The case for craftsmanship

// December 6th, 2011 // 1 Comment » // Employment Branding

Last week, at the ATC Social Media Conference in Melbourne, I heard one of the speakers suggest something I found remarkable. Bill Boorman told the audience that, in his view, any content ‘that took longer than ten minutes to produce’ was overcooked. Bill’s argument was that raw content was automatically more authentic, and that ‘snap shots’ were more honest than ‘wedding photos’.

I disagree.

I disagree because the argument about content craftsmanship is not a binary equation. We have a spectrum of options between ‘cheap and cheerful’ and ‘Directed by Ridley Scott’ blockbuster. Sure, there’s the occasion when being able to capture content relies on being in the moment, but this shouldn’t dictate your strategy. There’s certainly a difference between shooting like this, or producing something like this.

Life is not a choice between ‘shorts and sneakers’ and ‘tuxedo’. We have different outfits for different purposes, and it’s generally the case that as our intimacy with a group of people increases, our standard of dress relaxes. We cultivate a casual standard through continual exposure to our personality. We don’t begin this way for a reason. Many people still wear suits to job interviews because they acknowledge the statement that wearing a suit makes – we are here for work purposes, I am dressed accordingly. It is a professional standard, one that shows you’ve made an effort. It doesn’t make you any less ‘authentically’ you, it just means you’ve made a conscious choice to present yourself in a way that shows you care about how you’re seen.

The same argument goes for the basics of communication. If you’re not a great speller or a master of the apostrophe, you aren’t suddenly more authentic if you continue to spell things wrong or choose NOT to learn how punctuation works. It doesn’t make you seem more legitimate, or more believable. In fact, it does the opposite. It makes it look like you don’t care enough to proofread. Not edgy, not more real – just lazy.

Creating content should be about combining authenticity with craftsmanship. It should be about finding your narrative and expressing it to the best of your ability. It’s about being prepared to set a standard for your voice, a professional standard that you won’t compromise. If you have a story that’s worth telling, it’s worth telling well. And it’s worth taking the time to make sure it looks official, legitimate and is the best product you can produce in a reasonable time.

Overcooked is a comparative term. Content becomes, in my understanding, overcooked when the message is lost in the polishing. When you create content that’s not compelling or original, but stays firmly on the safe side of the corporate line. But that’s not about the time it takes to create – it’s about making something technically brilliant with no heart and soul. Good content needs emotion, whether it’s a sneezing panda or an Apple keynote or a cat with bacon taped to it. You don’t need to sacrifice quality to create emotion or authenticity, and you certainly don’t deliberately create content whose only merit is that it was ‘quick and dirty’.

It’s one thing to make ‘raw’ content because that’s your only option. However, when it isn’t, why do anything less than your best work?

To watch this as a video, click here.

The Bandage Of Social Media Won’t Stop You Bleeding Talent

// May 9th, 2011 // No Comments » // Recruitment Marketing

It’s been said before that we have moved into an age where adopting the new has overtaken mastering the old. We embrace platforms and technologies as they surface, usually in relation to how submerged we are in the innovation pool. The more time you spend on social media, the more likely you are to know something new is coming, and the more likely you are to try and integrate it into your people strategy. It’s why HR and recruitment people get involved in social media. We like to see the trends coming, and to experience the information, analysis and viewpoints of our own community.

The problem with this is that we become addicted to novelty. We get addicted to trying to get the new thing up and running. Facebook, Twitter, FourSquare, Tumblr – the list of possible ways to engage talent , particularly passive talent, grows as we spend more time in this world. We have conferences on how social platforms can build brand engagement, on how LinkedIn can find us the names of possible talent, on how metrics and online interaction can create loyalty. It’s a shiny new world, and it gives us all something to talk about. And I have no doubt that there are plenty of strategies that allow companies to use social media to bring passive talent to a greater understanding of what they offer. No doubt at all.

However, this addiction to novelty comes at a price. We have ignored mastery for diversity. We’ve become handymen instead of craftsmen, explorers instead of refiners.  Most of all, we’ve become people who go out and buy bandages instead of going to a doctor. We have diverse and complex systems to manage our active candidates that contain communications templates, can tie in to existing communities and give us a multitude of ways to parse talent. And I believe that, in the majority of cases, our teams of recruiters know enough about this software to get by, and nothing more.

(I’m going to use PageUp as an example here, just because it’s easier to name a system. PageUp isn’t the problem; in fact, it’s an excellent system that almost no one is using to full capacity.)

If you have PageUp, your recruiters most likely get trained in how to do the day to day work in the system, and very little about the advanced areas. They won’t be unilaterally educated about updates or new features. They’ll be technicians, good at using one functional workflow to answer a need – the need to fill a role. They won’t be masters, or gurus, or (insert your term for the PageUp wizard in your business here) – they’ll have a fit-for-purpose understanding. This has been the case everywhere I’ve worked, and from discussions with other people in the game, it is common enough. Common enough, in fact, that organisations with strong social recruiting efforts spend more time refining their social campaigns to attract passive candidates than they do talking to existing, active ones.

If we compare the relationship between candidates and your brand to human relationships, then we are investing in looking good on RSVP instead of learning to be a better spouse. In short, we go speed dating online and never use the phone numbers we collect. We are ignoring those who are already attracted to us in favour of converting the unallied masses to our brand. We are making conversions from brand ambivalence to brand alliance through marketing and online engagement, and then rewarding that conversion with silence and ambivalence of our own. “Treat them mean, keep them keen” doesn’t apply to what we do. We foster discontent with every missed opportunity for better interaction with our existing, active candidates, and often we do it because we’re time-poor. It’s like saying  “When sales pick up, we’ll do some marketing. “ Bad advice. This is the area in which most companies can grow the most, can return the best ROI, and can make the most significant gains in reduced time to fill, cost per hire and recruiter workload in. It’s so simple that’s it’s overlooked by default.

Advanced skills (mastery, if you will) in all the ways you can pipeline talent and use PageUp (or whatever system you’re using) is a less public, less expensive, less marketing intensive way of making gains in the war for talent. It requires harnessing the knowledge of your experts and sharing it so that everyone in your team becomes highly proficient in all the aspects of the system. It provides, in return, more channels and opportunities for measuring ROI, better deployment of resources, faster results, lower time to get new staff up to speed and, above all, thicker and deeper communications channels to the people in your talent pools who really want you.

Social media has pulled our focus, because it’s public and shiny and democratic. It’s visible and engaging and fun. People like using it. And it absolutely has its place in engaging passive talent, in building brand perception, in being a brand authority and in joining the conversation about your employment offering. It’s important, however, to make it a balanced part of a strategy that mixes passive contact with nurturing existing candidates, a strategy that encourages loyalty by rewarding the most loyal, active candidates with the most attention.

And if yours is an organisation that sacrifices good candidate care and dismisses active, motivated jobseekers for trying to hook the passive ones, you run an additional risk. If you sow dissent in those who love you, your social media presences may become the field on which you reap the annoyance, vitriol and disappointment of those hearts you’ve broken or spurned.

Social recruiting experts – who needs them? Not you.

// August 13th, 2010 // 3 Comments » // Employment Branding

There’s an old saying that applies to social media. “If all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a nail.” For those of us who have been swimming in the social media pool for a while, it’s easy to start thinking it’s a silver bullet. And maybe it is. Except that even silver bullets need to be well-aimed and fired from a  gun that works.

Using online social networks  as a channel for attracting and engaging talent is a great idea. It’s a great idea because it allows you to communicate in real-time with an opt-in talent pool. It allows you to stand up as part of the tribe, as a voice worth hearing in your industry. And it allows you to tell the story of your brand, your employment experience, and amplify the messages you want to send about your culture.  Most other media, such as newspapers, videos and careers events, let you do that too. The only real difference is that online social platforms give your audience a voice to converse with you, too. The democratic nature of response-focused online media gives your brand greater access to feedback and conversation.

Being able to use social media to engage people isn’t any different than being able to talk at a real-life networking event, or present on a stage, or do phone-screens for candidates. Being able to communicate on social media requires two things – knowing who you are, and knowing how to speak. And while it’s pretty easy to learn how to speak using social media’s pantheon of tools (there are certainly enough blogs, video tutorials, articles and resources out there), it’s a lot harder to know who you are and how to talk to people as a brand.

To acquire the knowledge of who you are, you need to rely on the principles and values that underpin your brand. Your tone of voice, your communication style, the content, frequency and responsiveness are all things that descend from your brand. If yours is a brand that is friendly, approachable, picky about getting the details right and wants to add value, then those are the defining traits of your brand on social media. The platform doesn’t change the personality of your brand.

So much of what’s discussed in social recruiting applies to recruiting skills in general. Good communication, timely response, the ability to identify talent amidst the chaff – these are recruiting skills, not social media skills. You wouldn’t hire a Job Board Expert to teach you how to post a job on SEEK. You’d try yourself, and if you got stuck, you’d ask people you know (usually someone who’s naturally aligned to this sort of thing) and maybe attend a one-off training course with SEEK. You wouldn’t hire an expert just to show you how to use one channel – you hire an expert to show you how to apply the brand to all your channels. That’s where brand agencies and internal employer marketing teams come in – here’s the message, regardless of the place you want to shout it from.

A social recruiting expert will teach you the tools, which you can learn for free and trial for yourself without them. A social recruiting expert can show you how Twitter works, and show you the mistakes they’ve made. However, a social recruiting expert can’t tell you who you are, and how to accurately and authentically create the brand using social media as an additional channel. They can show you how to hold a guitar, but not how to write music.

If you’re ready to explore social media to find and engage talent, because you have a strong brand, a well-defined value proposition and a good idea of how to appeal to your prospects,  then you don’t need a social recruiting expert to show you how to do that. And if you don’t have those things, all the social recruiting expertise in the world won’t help you find out who you are and help you connect with the talent you need.

Social Recruiting And Talent Seduction

// June 17th, 2010 // No Comments » // Employment Branding

Our level of social interaction almost always plays a part in our self-image. The communities in which we operate, where we find prestige, acceptance and camaraderie, become part of our internal value system. From a retail perspective, advertisers have known this for years. It’s the reason why Coke is always being drunk by thin, attractive, socially conversant people on TV, even though many awkward, overweight and homely people probably also enjoy it in real life. We associate products with an image, which we use to rationalise our choices, and to make brands part of our social atmosphere. I wear Prada, therefore I am like the celebrities I admire who also wear Prada.

Online social technologies have made it easier to create our own tribes, and to interact with a wider array of people. As the limits of geography and  chronogeography fall away, our social interactions are becoming faster and more diverse. Want to talk about cross-stitch? There are Facebook groups and discussions forums and probably a Twitter community who will share links on even the narrowest channels of embroidery and haberdashery. Love web design? Hundreds of blogs, communities and places to find inspiration, advice and people who share your passion. The PLUs – the People Like Us.

With this ability comes the opportunity for talent sourcing functions to step away from traditional recruitment and talent identification models towards something more immersive. For the first time, companies have access to the conversations that are taking place around their brands, their employment experience and their fields of expertise. These conversations are taking place on social networks and are searchable, trackable and joinable. They’re happening all the time. And with the right know-how, they’re a devastating weapon in creating expectation and aspiration among talent you’d like to attract.

Seduction is about conversation. It’s about finding common ground for a beneficial relationship, whether it’s a short-term relationship that’s mutually beneficial, or something longer. It’s about presenting an image that’s aligned to shared perception – an honest portrayal of values and benefits, delivered in a mutually-spoken language. Talent seduction is no different – it’s a process of creating connection, establishing a shared platform of interests and mutual benefit, and building trust and respect until the connection is solidified into a transaction or exchange of benefit.

So there are two parts to using social technology platforms to seduce talent. The first part is about content creation and dispersal. You’re going to attract people who share your values, and that includes the value you put on this content. A 3-minute video shot on a handycam might appeal to a certain market, but if you’re going to do a video and you want it to resonate, why not invest more time and resources to make it look better? The same is true of blogs, photo shoots, brochures – any created content transmits both the content and production value to an audience. It’s like a suit – anyone who tells you there’s no difference between off the rack and a bespoke suit has only ever worn off the rack. Putting the effort into your content is investing in your image and brand, and that can only help you appear considered, well-presented and attractive to the right people.

The second part is the conversation. It’s interaction. Being well-dressed is fine for a first impression, but if you sound off like a ladette the second someone speaks to you, it’s going to undo the work you put in to good content. The art of conversation is about listening more than you speak, about thinking before you sound off, and about an evolution of comfort. It’s a balance between sharing stories and responding to other people’s remarks. It’s an opportunity to influence the conversation, which shouldn’t be mistaken for dominating it. It’s creating expectation through shaped communication, not by standing up and screaming about how wonderful you are. And most of all, it’s about personal connection between a brand and an individual’s wants, needs, fears and expectations.

Imagine you go into a bar, and someone comes up to speak to you. They look like your sort of person, you’ve seen them around at other places you go, they’re outfitted in a style that speaks to you. They say hi. You say something back. They say, in a monotone “Thank you for speaking to me. I look forward to speaking to you! Hooray!” Offputting?

This is an automated response in real life. Whether it’s Twitter, email or anything else. It’s anti-human and anti-connection.

And here’s the kicker – if you know who you are (which in this case means you know your EVP and have an established brand) your targets will also know who you are. It means you can be more conversational and approachable – you don’t have to establish your identity or appear flashy. Your reputation will precede you, because you’ve spent time building it through interaction, and through being consistent. You can establish your value proposition in a social community by demonstrating those values and by being open to discussion with people who want to become part of what you offer.

We identify with those who share our take on things. We are more likely to work for companies who share our views on things that matter to us. Some companies might publish a list of those things on a website, and that’s a start. However, if a company can get into conversations about those values, and use those conversations to create a rapport, they can generate an emotional connection. And those are much harder to sever, and much more likely to make us invest in any relationship

‘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.

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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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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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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