I have been writing about utilizing social media and social networking to connect to candidates and build candidate communities here on EXCELER8ion for about 3 years, and in just the last 6 months, I have felt a very powerful wave of corporate acceptance and understanding that they need to have a social recruiting strategy. Large corporate clients are asking en masse to have their teams educated on social recruiting techniques and it is the number one topic that I am asked to speak about.

Does this mean that you should launch a blog (like my favorite MicroSpotting.com), start a facebook page or use Twitter to hold public chats with candidates like E&Y, or should you develop a YouTube channel to distribute video like Deloitte? Should you create widgets to distribute your jobs, events, and other career related content? Should you develop a social game or an employee social network where candidates can interact and ask questions to get the insider’s perspective?

Maybe you should do all of this. But before you buy into the latest service trying to sell you a socket page or build you a community – Do you know the status of your Employer reputation online?

Are you regularly monitoring what people find in Google when they search for information about working for your company? (and they are searching – to the tune of hundreds of thousands of career related searches every month.) Do you know what people are talking about as it relates to working for your company? Do you know who is talking, where they are talking, if it is positive – negative – or just neutral, and why?

No, this isn’t a test. Auditing, analyzing, understanding, and monitoring your online employer reputation should be the first step to developing a successful social recruiting strategy. Without first listening to and understanding what people are already saying about you as an employer, without knowing what issues exist or topics that are already being discussed – your company is in no position to begin effectively participating.

Launching social recruiting initiatives without understanding the state of your online reputation first can be a recipe for disaster. You may discover that launching a recruiting blog is the way to go, but you might also discover that there are issues that are actively being discussed that should be addressed as a first step.

So how do you gather this info about your online reputation? Google “Online Reputation Management” and you will find a myriad of resources from how to set up Google Alerts to full monitoring software packages such as Radian6 and SM2.

The information that candidates find online about you as an employer can be highly influential and considered more credible than the info they find on your corporate career site. I will cover these options, time needed, and how to tailor/focus your monitoring efforts to discussions that affect Employer Brand and candidate opinions specifically in the weeks to come.

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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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.

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Hat Tip: Geek And Poke

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A blogging friend of mine, Yvonne LaRose asked me an interesting set of questions on Facebook. I wrote her back first thing this morning and then I thought it made sense to publish my answers. Who know, maybe you’ll find the content interesting as well.

Yvonne asked about what I thought about Web 2.0 and Web 3.0 and if I had any new terms I might be able to tell her about. I offered enterprise mashup and bacn . Bacn because it’s timely and relevant and enterprise mashups because that’s what I’ve been working on for the past four months (more to follow on this later).

Hi Yvonne,
Sure I’ll give it a go!

I think web 2.0 has been beaten to death. In memes, articles, and white papers it has been defined in a great number of ways. For me web 2.0 is about interactivity. Web 1.0 was about publishing and getting offline stuff online. Web 2.0 was about empowering individuals and adding conversation. In my opinion this brought *people* in to computers and the Internet for the first time in a meaningful way.

Web 3.0 is very up in the air as to what will shake out. Many refer to this as the semantic web, a place where a much richer tagging and classification of underlying data will drive greater access to content. Think enabling technology. I think all the technical stuff that underlies web 3.0 is very cool but the focus should be about humanizing the web, or humanizing technology.

I think that what is happening with web 3.0 has a chance of doing this. To me, I’ve always been a geek and a technologist but I feel now my mission and use of this technology is here for the purpose of connecting US – we the people! Just like Facebook did for this exchange between you and I Yvonne. A bunch of 1’s and 0’s in programming made it all possible to execute but a person and a group of people made things like blogs, messaging clients and Facebook. For these reasons I beleive we are living in a renaissance.

New terms: hmmm.
As you say, mashup is a really good one.

How about enterprise mashup! I just completed a four month project on enterprise mashups (company mashups for profit). It’s about combining multiple data and or web functionality to produce something. At the very least a useful aggregation of stuff on the web but if done well, a solution or tool that is better than the sum of its parts.

Example: You want to build a site for collectible baseball cards. You build a mashup that collects classifieds information from eBay, Craigslist and forty different speciality sites that sell collectible baseball cards. You put it all together in a new online database and design a user-friendly search engine to sit on top of it. Then you get fancy and add a shopping cart that lets your site users buy baseball cards from any of those sites through your own new easy-to-use baseball card shopping site. You get the data by using mashup tools to scrape the web sites you want the information from. Scraping is no different than Google robots (bots) crawling sites to check for changes so they can be indexed in the search engine.

One more? Bacn. That’s pronounced bacon.

“Bacn is a new problem now plaguing our email inboxes. Putting it simply, Bacn is email you receive that isn’t spam… And isn’t personal mail. It’s the middle class of email. It’s notifications of a new post to your Facebook wall or a new follower on Twitter. It’s the Google alert for your name and the newsletter from your favorite company.”

Now, I think since I’ve done all this work early on a Sunday morning I’ll go publish my reply on a blog somewhere – maybe someone else will find it useful. Hopefully you got some little thing from all my blather!

Cheers Yvonne and thanks for writing.
- Jules

Technorati Tags: bacn, web 2.0, web 3.0, the semantic web, mashup, mashups, enterprise mashups

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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.

Technorati Tags: Boomers, Baby Boomers

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River of Reputation

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.

Hat tip to a twitter mention of a conversation between Scoble and Anil Dash. I was also influenced by Brian Solis’s post Lifestreams Channel Online Activity, Creating Rivers of Relevance, discussing data streams and one’s personal brand.

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Oh yeah, and this video coves user generated content, social media, personal publishing, blogs, online community, video, web publishing technologies like HTML, XML, and RSS and has same great music from deus to go along with it (oops, this is the deus I meant from the music in the video – two new music finds in one!).

This amazing video is courtesy of Assistant Professor Michael Wesch, who leads the Digital Ethnography group at Kansas State University. Thanks to Organic’s Three Minds blog for making me aware of this and Patrick Dunphy (I wish I had a link but Three minds didn’t post one) for making Three Minds aware of it.

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