‘Social’ recruiting isn’t about the technology

// May 26th, 2010 // No Comments » // Recruitment Marketing

Recruiting is about people. It’s about human interaction – people identifying with a story, with an idea, with a culture. It’s about creating a common perception that’s driven by people, and related to their social habits. Technology facilitates that, but it certainly doesn’t replace it.

So while we talk about Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and their web-based friends, we’re failing to discuss a fundamental part of the concept – those channels are only as good as the people using them. Not from a skill perspective, but from a content perspective. Who is managing your interaction? What is the purpose of it – to land a candidate or to build the brand?

When we talk about candidate management systems and CRM systems for talent acquisition, we’re replacing human interaction with technology. We’re substituting human connection for reliability, for a consistent experience.  Yes, every candidate gets a response when they apply, but it’s not from a person – it’s from a program. When we adopt systems that search online for social media profile information, are we using technology to spy on people, or to replace our ability to evaluate humans without going through their online personas? Is every communication in line with the employment brand?

As a community of people whose profession is talent, finding and engaging people is what we do. More than ever, technology delivers us opportunity and risk. Ensuring that our communications, regardless of the media, are clear, are going to be interpreted the way we expect them to be, and are in line with the brand and our values as a business, is going to have a more positive impact than being on fifty new social media platforms and using them all randomly.

Get the voice of the brand right. Make it something people want to listen to and engage with first, and then adopting new channels, new strategies and new media becomes easier to manage, and more lucrative.

Rejection And Criticism

// April 15th, 2010 // No Comments » // Behaviour

Rejection.

If a client chooses another option over the one you’re selling, there are two things you can do.

The first is to attack the client directly – accuse them of being unprofessional, complain that you didn’t do your best and deserve another chance, bad-mouth the competitor, complain and use all your sales skills and existing knowledge of the client to try and guilt them into reversing the decision.

The second is to take it on the chin, to wish them well and tell them that the door is always open if there’s anything you can ever do for them. Keep it professional and objective, get feedback on what you could have done better, and stay in touch.

Guess which one means you might get the business back eventually? That’s right – the one most of us don’t do.

Criticism.

There’s a poster on my wall at work that says “If you’re tired of people exposing your mistakes, don’t attack the people. Attack the mistakes.” I’ve seen a few people in the industry respond to criticism by publicly attacking the critic. How does this make you look more credible? If you have issue with the review, address the review, not the reviewer. Attacking people, instead of issues, just weakens your argument. Or, just for something different, be confident enough in what you’re doing to ignore the criticism. If you don’t credit the reviewer, don’ respond publicly – just ignore it. Drawing attention to nasty things someone said about you on the internet doesn’t create anything but antipathy. And I’m pretty sure we’ve got enough of that already.

If it works, do it again. if it doesn’t, do it again. And don’t feed the trolls.

Creating Tribal Value

// March 29th, 2010 // No Comments » // Employment Branding, Internal Communications

Paul Jacobs wrote about epic wins this week in a thought-provoking blog post that links gaming, the most immersive artificial experience currently available, to the industry of talent and service. This got me thinking about what the epic win represents to the individual, and how we can emulate that feeling when it comes to work. How can we deliver epic wins?

(I’ll preface this by pointing out that I am a gamer, albeit casually. So my insights into gaming as a subculture are driven largely by my own participation in gaming. )

Where gaming becomes essentially a tribe (by which I mean a subculture with a communal interest, language and standard of value) is when shared exposure to a particular experience becomes a unifying factor. Gamers become members of factions within their tribe that revolve around genres, platforms, styles, social connections and more. There’s occasionally some tribal warfare among these smaller groups (PC vs console, X360 vs PS3, etc) but they are still all gamers. Their membership to a self-selected class of people becomes part of their identity. They actively seek out discussion on their areas of interest. They recognise each other through a shared cultural language and, occasionally, uniform.

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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.

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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