“Recruiters and hiring managers will move towards “community manager” roles and need to build and take on newer skills to augment their existing skill sets. The ability that will count will not be to tell their own stories, but encouraging participants to tell their stories, and being great listeners in integrating them”
-Gautam Ghosh
Organizations face a big challenge in the context of two ever-changing realities, firstly key talent is hard to find and secondly, job seekers are increasingly looking to peers for the collective wisdom of the social web to decide on which firm to join.
The two objectives organizations will need to start thinking about are:
- How to build an employer brand that is relevant to the needs of key talented people and to understand how to join in and monitor conversations on the social web.
- Understand where these talented prospective employees are, what they talk about and how to attract them and engage them to consider you as an employer of choice.
Organizations will need to move away from building their presence on social networks and integrate them to build online communities for their talent pool.
When a person joins a talent community owned by an organization he or she gives permission to the organization to have a conversation with him/her and it is up to the organization to either mess it up by “pushing” its message or to take it to the next level by active engagement.
As this becomes more and more common – recruiters and hiring managers will move towards “community manager” roles and need to build and take on newer skills to augment their existing skill sets. The ability that will count will not be to tell their own stories but encouraging participants to tell their stories. Tomorrow’s organizations that need to tap into the talent pool will benefit from the following steps:
1. Listening & Interpreting
The employer brand is no longer in the organization’s control. Every day, people are asking information about and reviewing what others have said about employers’ cultures, roles, career prospects in sites like Glassdoor.com or even Google Places. Using “listening” tools such as Radian6, Alterian SM2, Buzz stream will help in identifying the social places where they “hang out”.
“Recruitment teams need to answer these questions “What do your prospective employees look for in their ideal workplace? What’s the perception in the market about your company and its culture? What’s the perception about your competitors?”
2. Find & Attract Good Talent
Monitoring content that they create and queries they answer. Holding talent contests around the content they are looking for prospective candidates is a great way to finding talented people. If the organization builds vitality in the contest it’s a great way to spread the word and engage a larger talent pool.
3. Engage With Active Prospects
Engaging needs to be done in two places at the niche social networks they converse in and at the organization’s own branded social community which could be a blog or a full-fledged social network. It can be used to showcase organizational culture, with rich multimedia content like photographs, videos. Content can be curated on the corporate site from the social web around different axes such as product, market, and industry. Prospective employees could also be invited to contribute content and showcase on a leaderboard. Employee/ Team blogs serve two purposes especially for large organizations they act as communication vehicles with media as well as engaging niche talent.
4.Onboarding New Recruits
While this is done offline, I feel a part of making the initial connection could be done virtually even before people “sign up” and strengthen bonds between future employees.
5. Learning
Social technology can make learning more of a continuous process than a 2-3 day event it currently is. Trainers can create a community of learners, who can continue to share experiences and be a support group as they implement learning’s in their workplace. Marcia Conner’s book “The New Social Learning” shows how various firms are using these tools to augment employee training.
6. Recognition
Companies like Rypple, Globoforce have started the concept of social peer recognition and it can be a powerful factor to increase employee engagement. In the future look out, for predictive analytics about engagement and attrition by analyzing how their peers are recognizing employees.
7. Knowledge Sharing
Forget the idea of databases acting as “repositories” of knowledge, internal social networks can capture employees work activity as social intranets connect deeper into business applications and team members can follow what others are doing on their activity streams. Newer tools like Opzi and MindQuilt can also emerge as an enterprise version of Quora, the popular Q&A site.
8. Alumni Connect
Today’s employees can be tomorrow’s ambassadors if an alumni program is managed well and alumni see value in being a part of the community.
The vast majority of organizations and job seekers are stuck at the “salary” discussions, as they don’t think about the desire of an individual to make a difference and meaning to others. And unless you can connect with that innately human desire which are discoverable and engaged via social technologies – recruiters and organizations will continue to judge a person by their current and future salary levels and they, in turn, will treat each firm as a mercenary would. It’s about time organizations and job seekers got to know the human side of each other.
