Michael Specht

ATC Social Media Event

Yesterday was the first joint ATC/Inspecht event looking specifically at the usage of social media in recruitment. My personal opinion is that overall the day was a great success, although we will wait for the formal feedback from participants to know their feelings. Here are some of my thoughts and observations.

Having over 130 people in a room designed for 120 is a little cramped, but that is what happens when you sell out an event.
A lot of people knew very little about social media in general, let alone how they could be using it as part of their day to day work.
80% of the participants were internal recruiters or consultants, very few agencies were represented.
Mark Pesce is always a great speaker.
There was lots of good discussion on Twitter.
E&Y are doing some very good things.
Atlassian as always have their finger on the pulse of their community.
People are very confused about how to include social media as part of their recruitment strategy.
There is a lot of concern about the legal and management issues of social media in the work place.
Job boards are not going away anytime soon.
We need to really start to promote Enterprise 2.0 as part of talent management strategies

We will be pulling together as many of the presentations as possible and make them available on the conference site. Also all sessions were captured on video once the videos are edited they will be posted online.

Here are a couple of blogs post I have found discussing the event:

A final note, we are talking about a bigger and better event for 2010 so watch this space.

What’s next with social recruiting

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.

Twitter Lists for All

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:

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.

Talent Management Power Blog?

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.

Crowdsourcing promotions?

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.

Some unrelated thoughts

The famous Web 2.0 Summit wrapped up late last week with lots and lots of product announcements and more news stories than I could ever hope to digest. (Not helped by the fact that I have been sick for about 4 days now.)

Anyway here are a few summary items:

If teens are confused by Twitter but love Facebook what does that tell us? Could it be the nature of the communication, to quote the NY Times:

“Many people use it for professional purposes — keeping connected with industry contacts and following news,” said Evan Williams, Twitter’s co-founder and chief executive. “Because it’s a one-to-many network and most of the content is public, it works for this better than a social network that’s optimized for friend communication.”

The iPhone is heading towards being the most successful gadget ever.
Tim Berners-Lee tells us the biggest threat to keeping the Web open is large companies or governments. Also he is not sold on cloud computing.
Both Google and Microsoft have got into the real time search game, by indexing Twitter with Microsoft including Facebook updates.
But could Google’s social search be the killer search app?

Yes all of these announcements and trends are great except the most interesting thing for me happened before the conference even started.

Web Squared.

With both Read Write Web and ZD Net providing some good coverage. Basically Web Squared is about the intersection of social web technologies with the emerging trend of real world objects connected to the Internet in some fashion, aka Internet of Things and with “Shadow Information“.

To quote Tim O’Reilly and John Battelle:

Collective intelligence applications are no longer being driven solely by humans typing on keyboards but, increasingly, by sensors. Our phones and cameras are being turned into eyes and ears for applications; motion and location sensors tell where we are, what we’re looking at, and how fast we’re moving. Data is being collected, presented, and acted upon in real time. The scale of participation has increased by orders of magnitude.

So to pull this rambling post to an end I ask this simple question.

Given corporations missed Web 2.0, will they miss Web Squared (or what ever it is called)?

I suspect there will be more on this topic.

It’s all about the message

A lack of clear communication is cited as a common cause of many relationships failures, be they personal or professional.

Many a study has shown that clearly communicating the employment deal up front is a critical first step in having an engaged employee.

This should be obvious, no one likes to buy a product only to find out that the advertising misled us. If you have not been watching The Apprentice Australia, spend a moment and watch the video below, skip to 3:30 and see what one of Australia’s top businessmen thinks of misleading advertising. Even if it is slightly grey.

Which is why if an employee is sold a deal that does not meet the marketing you are battling up hill to reengage them!

Make sure your job ad, career web site and interview process does not sell something that is not.

While employee testimonials are a great way to provide insight into what it is like to work for your organisation, they tend to be staged, not to mislead but to put forward the best image. Another idea, let your employees blog. Employees who blog openly and honestly will allow prospective employees to see what it is really like in your workplace.

54 Percent of Companies Have Bad Management

These types of articles really really get me going.

54% of Companies Ban …

I’m sorry but I am not surprised that 77% of employees who had access to Facebook used it during the work day! Ok how many logged onto personal email accounts, made a personal phone call, used their personal mobile phone, had some non-work related discussion in the kitchen while getting a coffee.

Given that 63% of Australian employees are not full engaged at work it is not surprising that they are looking for a distraction. Close down Facebook, Twitter, MySpace whatever you will not see an increase in productivity.

We know from academic research that companies that engage their workforce perform better. Research from Alex Edmans, a business professor from Whartons School, has shown that engaged employees do in fact drive company performance. He looked at Fortune magazine’s list of “100 Best Companies to Work for in America”and found that an annually rebalanced portfolio returned 14% between 1998 – 2005 compared to the market in general of only 6%.

So let’s ignore the research found that employees who “surf the Internet at work” are 9% more productive than those that don’t. Or the productivity benefits of engaged employees? Or the real life statements from employees of Australia’s largest employers.

If your employees are spending too much time using social media I would question do you have a management problem or a technical problem?

ATC Social Media Conference

We are coming to the end of the early bird discount period for the joint event between Inspecht and ATC Social Media: A Recruitment Revolution. while the early bird discount is good, register 2 or more delegates and you get an even better deal.

So why attend?

Listen to Australian case studies from Ernst & Young and Atlassian
Hear from Futurist Mark Pesce
Participate in workshops on social recruiting strategies, digital branding and the use of social networking for sourcing
Watch the debate between Stephen Collins and Jake Andrews, from SEEK, on “Do you need a job board when you have social networking?”
Put forward your own ideas and thought in the World Cafe session
Listen and interact with your peers in the special unconference session where you get to control the agenda

This event was inspired by the ERE Social Recruiting Summit so I caught up with Paul Jacobs from Tribe HQ a New Zealander who attended the event with me to find out why he trekked all the way from Wellington New Zealand to San Francisco. (These are definitely NOT Oscar winning performances but we had fun.)

Finally if you are a member of Recruitment 2.0 APAC you could win a free ticket to attend