Tips For Social Media Reference Checking (if you must)

// March 22nd, 2010 // 1 Comment » // Employment Branding

Following on from my last post on the topic, rather than talking about whether it’s right or wrong, I thought I’d try a different approach to the social media recruitment/ background check debate.

I think there are five things that smart, tech-savvy corporates (and recruiters, but I tend to write from a corporate perspective) can do to help candidates and managers with the issue of ‘public’ information about people’s private lives.

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Using Social Media To Profile Candidates

// March 19th, 2010 // 3 Comments » // Employment Branding

I’ve already been involved in some online debates about whether the practice of gathering data from personal social network profiles to research candidates is ethical. And rather than repeat my position, I’ve got some case studies for those who have been commenting, because I think this deserves exploring.

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Simple Rules For Being A Better Employer

// March 4th, 2010 // No Comments » // Employment Branding

1. Recruit for the future. Being able to do the job today is only half the requirement. The person you hire needs to be able to do the job that the business needs them to do tomorrow, by tomorrow.
2. Remember that the H in HR stands for Human. People are irrational, emotional, creative and different. The more you try and standardise them, the less your standard applies.
3. Accountability, not blame. Blame is accountability plus defensiveness and emotion. Ownership of the error should be about who learned from it, not who caused it.
4. There’s no hierarchy on ideas. If anyone can invent an idea, a process or a tool that makes the business better, you need to make sure everyone can be heard.
5. Leadership, management and supervision aren’t synonyms. Look at the ratio of leaders to managers to supervisors, and make sure your leaders are in the right space for the business.
6. Measure everything. There is no point at which you’d like less data on how people engage, interact, learn, grow and deliver back to the business. Every process which can be measured, can be optimised.
7. Take courageous leaps. Having the chutzpah to try, knowing you may fail, is going to deliver more lessons in what to do (and avoid) than a thousand seminars.
8. Design your experiences. Build systems for conversation and feedback, and be prepared to listen, so you can build on the strengths and reduce the weaknesses.
9. Source opinions without being ruled by them. As the saying goes, fixing all the problems people had with the horse and cart wouldn’t have given us the car.
10. Redefine your internal definition of failure. Did you learn something? Did you find a different path? It’s never the first prototype that becomes the final product, but that doesn’t stop people from building prototypes.

7 Things HR Can Learn From Video Games

// March 3rd, 2010 // No Comments » // Employment Branding, Internal Communications

I love video games. I have loved them since I first had a computer that required a knowledge of BASIC to get the games running, It had a cassette drive. I’m not kidding. I’ve played habitually on almost every system, and enjoyed some of the tastiest fruits that the gaming tree had to offer. While the gaming industry thrives on entertainment, there are certainly some good lessons to be learned. Here’s just a few;

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Using The Light Touch In Employer Branding

// March 3rd, 2010 // No Comments » // Employment Branding

There’s a phrase I use here to describe what we do to make being an employee a better experience. “When you’ve done it right, people won’t be sure you’ve done anything at all.” Yes, it’s from Futurama. That doesn’t make it less true.

Your EVP (and your employer brand) should be an echo. It should be an echo of how people feel every day about working for you, about how you treat them as an employer, about how working with you adds to their lives. It should not be propaganda, which sets out to convince. It should not be a campaign for change or revolution. It should be the quiet affirmation of something people may not already realise – this is how it feels to be a part of your business. (I can’t over-emphasise the word feels enough either- the EVP isn’t about what reason, but emotion).

When you’re applying the brand, it should be with a light touch. It should feel like an accent. Whether you’re taking it as far as some (designing forms and technological interactions to connect more meaningfully with people) or simply implementing an EVP at the basic level, the rule always applies. You don’t need the town crier. You need a quiet ‘yes’ whispered in the ear of your staff. That’s why it works – because you’re not selling them, you’re reminding them.

Externally, a heavier touch is needed, but still nothing excessive. People are convinced by emotional connections – you’re not offering them a bargain-basement deal, so don’t advertise like you are. Go out for talent by using different means of creating an emotional impression. Draw them into conversation, so that their interaction with you becomes a human exchange. After all, this is the brand that’s made up of people, so it’s much easier to be conversational and honest. Talented people looking at your organisation should see no difference between the story you’re giving them and the way you conduct yourselves (both on and offline) with other talent. They should see that this is who you are, and, once they’ve joined you, see that this is STILL who you are.

Most people won’t notice that you’ve made your intranet more user-friendly, or that you’ve made it easier to change their details themselves, or that you’ve restructured your career development framework. The won’t notice the specifics – they’ll notice that when they interact with the business as employees, it feels like they expect it to feel.

There’s another post coming up about how this applies to your employer brand in social media, but for now I’ll say this – your EVP is supposedly the aggregate of every thought your employees have ever had about what it’s like to work for you. Social media lets them publish those thoughts. Now, if you could read every conversation every single employee of yours had online about working for you, would they match?

Designing The Employee Experience

// February 18th, 2010 // No Comments » // Employment Branding, Internal Communications

Recently, I’ve been reading up on user experience design. Largely, it’s been driven by the part of my role which includes redesigning our corporate intranet to deliver better information to our staff. So like a good little boffin, I read about web design, and SharePoint design, and building for user value, and creating meaningful interfaces. And something funny happened. I tried to apply it to being an employee instead of just using the intranet.

Your EVP and your employer brand are ideally connected to the employee experience. Not just as the result of it (which you gained through research and focus groups and surveys and such) but a continual cause-and-effect. Your brand is at its most effective when it is used to influence how employees feel about working for you, and how they connect with you. For many companies, this is about internal reinforcement – you told us you work here for X, so we’re going to provide more of X. X is great! Hooray for X, which we provide!

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Recruiting hearts, not minds

// November 26th, 2009 // 3 Comments » // Employment Branding

What used to be called “the war for talent” isn’t far from starting up again. The terminology is misleading, because wars have an end, and this is now a permanent market condition. There’s no war to be won – talent is scarce. Whether it’s graduates or experienced hires, your skills pool is shrinking, and you’re going to have to be more flexible, proactive and attractive to snare the people who’ll deliver your future.

Traditional sourcing methods are still delivering good candidates, everyone’s talking about social media and its “potential” as a sourcing tool, newspaper ads (like the newspapers themselves) are dwindling, and more and more people are looking at referrals, alumni programs and human-contact sourcing as viable, cost effective alternatives.

As the talent pool shrinks, there are seemingly two schools of thought about how to tackle the market: (a) talent as an acquired commercial asset and (b) talent as an investment in human potential. Each has its strengths and ROI, and each is viable as a resourcing business model. One recognises contribution to the bottom line, and one is more about contribution to the business culture.

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Generating Names Or Making Connections?

// September 23rd, 2009 // 1 Comment » // Employment Branding, Recruitment Marketing

This morning, I saw an email offering to teach recruiters how to identify talent using Facebook, Twitter and a few other social networks, by doing site x-rays for search terms. It’s not a bad way to identify what people do for a job, assuming they’ve put that in their information. Here’s my problem – those people aren’t candidates. They aren’t looking for you. And in finding (and potentially approaching) them through a technological means, are you putitng your brand at risk?

Internal recruiters are the mouthpiece of a brand, not just an opportunity. When you’re in-house , your job isn’t just to fill a role, but to add to an existing team that’s already a part of your business. There’s a fundamental difference between agency recruiting and in-house recruiting. In house, you see your mistakes every day. Your bad placements are there, being performance managed or managed out, and it sticks to your reputation. No one within the business remembers the names of their agency recruiters with the same tenacity that they remember the guys sitting down the hall.
Which means in-house, you’re recruiting for a culture, not just the job itself. You know the culture better than anyone else, and so it’s a massive part of what you’re looking for. You know the fit you need for the team. You know your value proposition. And you know your brand, and how valuable that is in market, because it’s what gets people to love you, or leave you.

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Want To Engage Gen Y? Start By Calling Them Something Else

// September 22nd, 2009 // No Comments » // Employment Branding, Recruitment Marketing

I’ve spent this week introducing our managers to our graduate marketing program. It’s a program that has been hand-built by me and a very dedicated team of designers and developers. It’s frankly awesome.
In nearly every meeting, these managers (who are largely technical types) have asked if the way we communicate – personal, informal, friendly – is a “Gen Y thing”. Because, you know, Gen Y love that stuff. And at every opportunity, I’ve taken pains to point out that no, it isn’t. It’s a people thing.
The people we want (and I suspect this applied to you too) don’t like being generalised. They don’t like being categorised. They like being individuals. They like having this recognised, too. People respond well to being singled out for the things they pride themselves on. In other words, people respond well to being recognised as a person.
Those Generation Y’s that managers are always complaining about have a reasonable point to make. As long as you keep seeing them as a generation, and not as individuals, you’re alienating them. Every person within generation Y has the same level of individuality in communication style, work preference and background as anyone else. They are as susceptible to cold, hurt, excitement, honesty and fear as anyone else.
Generations are a way of making broad classifications. They are a way of seeing. And every way of seeing, is a way of not seeing. If you continue to define people by their generation, you paint them with the ‘average’ of their collective public perception. You brand them based on the collective psychological impression the chronological group they belong to has given you. In short, you marginalise their humanity right from the start.
Need something to call your new graduates? Try their names.

Building The Brand In 140 Characters Or Less

// September 21st, 2009 // No Comments » // Employment Branding

Lots of people (including me, in previous posts) have been talking about using online social networking for recruitment and talent sourcing. It’s a hot-button issue in an industry that loves to exploit potential new media to find candidates. Tell a recruiter there could be candidates (and commissions) in it, and odds are, they’ll throw themselves at it with the gusto and carelessness I usually display at All-You-Can-Eat Ribs night.

I’m from the employer brand school of thinking. All of our talent acquisition strategies are demonstrably linked to our corporate core values and our employer value proposition. We don’t spam mailing lists and we don’t advertise jobs that don’t exist. We take a community approach to employee referrals and alumni that’s quickly moving into the online space. I still think press presence is part of the toolkit for the right roles. I think getting them in the door is easier than keeping them engaged, in love and moving forward once they’re part of the company. And, as I’ve said before, I believe that the more people get involved in communicating for the brand, the more likely the wheels are to fall off.

Brands live and die on their ability to transfer emotion. That ability is the thing that makes you feel what someone else feels. It’s the moment when looking at a Coke poster makes you think you’d be happier (and more like the people in the advert) with a Coke. So you buy one. And you don’t ever think about whether you were as happy as the people on the poster were, because you’re going about your life, drinking a Coke.

Where this becomes a problem for brands (and while I’m not just talking about employer brands, it’s where my head’s at) is that it’s really hard to transfer emotion in small bites.

Video is arguably the best single-direction method to transfer emotion from one human being to another. It’s the reason we watch an unprecedented amount of online video, DVDs, films and downloaded TV shows. Interactions with real people online are also entertaining and can certainly help to solidify opinions around a particular voice. (One only has to look at the stand-up comics joking away on twitter and the subsequent responses to see how quickly single-voice brands can spread.) However, as the richness of content goes down, so to does emotional transfer. And 140 characters is about as content-poor as you can get. It’s text, often used to promote a link or show a picture, usually as a response to other conversations.

How do you paint the employer brand, the physical, emotional and psychological experience of working for a company, in 140 characters? And how do you do it in such a way that it’s going to impact and resonate with your intended audience?

The three R’s. Relevance, richness, response.

By relevance I mean talk the language of your tribe. Talk about things that excite them, not just about what jobs you have open. Introduce team members, talk about what’s happening in the real world. And talk about it the way you’d want to hear about it – in a way that stimulates conversation.

Richness refers to the type of conversation you have. Promote links people will find useful. Demonstrate an understanding of your followers by giving them content they’ll like. Talk to them, not at them. And talk to them like a human, a person who reacts and emotes and empathises and believes in a vision. There are enough bots out there without you becoming one for want of a personality.

Response means just that. Become part of the conversation. Forge a dialogue between your brand and your followers/fans/viewers/audience. Watch the discussions between your people and get involved. Talk to the issue and talk to the people. Share your views, listen to arguments, learn more and be part of the discussions.

It’s not a science – after all, we’re talking about people, who can be emotional, irrational, over-hasty and ignorant. If you want your brand to be a part of the new online environment, posting links to your open jobs isn’t a strategy.  Make your brand a voice, a leader, a pundit in the industry (whatever industry that is) and the right people will find you.

Read more about this in Andrew Weir’s great post about emotion.