A couple of weeks ago I was asked to take part in a social business round table organized by IBM and involving several other bloggers including Peter Gold and Jon Ingham. It’s really good to see the whole idea of social business being taken more seriously by more companies and at a higher organizational level. As I say in the video which IBM made as part of the event, (embedded below) essentially every company is a social company because companies contain people and people are by their very nature social! Social tools and technologies offer a fantastic ways to unleash the power of people and collaboration within businesses and I feel very strongly that it’s time for HR to step up to the mark and start facilitating rather than blocking this.
A few weeks ago Joey quit his job. Nothing unusual so far, I’m sure lots of other people did as well, however I bet that Joey was the only one who took a marching band in with him to accompany him handing his notice to his boss! Predictably the YouTube video of said event has already racked up nearly 3 million views and Joey has been hailed as a champion of the recession.
Perhaps the most interesting thing though were the very specific reasons Joey gives on the video for leaving which are certainly unambiguous in terms of sentiment . He clearly mentions his employer and says “they treat us like shit here”. Although this is an extreme example, the whole episode shows how stories about employers now spread and how easily reputations can be damaged. Not everyone resigns on YouTube with their own band but every growing Facebook networks mean many people’s resignations are similar if slightly less spectacular “social objects”
So what was Joey’s employer doing to defend themselves against this kind of reputational damage? In a word nothing. Whatever they have done since, at the time the video went viral they were nowhere in social media or on YouTube. A visit to their corporate recruitment website reveals some stock photography and general corporate jargon about what a great employer they are. The key issue is that there is no proof. There are no videos of their employees, no authentic stories, nothing at all that could possible counter balance Joey’s video
The sad thing is having spent a great deal of time auditing corporate recruitment websites this year I can tell you this is a situation that is common to the vast majority of large employers. Very often modernizing the corporate website or embracing social media is seen as unimportant or too difficult or something for which resources are not available.
I’m sure this hotel will probably have some local recruiting difficulties that may or may not be reflected internationally. All of this will cost time and resource to fix and that time and resource will be significantly more than it would have taken to make sure their employment communications were doing what they should be doing. More than anything this shows that social media isn’t something companies can opt in or out of and the risk of ignoring how the very notion of an employer brand is changing is enormous.
Last week I spoke at the excellent UK Recruiter end of year conference and shared some of my thoughts on the forces shaping the future of the recruitment industry. I’m not going to go into any detail about the four forces I identified in this particular blog post as I’m working on a whitepaper to be published in January that will cover them pretty comprehensively. However as part of the presentation I also talked about what I believe is going to be the “Megatrend” in recruitment over the coming weeks, months and years:
I’ve always been very interested in the plethora of discussions taking place round the candidate experience topic but have been somewhat underwhelmed by a lack of tangible action that companies have taken to address the real issues. With that in mind I’m delighted to finally talk a little bit about the really smart start up I’ve been helping out over the last few months.
Mystery Applicant will be launching at the end of the month and will be providing employers with real time information and benchmarking tools that will allow them to understand and improve the experience they give to candidates throughout the recruitment process.
As part of their launch the Mystery Applicant team are running a survey aimed at anyone who has applied for a job in the UK during the last six months, in order to get a sense of how people feel they are being treated. They would be really grateful for any help in spreading the word so here is a link to pass on to anyone relevant in your networks:
If you are actually a recent job seeker or are going through the job seeking process at the moment why not give yourself a voice in the debate and fill it in as well
Now that was a long blog break! No particular reason for it either, I wasn’t kidnapped by Monster and forced to write a nice article about BeKnown as ransom (see my last post) nor unfortunately did I spend the summer sitting on a beach drinking ridiculously named but reassuringly expensive cocktails. I’m back blogging again now though and thought it might be worth giving my verdict on a few things that have been going on over the summer.
Google +
Firstly I suppose I should say something about Google +. I like the interface but I absolutely hate the ridiculous bandwagon-jumping link baiting hype that has accompanied it. The Quora stuff at the beginning of the year was bad enough but some of the complete rubbish that has been written about Google + (some of it recruitment related) is really clouding the water when it comes to any actual usefulness the platform might have. Yes Google+ does have some nice functionality but if that is your USP then it is easily copied. This is exactly what Facebook has done in the last week or so and in so doing has graphically illustrated that functionality alone will never make Google+ a Facebook killer.
Google’s actual USPs are its reach into the Gmail user base and an implied role in SEO. This it what has driven its growth and is also why there is very little content and engagement on there. At the end of the day while people may join multiple networks they will only invest their time in places where their friends / target audience hang out. Google+ might get some traction in certain niches in the short term but will take a very long time to go mainstream, if indeed it ever does
My Verdict – Relentlessly overhyped, will have relevance moving forward but it is too early to say what that will be
Be Known
I know that I promised an in-depth review in my last post and I’m sorry if I’m disappointing anyone by not doing one. While I still think this is an incredibly significant move by Monster there really isn’t very much to review at the moment. In some ways I think the situation is similar to Google+, lots of people are joining, with Monster leveraging its enormous existing audience to drive this, but there is very little actually going on.
The “commercial talent community” space is an interesting and evolving one but platforms like BeKnown and Branchout have yet to prove that users join for any other reason than to look at job postings. As it stands BeKnown is just another platform for job distribution and little else. That said though its mention (albeit just on a slide) in the recent F8 conference and partnership with Facebook to be one of the first new social apps could be very interesting indeed!
My Verdict – A Red Herring for now but watch this space!
The LinkedIn Apply Button
I’ve blogged about this before but it seems that lots of people got distracted by a summer long argument about the “death of the CV” that was quite frankly pointless. I really wish a lot of this black or white 140 characters powered thinking would just go away. Ninety percent of the time in has no foundation in the current realities employers are facing.
In an attempt to get closer to the reality of the situation I spoke to LinkedIn’s EMEA Marketing Director, Laurence Bret-Stern, earlier in September. When I asked her about the CV vs Profile debate she pointed out that thousands of companies have already voted with their feet and have installed the LinkedIn apply button! She also intriguingly hinted that there was much more to come as LinkedIn becomes an ever more open platform to “connect professionals with opportunities more efficiently and effectively”
I really feel this is the most under commented on story from the whole summer. Not only has LinkedIn launched an apply button but a significant number employers are now actively using it which, despite their user growth, is not an achievement Google+ or BeKnown can currently match.
My Verdict – The game changer of the summer and I’m amazed no one seems to have noticed!
Finally it would seem that one of the major job boards has blinked and properly joined the social recruiting revolution. Monster pre launched a Facebook recruiting network called BeKnown this morning and on first glance it certainly isn’t a token effort. It looks like a very serious play to get into the Facebook recruitment space, a market that has been taking off recently with some interesting successes in terms of both audience growth and client case studies from companies such as Work4labs and dare I say it Branchout.
Monster’s strategy seems to be driven by a desire to capitalise on a differing audience between Facebook and LinkedIn and there is a great blog post here that goes into this in much more detail. This really isn’t surprising, as despite robust denials to the contrary, LinkedIn’s massive growth and significant monetisation of the professional network recruiting market has been a major concern for many job boards.
Inevitably I’m sure today’s launch will see the old arguments about people not wanting to use Facebook to find a new job being reiterated, particularly here in the UK. As I’ve always said though social and professional networks are just platforms and the way people use them varies massively from person to person and in recruitment terms from industry to industry. I’m currently researching Facebook recruitment case studies at the moment and there are enough out there and enough interest from the audience for Monster’s move to be a sensible one.
So is BeKnown any good and will it work? Well on first glance there is a lot I like about it but I’ll do a proper review after I’ve seen Monster on Tuesday to find out more. It is very early days though and it would be churlish to predict any kind of success at this point. Regardless of the eventual outcome though Monster have shown they understand more about social recruiting than I gave them credit for and if I was one of their traditional competitors I’d be watching BeKnown with a great deal of interest!
Well know recruiting legend Matthew Jeffery caused a bit of a stir last week when he published his vision for Recruitment 3.0. A highly abridged version appear here on ERE but it doesn’t do much justice to the full version of the article which was published in the subscription only Journal of Corporate Recruiting Leadership. To me it is one of the best blueprints I’ve read for the future of recruitment.
So if you want to know more and want to know how to get hold of a copy of the full version of the article I suggest you watch the interview below!
About three years ago a wrote a post with the above title on the Digital Recruiting blog. You can read it here. Just to give some context, at the time LinkedIn had only just hit 1 million members in the UK and it was nowhere near as well known as it is today! Lots of people have also said the same thing with this excellent post from Hung Lee being just one example of this kind of thinking
I’ve just spotted this post on Mashable a part of which I’ve pasted in below
LinkedIn will launch a button for employers’ websites called “Apply With LinkedIn” that allows job candidates to submit their LinkedIn profiles as resumes, according to a report.
Twitter and Google have both launched new buttons this week, and now it seems LinkedIn will also introduce a new way for third-party sites to integrate its services as well.
A “source briefed on the feature” told GigaOm that the new feature, which will be displayed alongside job descriptions on partner sites, will launch later this month.
Aside from making it easier for candidates to apply for jobs, the plugin uses applicants’ data to automatically sort candidates for the employer. If a company wants more than a LinkedIn profile to vet candidates, it can use additional questions from a template (i.e. Are you willing to relocate?), add customized questions or request a cover letter. Submissions can be sent to an email address, a URL or JavaScript callback.
So definitely time to reopen the debate, what do people think? Will it catch on? Will recruiters be prepared to move with the technology or do old habits just not die? Will this effect the way people write their LinkedIn profiles and in so doing reduce its power as a non recruitment networking tool? What does this mean for Job Boards?
So many questions and I’m sure lots of opinions to go with them. There is one thing I’m sure of though, if it happens as reported this is a very significant move!
Graduate recruitment has always been of great professional interest to me, in fact my first ever digital recruitment project was creating the strategy and project managing the build for Siemens first ever graduate recruitment site in 1999. What has always frustrated me though is the lack of progressive thinking from many employers in their approach to recruiting graduates. Uptake of new technologies has, with a few notable exceptions, always been incredibly slow and in my opinion much of the overall thinking that goes into corporate graduate recruiting strategies is outdated and in danger of fast becoming irrelevant. A bold sweeping statement I know but let me explain what I mean.
A few months ago I was at a conference and asked two graduate recruitment managers from two very well known blue chips why they only focused their recruitment efforts on a small number of specific universities and how they choose these institutions in the first place. The first graduate recruiter told me that they only wanted the best graduates so focused only on the best universities. So far perhaps so logical, however when I pressed the point and asked what criteria they used for selecting which universities were the best, I was told that they didn’t have any criteria they just targeted the same universities every year because they were ones they always target. The second graduate recruiter gave pretty much the same answer but at least added some slightly more enlightened insight by saying they would like to broaden their number of target institutions but were worried about diluting their brand by not being able to maintain the same level of high quality, high touch campus presence.
I can understand why the target institution thinking was important even in the recent past. With so many universities and students out there and graduate recruiters relying on traditional communication strategies, it was important for them to build these kinds of filters into the process to maximize their resources in order to get the best results. However things change and behaviors should evolve.
In Clay Shirky’s excellent book Cognitive Surplus he describes how human beings are often forced to take on board behaviors that can become the established way of doing things but are actually unnatural to the brain and quickly change when technology develops to replace them. His example is remembering phone numbers and although all of us over a certain age developed strategies for remembering lots of these long numbers, we quickly abandoned them when mobile phone address books became ubiquitous. I feel very strongly that this kind of shift needs to happen in the minds of graduate recruiters. The old filters, strategies and ways of doing things need to change quickly as there are two major forces that are dictating the need for huge change in the future.
The first of these is the market itself. With the onset of £9000 tuition fees and the current high levels of graduate unemployment, it is inevitable that companies should be thinking about their future talent strategies in a different way. If employers still want to attract the best young talent in the years to come targeting the same old universities with the same old methods isn’t the way forward. The people who can afford to go on to further study in the future are likely to prioritise proximity, affordability and flexibility as key criteria in their choice of institution rather than previous reputation. That is if they decide to go to University at all! There will be a massive fragmentation in the market and I don’t believe using the strategic shortcut of targeting specific institutions is going to deliver the required results.
The second force driving the future is the ways in which the social web and social technologies are enhancing the way people communicate. I recently did some work for one of the more forward thinking graduate employers and what became really clear quickly is that today’s students are keen to enter into a relationship with potential employers early if there some kind of payoff for them (this doesn’t have to necessarily be an eventual job offer either). They also have a genuine desire to self organise and support each other in their job hunt. Add in the fact that they are most connected generation on the planet and it is fairly clear that the traditional graduate brochures, posters and flat websites aren’t going to provide the collaborative brand experience they are looking for.
I think this all points to a clear view of the future and if employers think about this strategically they can actually offset these forces against each other. Fragmentation in the geographic distribution of talent isn’t as much of a problem if companies have a properly thought out social engagement strategy. I believe that finally we have the basis for employers to provide the same high quality person-to-person experience online as they have done on campus in the past. The social web offers the chance of one-to-many and peer-to-peer dialogues in a way that the “virtual careers fairs” of the past never could.
It’s great to see some brands already experimenting with this and I’ve previously blogged about some great work from Unilever here and Deloitte here. However more employers need to be looking at this area closely. There is a learning curve to go through and I wholeheartedly believe that the first movers now will be securing the best talent for years to come. Whatever happens though it surely must be time to finally kill off the graduate brochure once and for all!
I’ve had a lot of feedback on my recent mobile recruiting post and I’m going to write a proper follow up pretty soon to collate some of these views as well as the additional thinking I’ve been doing. In meantime though one interesting by-product has been a couple of invitations to review some new apps in the space. I’m not normally a review type blogger but I thought I would make an exception as I have such a big interest in everything that is happening in mobile recruitment.
Having already taken a look at employers and the iPhone with a review of the PepsiCo iPhone app for the Mobile Recruiting News site, I thought I should turn my attention to Job Boards and the iPad. So I accepted the invitation from Monster to take a look at their new iPad app, which launches this week.
I have to say that I was quite cynical. I really feel strongly that app based recruitment has to integrate with the features of the device it has been made for. If it doesn’t then I don’t see the point of using an app when an appropriately optimized web site would do the same thing. So the main question for me was going to be whether Monster’s app made the most of unique environment of the iPad.
So what did I think? Well I was pleasantly surprised! The first thing that strikes you when opening the app is the importance Monster has placed on user centered design. The app not only looks great but is also incredibly user friendly in terms of how the information scrolls and presents itself perfectly for the iPad’s screen size.
At this point it is worth pointing out that to get the full benefit of the app you need log in and you can do this either via an existing Monster account or one you can create on the iPad itself. Personally I don’t have an issue with this and I’m not sure many users would either. Logging in and registering with an app is pretty much the norm these days if there is a high value information exchange taking place.
Once logged in you can do pretty much everything you can do on the Monster site with the added benefit of geo-location based job searching. You can’t change your stored CVs but you can create custom cover letters and in most cases apply for a job directly from the app.
Mobile recruitment still has a very long way to go and often runs the risk of being either tokenistic or faddish in terms of implementation. What I like about the Monster iPad app is that it delivers an experience that I think iPad users will really appreciate as being unique to their device. Monster hasn’t tried to over complicate things and I think as a first effort it works really well.
Perfect for conducting a job hunt while sitting in a coffee shop away from prying eyes and snooping IT departments in the office!
Well done to Monster for putting the user first and I’ll be very interested to see how the other job boards respond
Well it’s been quite a year for live events so far, climaxing with the excellent TRU London a couple of weeks back. I’m not going to write anything more about TRU as there are already so many excellent blog posts out there, you can see most of them aggregated here.
During the recent Social Media Week I gave a brief presentation in which I looked at some of the emerging characteristics and definitions of social recruiting. I first tried to define the term 18 months or so ago and wanted to revisit my thoughts based on what I was seeing in the marketplace now.
The presentation was actually filmed and I’ve embedded it below but I thought it was also worth summarizing the key points for those of you who don’t have a spare 14 minutes to watch the full video!
Social Recruiting is a concept not a defined technique
This is a really key point for me. Social Recruiting isn’t a clearly defined approach or set of tactics it is a concept and set of ideas loosely based on using the social parts of the web for talent attraction and recruitment. This sounds fairly straightforward but it can actually be quite difficult to grasp in practice. I’m forever seeing people debating and arguing about “social recruiting” and it will often turn out that the source of their conflicting opinions is the fact they are actually both talking about completely different things!
So what are employers actually doing in this space? Well based on what I’ve seen from companies so far, “social recruiting” activity seems to be falling broadly into these three categories.
Push
The most visible approaches are, I would argue, just old fashioned web 1.0 tactics that involve pushing job postings and other content into social channels to take advantage both of the large audience and any possible viral effect. This could include everything from broadcasting jobs via Twitter to running more structured digital recruitment advertising in Facebook. Purists might scoff that companies are missing the point and that this isn’t what social media should be about but this is counter balanced by the successes many advertisers and “broadcasters” are achieving. Either way though the quality of content and thought behind the output needs to improve considerably if any of their current success is to continue.
Pull
If Push looks a bit like advertising then pull looks very much like good old fashioned recruiting. As well as being many other things, LinkedIn is the biggest user generated database of talent anywhere in the world and as such has given many employers the platform to really move forward with their direct sourcing strategy. In a recruitment market where it is hard to persuade top talent to make a move and recruiters are often inundated with response to their traditional digital talent attraction methods, social sourcing has offered the opportunity to advertise less and engage more with the right people at the right time on a one to one basis.
Genuinely Social
While push and pull tactics certainly seem to be both valid and successful, I can’t help but feel though that employers who are not extending their activity to genuinely social conversational based methods, are missing out on the true power of social media. Also as employer reputation and brand become ever more important, taking part in “the conversation” will become vital.
Here are some of the areas where I’m seeing companies being genuinely social.
Peer to Peer Recruitment
A key area that social really enables. Allows companies to use their own employees as brand advocates and give potential hires a unique perspective into the culture of the area of the company they are thinking of joining
Referral Schemes
I’ve written about these before here and here. Most recruitment has always come from referrals. Difficult to do but once employers can find effective ways of extending their referral schemes to properly tap into the digital social and professional graphs of their employees, this will be huge
Talent Communities
There is currently lots of debate about whether some of these are proper communities or are actually just socially sourced lists of names. Where ever the thinking goes though there will definitely be a role for the genuine community in certain sectors of the marketplace, especially in areas like graduate recruitment
Reputation and Brand
Not necessarily a specific recruitment tactic but nevertheless incredibly important strategically. Somewhere a conversation is taking place that will effect your reputation as an employer. It could be positive it could be negative but the key question companies should be asking themselves is “do we know about it?” and “are we influencing it?”
The video of my presentation and the short accompanying slide deck are embedded below:
