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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Since The Internet, What Has Changed?

// March 15th, 2010 // No Comments » // Uncategorized

From a discussion with Riges Younan of Peerlo, I started thinking about what’s really changed in the ten years since I started working in employer marketing. And as a result, I started looking, not at what the technology allowed us to do as vendors and marketers, but at how I think it’s changed our behaviour as a people.

When we first began using the internet as a forum for classified advertising, with sites like SEEK, we found that we could significantly reduce the time and cost of going to market for jobs, provided our audience knew how to deal with internet recruitment tactics. Companies had a basic site (some more complex, obviously, usually aligned with interest in the internet’s tools, like computers) but content published online was still paid. It was a niche media stream, like running one’s own private magazine. The global economy which exists online makes it easier for people to find work, and the searchable nature of the information made it easier for us to find data on nearly any subject. The problem became quality control. Ease of publishing led to a loss of focus on quality, and a perceived dip in value (after all, publishing online was easier than newspapers, etc, so didn’t receive the same respect from the business community)

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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?

Employee Behaviour And The Social Web

// March 1st, 2010 // 3 Comments » // Internal Communications

Last week, I spoke at Media140 about employee behaviour on social media. There’s been some great feedback from people about how we’ve reached the point we have reached as a business, and about whether the online conduct policy represents an effort to control staff behaviour.  I thought, in the interests of providing a bit more information, I’d expand on the topic (for those who were there) or give an overview on how I think this works (for those who weren’t).

The behaviour of employees, unchecked and unmonitored, can be tremendously damaging to a brand. An employee whose identity, online or off, is linked to a brand, can through their behaviour bring the brand into disrepute, lose clients for the business, land clients in actual legal trouble and have a significant impact on the ability of the business to attract talent and clients.

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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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Is It Your Job To Protect Employees From Themselves?

// October 13th, 2009 // 1 Comment » // Internal Communications

There’s some interesting discussion going on (at least in-house where I work) about how far a company should regulate social media usage. I’ve done a lot of research on industry practice and written a couple of position papers for the board on how we should approach this, as I believe it’s firmly attached to our EVP. In my opinion, you can’t support the free exchange of ideas and foster a culture of teamwork and collaboration, then muzzle people who dare to talk about something other than work. And luckily, the board has agreed.

However, this raises another question. We know (from sites such as Lamebook) that people are becoming more likely to share content which reflects badly on either themselves or the company on social networking sites. We’ve all seen the stories of people fired for criticising employers online. Does our duty of care as an employer extend to educating staff on how to protect their online reputations, and by extension, our own?

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