Michael Specht

If you have been following this blog for a while you would know that I am always looking for the next thing. I have been doing the same thing with using social media in business.

Social Recruiting has a lot of  buzz at the moment. How do I know there is a buzz, well 200+ people attended the Social Recruiting Summit in New York City last week, we have almost a full house at the ATC Social Media event, RecruitTech 2009 had social media as a primary theme.

But let us take a step back, for most social recruiting is just about using social media as another marketing channel. A terrible waste in my eyes.

My definition of social recruiting is:

• Using social media tools as part of the recruiting process
• Building a community of potential candidates
• Engaging with candidates as people not numbers

From an employer’s perspective recruitment is about fueling organisational growth, renewal, building the most efficient and sustainable business. This can only be done through personal relationships and cultural fit. (Yes there is a bit of sales and marketing in the mix but that is just attraction, the rest of the process is all personal.)

This brings me to Doc Searls’s recent blog post “Beyond Social Media“. If you do not know Doc Searls you should, also you should read the book he co-authors 10 years ago, Cluetrain. In the post Doc raises several very good points.

• Twitter is now as necessary to tweeting as Google is to search. It’s a public activity under private control.
• Most other popular activities online are not owned by anyone, they are public.
• Personal and social go hand-in-hand, but the latter builds on the former.
• Today in the digital world we still have very few personal tools that work only for us, are under personal control
• Individually-empowered customers are the ultimate greenfield for business and culture.
• What we’re not doing because “social” everything is such a bubble of buzz right now

Are we really finally about to enter the age of Brand You or is it another 10 years away? If the individual is now the key to business and culture what does that mean for:

• The recruitment process?
• The HR Management practices in your average corporation?

I hear recruiters complaining they do not have time to develop relationships with candidates or use Twitter etc.  But what happens when the candidates are developing that relationship with a potential hiring manager or potential peer? Where do recruiters add value in this transaction?

For HR the issue is just as difficult. When employees view themselves as individuals who own the ideas, conversation and intentions to create the “business”. How do structured learning and development programs remain valid in an era of so much open information? How do you keep employees engaged? How does that traditional compensation plan survive?

I could go on, but I hope you get the picture. So if what Doc Searls is saying, “individually-empowered customers are the ultimate greenfield for business and culture”, is true then the companies who first leverage these concepts will be the ones we are talking about in 5 years time. Just as recruiters now marvel at Microsoft and the like who all started on their paths in around 2005.

Popularity: 1% [?]

Earlier this week Twitter and LinkedIn announced a partnership whereby you can now share updates between both services. Given that according to Pew Internet & American Life Project a total of 19% of American online adults have posted a status update this change is significant.

Firstly it will give all those professionals on LinkedIn who feel they do not have time for Twitter a chance to create a Twitter presence that complements their LinkedIn profile.

Second Twitter users who want to provide their professional LinkedIn profile with a bit of fresh content can do so. But this is the trick.

Most people with a LinkedIn profile want to keep it professional, well the folks at LinkedIn and Twitter have thought of this.

You can set up the integration so only Tweets with the hashtag #in appear on your LinkedIn profile.

All of this new content on both platforms is a gold mine for Recruiters and Employers.

How?

Many people keep their LinkedIn profile a little restricted from a public point of view, with their status updates appearing in Twitter you can now get a better view on what they are doing. But it is the integration from Twitter to LinkedIn which has the most potential. If people are using LinkedIn as their digital resume, tweets appearing alongside their professional background will allow recruiters and employers to gain a far greater understanding of a candidate.

Popularity: 1% [?]

For the last couple of months Twitter has been testing out a new feature, Lists, and as of yesterday Lists were available to all users. So what is a list?

Anyone can curate and publish lists, so if you have an idea for one, just click “New list” in the sidebar of your Twitter account and you’re on your way. Add accounts to a list using the “Lists” drop drown on a profile page. We believe Lists will be a new discovery mechanism for great tweets and accounts.

The ability to group Twitter accounts into personalised but meaningful groups that provide you a real time view on what this collection of accounts is doing. In typical Twitter style they have provided us with an open API so we can build our own applications via the Lists API.

Lists have several features that make them very interesting:

• Want to keep up with lots of different people but do not want your main timeline cluttered with noise, create a List
• What to follow some high volume feeds, create a List
• Want to create a list of people for new Twitter users to follow
• Create a list of Twitter users from your company, maybe a list of public officers
• Lists can be public or private, so create a private list of your family/friends
• Create a list about anything!

But where things get really exciting is with the API. Where you can create lists, see what lists a particular user is on, show the timeline for a list, add accounts to a list, review accounts on a list, find out who has subscribe to your list with more to come.

Some example lists:

• http://listorious.com/JobHuntOrg/employers-recruiting
• http://twitter.com/Techonomics1/career-hr-recruiter
• http://twitter.com/pauljacobs4real/recruitment-rebels
• http://twitter.com/ThomasShaw/jobboards-industry
• http://twitter.com/smange/aussie-news
• http://twitter.com/recruitingblogs/community
• http://twitter.com/CincyRecruiter/hr-recruiting-pros

Want to find more lists? Check out Listorious. Listorious also allows you to recommend to the list curator a Twitter account that should be added to their list.

Popularity: 2% [?]

Yes it seems I have risen to the ranks of a power blog for the first time. Yep I appeared today on the Fistful of Talent/HR Capitalist’s 5th listing of the top 30 blogs on talent management.

Previous listing have been judged by humans to determine if a blog was to be included. This time the selection process was a little different. They used HubSpot’s Website Grader tool. To quote FOT:

They evaluate “marketing effectiveness” which is based on a proprietary algorithm that blends over 50 different variables including search engine data, traffic, backlinks, etc.  Now we realize, this takes out of the equation the human factor, the FOT factor. But this is pretty black and white, wouldn’t you say? And since traffic is a factor in the website grading… let’s hope trust that good content is what drives great blogs with high traffic.

Anyway I scrapped in at number 29 on the list, amongst some very impressive names, head over to FOT and check out the list.

Popularity: 2% [?]

I am a firm believer in the whole “Wisdom of Crowds” process so this article in The Age today made me think a bit. Austereo, Australia radio network, had teamed up with Jelli a US network to provide Australians with the first 24 hour a day crowdsourced radio show. Basically listeners go online to vote on what they will hear next, with the next song being determined only 2 seconds before the end of the current one.

This got me thinking.

Could an organisation crowdsource promotions, or placements?

Yes I know this might upset some of my readers but think about it most employees already know who should get the job so why not let them decide in an anonymous manner?

Innovative organisations could use other influencing factors based on shadow information.

Popularity: 2% [?]