People to People) businesses don’t hate their jobs. Why? Because they are empowered by their management team to collaborate with employees and the communities they touch. As a result of being  clearly aware of their operational boundaries and because they receive ongoing, multilateral support from their organization, they know how to act professionally when dealing with the public.

Proactively educating employees through internal communications is a critical component to successfully using social media for recruiting.  Employees need to know where/how to help if you want their help listening and responding online.  Continually monitor your online reputation and then let employees know where conversations are happening about you as an employer (hint: Indeed Forums; GlassDoor Reviews; Vault; JobVent). Solicit their support in leaving their own honest reviews, responding and commenting on other reviews, answering job seeker questions etc.

Use your Intranet, email, SMS etc to regularly communicate to your employees things they can do online such as:

1. Where they can help answer your candidates questions (maybe even create a forum specifically for this purpose on your career web site)
2. Discuss why their work for your company, or their latest project
3. Post pictures and videos from Company Events
4. Post reviews and information about you
5. Tweet or contribute to the company facebook fan page (become a “fan” even )

Align with Internal Comms to create an Army of Davids out of your employees, guide them to tell their/your story via social media, and watch your social recruiting machine flourish.

So who’s doing this well?

- Shannon

Shannon co-authors EXCELER8ion with her other half Julian Seery Gude. EXCELER8ion is a blog about digital engagement.

Shannon is a regular speaker in the HR & Talent Acquisition space where she’s known for her work in social media and integrated digital engagement. By day Shannon works at a Recruitment Marketing Agency.

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Today’s candidates have high expectations for the experience that is offered by a company committed to attracting and retaining Talent. From the type of information that an interested candidate is able to find about working at your company, to how initial connections are made and a relationship established, to the experience on the Career Web Site. And it doesn’t stop there. Once a successful candidate becomes a hire, they also have high expectations for the on-boarding experience, the Intranet, and even after they leave in the form of the availability of Alumni networks.

This expectation isn’t set by the type of experience they are used to having on career or internal company sites, rather it is set by the type of online experience that are available on much of the rest of the web where they are using social networks, blogs and articles that allow comments, and discussion forums to connect and interact.

In order for corporations to successfully use social computing tools to connect and build relationships with talent in an authentic way that builds credibility and trust, an internal resource needs to be identified to foster this “candidate community”. While consultants and agencies can help provide knowledge and guidance, brand reputation monitoring and process research, technical support, web development work, and ROI metrics – the actual building, evangelizing, and cultivation of the community HAS to be done by the people at the company itself.

“But who is going to manage and moderate this?”

Utilization of social tools and the publishing of work related content will/should/already does happen through many employees at a company (how many of your people have facebook pages?) – but the Champion of how encouraging, leveraging, and distributing this work related content should fall under a specific owner.

This position may eventually be known by many different titles, but for our purposes here, I will call this position: Candidate Community Manager (CCM). Jeremiah Owyang outlines the main Tenets of all “Community Managers” in his post from November of 2007 – The Four Tenets of the Community Manager. For the specific “Candidate Community” as it relates to recruiting the best to work with your company, these tenets are just as relevant:

1. Candidate Community Advocation – An advocate for the candidates that focuses on listening and understanding their expectations, monitoring and participating in the conversations that are taking place in a variety of online channels such as social networks like facebook, job seeker forums like Indeed.com Forums, and feedback sites such as JobVent. By being good at listening and understanding the candidate community, the CCM can focus all content programming on the interests and needs of their candidate community members and help to evangelize these needs with company stakeholders.
2. Employer Brand & Reputation Ambassadorship – The employer brand evangelist heads the team that communicates career opportunities, company culture, promotes career events, and highlights awards and news items through tradition and channels. I currently know of no better example of using social channels to communicate company culture and shine a light on the many employer brand evangelists (read *your employees*) than what Ariel Meadow Stallings is doing for Microsoft through her blog Microspotting and the corresponding flickr photstream, Twitter profile and videos.
3. Online communication and analysis skills – A candidate community manager has to “get it” when it comes to social computing. They will need to be savvy users of social networks, understand RSS and content portability and distribution, blog participation even if they do not author one, how to create and respond to forum threads, how to encourage comments, as well as how to effectively and authentically use microblogging sites like twitter and plurk. The successful CCM literally has to be an active member of the online communities. Having a deep understanding of the best way to respond to the community and how to address negative or even inflammatory issues and deal with online trolls. Finally, in order to understand user patterns and site effectiveness, the CCM need to know how to get access to and to understand site analytics reports.
4. Candidate focused site requirements gathering and process improvements – In order for a candidate community manager to be able to meet the needs of their community, they have to have a true understanding of their on and offline reputation as an employer, as well as an understanding of the effectiveness and candidate perspective on the current recruiting process. In short – they have to be the expert at knowing how their members define an “excellent recruiting experience” and be able to communicate this internally and to consulting/agency partners in order to present the business case to secure funding, as well as to communicate actual solution requirements to the teams that will develop and implement them.

This begins to outline the tenets for a true champion of social recruiting and the candidate community within a company. The results for a progressive company that implements a social recruiting strategy, lead and fostered by a Candidate Community Manager will be increased relevant and real online conversation about their employer brand, their culture and job opportunities that exist. This will lead to increased credibility, exposure and most importantly, an increased understanding of your target – The Candidate.

Shannon co-authors EXCELER8ion with her other half Julian Seery Gude. EXCELER8ion is a blog about digital engagement.

Shannon is a regular speaker in the HR & Talent Acquisition space where she’s known for her work in social media and integrated digital engagement. By day Shannon works at a Recruitment Marketing Agency.

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Shannon isn’t one to toot her own horn but I don’t mind doing it for her. Er…Coming from her husband that sounded a little dirty didn’t it? Bill Vick published a great interview on Friday with Shannon on XtremeRecruiting.org about using social media in recruiting. Check it out here.

I think Bill asks excellent questions on all his interviews like this session with Jibber Jobber’s Jason Alba or this one with Chris Brogan.

My focus these days is helping small businesses attract clients in their local town or city using local online marketing and social media. Because of their small budgets, the small business market is one that doesn’t get a lot of attention from our Recruitosphere or ad agency types (or bloggers for that matter). Since there are so many recruiting experts who visit EXCELER8ion I would love it if you could stop by my latest post on recruiting for small business on Local Na8ion and give them some of your words of wisdom in the comment area – it will really help my Local Na8ion readers a lot.

Thanks so much!

- Julian

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Is corporate HR and their executive team receptive to social media?

A commenter recently asked:

Curious of your thoughts regarding how receptive HR is in including social media strategy as part of their marketing and media mix. I think for many of us it is a no-brainer, and I believe Executives are beginning to understand the power of social media and the habits of their target, but from your experience, are you finding HR Execs receptive and willing to allocate appropriate portions of their budgets for this?

Julie O’Reilly
Marcom Village

What do you think when you hear “do you have a social media strategy?” Do you think about making media buys to run banners on sites like facebook and LinkedIn; or maybe placing employment messaging within other publisher’s podcasts? In recent years the number of sites where you can place ads and the forms these ads are offered in have increased. The introduction of these options for interactive recruitment advertising is exciting and the possibilities are growing by leaps and bounds. But, this is advertising – which doesn’t happen to be the core compentancy of social sites and mediums. These sites are forums where millions upon millions of potential candidates are connecting with one another, participating in active conversations, and changing the very definition of thought leadership. The potential for social media to completely disrupt how companies find and build relationships with candidates is powerful, if they can be convinced to learn how to harness that potential.

I have spent the last eighteen months speaking with corporate HR leaders at some of the largest organizations in America on this very topic – urging then to adopt social computing in their recruiting and retention efforts. It is just in the last month that I have seen corporate HR realize that they have to begin “thinking” about adding social media to their recruiting and retention efforts. But when I discuss crafting a social media strategy, I am not talking about using these sites for advertising, I am talking about efforts such as:

• Publishing employee-generated content that shows the real soul of the company and tells the stories that make the company what it is.
• Using photo, video, audio sharing sites to help those stories come to life.
• Using RSS to distribute this content outside of the corporate career site.
• Having real FAQs sections where candidates can ask questions, get real answers, and have this exchange be indexed and searchable for others.
• Evolve the definition of “relationship marketing” to include building and cultivating your candidate community on your career site through real two-way exchange of information.
• Encourage recruiters, hiring managers (all employees really) to seek out potential hires and build relationships within online communities.

What is the “right” strategy for one company is not necessarily right for the other. The key is to allow your employees to express their stories in the way that is RIGHT for them, thereby authentically and quite literally showing candidates who your company is and what it might be like to work there.

So to answer Julie’s question, in my experience, “how receptive is HR in including social media strategy as part of their marketing and media mix?” I think that companies are starting to view advertising within social networks as the no brainer, and they are using budget that they already have allocated to interactive advertising, but just changing where those dollars are being spent. When it come to harnessing the power of social media to connect to candidates and literally give them the a behind the scenes view into the making of the organization – I would say, “not so much.” The fear of creating “too much risk” for the organization due to not being able to control the message is the root of the hesitation.

I have spent so much of my time passionately trying to explain to HR execs what social media IS, describing the changing of the guard that is happening, how thought leadership is changing, how the ability to spread and amplify the affect of messages has evolved, all of this can be seen so clearly through growth and impact of social computing – that I have probably done a poor job of making a traditional bottom-line focused business case for why companies would benefit for using social media to attract and retain the best.

Shel Holtz, an author and blogger with 30 years of organizational communications experience in both corporate and consulting environments, just wrote a terrific post addressing the business case for using social media as a communication channel entitled, Business adoption of social media: It’s not about employee rights, where he simply states:

My position on employee engagement in social media is based on my belief that doing so will produce far greater benefit—in the form of enhanced constituent relations—than risk, particularly when it is managed strategically. There are many dimensions to these benefits, some of the most important of which include the following:

• Recruiting and retention—Deloitte is frequently named the best company at which to begin your career. Deloitte is also the company that hosted an employee film festival, in which employees submitted creative videos articulating the company’s values and culture. The best of these are now on YouTube. Deloitte has engaged in social media in a variety of other ways, which in part accounts for the company’s ability to choose from the cream of the crop. Meanwhile, Clive Holtham, a professor at the Cass Business School, notes some California firms “are finding they cannot attract or retain staff because their IT infrastructure fails to meet the demanding standards of the new generation,” according to an article in Data Storage Today. Let’s face it: If employers in the don’t want to pay for the lion’s share of employee medical coverage. They do, however, because without it, they wouldn’t be able to attract the talent they need to implement their strategies.
• Employee engagement—Companies with populations of mostly actively engaged employees tend to outperform those with populations of mainly disengaged employees. Engagement flows from a number of factors, but it won’t flow at all without trust. Once employees are engaged, they produce discretionary effort on behalf of their employers.

In my view, using Social Media to provide a window into what it is like to work for an organization provides validation for a candidate against the marketing messages. This validation leads to a feeling of trust and genuine interest in the company (engagement), credibility (feeling that working for this employer is a good career decision) and ultimately loyalty (retention). I participate in social media everyday, it has become part of how I work, how I provide thought leadership, and how I judge the thought leadership coming out of other companies – that I know the potential for what it could mean for recruiting and retention – literally in my bones. Is it the only way? No, of course not. But the expectations of candidates are changing. They EXPECT to be able to find out what it is really like to work for a company, and they respect the companies that enable that process and help bubble that relevant information up to the top for them.

Shel says:

People may still want to work there even if they cannot engage in social media. The pay, the experience, the benefits all may carry greater weight than the ability to talk about work on a blog.

In general, though, based on dramatic shifts in culture, society, business and communication, most organizations will be well-served to integrate social media into their communication models.

But for any F500 company, it comes down to money – not passion for an idea. So my goal for the next month is to put together that financial business case for why Corporations cannot afford to ignore the potential of social media for attracting and keeping their best people.

Shannon co-authors EXCELER8ion with her other half Julian Seery Gude. EXCELER8ion is a blog about digital engagement.

Shannon is a regular speaker in the HR & Talent Acquisition space where she’s known for her work in social media and integrated digital engagement. By day Shannon works at a Recruitment Marketing Agency.

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Wanted to share a quick tip that I discovered today that hiring managers and recruiters can use. It is a search string that tells Google to search just social networking site profiles (such as from LinkedIn; public profiles on Facebook; MySpace) and pull back relevant results for the purposes of finding passive talent to build connections with and add to your candidate community.

How is it done? Leveraging Google’s ability to pull back search results from a specific URL, use the following methos to build a search string to find candidate profiles: keyword (such as a name, company, location etc) and then the profile URL. For example, all profiles on LinkedIn start with the URL: www.linkedin.com/pub or www.linkedin.com/in. All ‘public’ profiles on facebook start with www.facebook.com/people. All MySpace profiles start with http://profile.myspace.com and so on. If you can figure out the URL structure of the profile pages for any socnet that you are interested in, you are off and running.

So what does this look like: using the Exact keywords of Shannon Seery and these sites, connected by “OR” site:linkedin.com/pub OR site:facebook.com/people OR site:profile.myspace.com (e.g., “Shannon Seery” site:linkedin.com/pub OR site:facebook.com/people OR site:profile.myspace.com)

Hope that is helpful. Enjoy!

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