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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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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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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Make Them Feel Lucky – Customer Service Tips

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

Recently, I was talking about a great customer service experience with a friend of mine. I’d had one of those exceptional service moments that you walk away from a little happier with the world While we were talking, in response to my story of literally awesome service, he said “Geez, you were lucky you picked a good (insert business here).”
I think this is true. I also think it’s something we should be striving for more often.
Seth Godin talks a lot about being remarkable. I think this points people in the right direction, but leaves the frame of reference up to the consumer. Every interaction with a client or customer is an experience where you are judged. Maybe it’s against expectation, or a competitor, or even against your track record. What’s important is that, to grow your business (whatever it is) you need to meet that expectation, and throw in a little something special.
Culturally this can be a challenge for you and your people. It’s easy to point to a track record of undistinguished service as profitable. It’s easy to compare yourself favourably to your competitors or deride customer expectations as unreasonable. It’s much harder to convince managers and employees that achieving a demanding, unrealistic and subjective goal is much better.
I liken it to videogames. It’s easy to beat a videogame on ‘easy’. More often than not, you get the same storyline and are treated to the same dynamics. What’s missing is the challenge, and the reward that you overcame a task which is more difficult than you were used to.

The two things that customers really remember from any interaction are service and price. Not everyone can be competitive on price. Being competitive with your service level is a choice to build your business around happier, more loyal customers.
Make people feel lucky they deal with you, and they’ll keep coming back.

Employer Of Choice – But For Who?

// September 18th, 2009 // No Comments » // Employment Branding

When you’re crafting an employer brand, it’s common for someone around the table to talk about having a brand that reaches the greatest audience. They want an employer brand that everyone’s comfortable with, that ensures you don’t offend anyone. A brand that gains mass appeal with the public. A brand that everyone can love. It’s a reasonable argument – more readers, more candidates. And who doesn’t want more candidates? Who doesn’t want to be an employer of choice?

You don’t.

Being the place that everyone wants to work is the surest way to burning out recruiters, hiring managers, and destroy your brand. Being an employer of choice will grind you into the ground quicker than being the place that no one wants to work. Your popularity will become a curse, and will reduce your brand to a litany of disappointed candidates. You don’t want everyone to want to work for you.

Part of a successful employer brand is the appeal to an archetypal person in the market. It’s about creating a personality that certain people will fall in love with. A personality that appeals to everyone makes you lovable to no one. Being lovable is about being individual, aligned and appealing to a particular taste. It’s about finding the people who are like you. Who share your values, your vision, your ethics and your style.

If you try appeal to everyone, you end up appealing to no one. You can’t align yourself to someone by being bland or neutral.  Personality’s don’t work like that.You have to stand for something to get people to stand beside you.

For your employer brand to be really effective, you need a thorough understanding of what your ideal employees want from an employer. Saying you’re family friendly doesn’t appeal to young, upwardly mobile entrepreneurs. Saying you’re a company that pushes hard and rewards extra effort doesn’t appeal to those looking for more work/family balance. Saying you’re anything that you’re not, just for the sake of getting talent through the door, is going to backfire totally. As demonstrated beautifully in this post by Maren Hogan.

Your brand needs to be relevant, targeted and honest. Otherwise, you end up having to manage a lot of expectations,  and you create promises so meaningless and vague that it’s impossible to meet them to the satisfaction of your staff. You brand can’t be open to interpretation. It must be specific about the kind of people it is geared to attract, and the kind of people it wants to repel.

An employer brand isn’t just about finding the right people – it’s a cultural blueprint for your organisation. It should make it clear to people who are skilled enough to work for you that there are cultural parameters to being your employee. It should also tell them what those parameters are quickly, succinctly and in a way which encourages engagement or disengagement.

Your brand is a message. You don’t just have to craft what you’re saying – you need to define who you want to receive it too.