More on employee communications

I’m sure this has been mentioned last week by someone, I just can’t remember, so here goes again.

Further to my last post what happens when Mary from accounts posts her video on Google, while their terms and service prohibit pornography/obscene material there is still a large amount of content that really Mary probably does not want her colleagues in the office seeing?

What will happen to bandwidth usage in the office, will IT now have to ban certain file types, what impact will that have on the legitimate work?

Just more things to consider.

Blogging policies

Lori Dorn points to an interesting piece by Niall Kennedy (from Technorati) on blogging policies and how employers in his mind are not looking broader enough at their policies.

Naill touches on the different disruptive technologies that are entering the workplace, blogs, cameraphones, IM, P2P, CD/DVD writers etc. Each of these “new” technologies (I say “new” as they are not really new it is just that they are now becoming mainstream) has the potential for good and evil the trick is we all need to learn how to use them for good. Most of us know that giving a tip to a mate over a few drinks that your company is about to announce something good/bad and if they act quickly they could make some money is bad. How different is that to tapping out the same tip on your blog, even anonymously, or via IM, email etc? Do employees understand that everything is tracked, have we told them? Do you even know that this is the case?

What about snapping a picture of the office and placing it on Flickr? Many companies ban camera’s on site for fear of trade secrets being photographed, does this mean we all now need to check our phones at the door? Or with the rise in DVD writers can employees now walk out the door with the payroll system on a single DVD?

As I said all of these technologies can be used for good or evil, we need to educate ourselves, management and employees on how to balance the good, bad and the ugly of each technology. The good can be seen when blogs help team/workplace communication, cameraphones assist in product development or marketing, IM enables collaboration across locations, P2P rapidly allows documents to move around the organisation, etc. Possible solutions are for induction courses to inform our employees on what is appropriate for each organisation, specific courses for our existing employees we did this when email and PCs were introduced.

Lots to think about for a Monday morning.

Workflow vs HRMS

Dubs from the HR Technology Discussion board provides a great primer on workflow.

As Dubs said workflow in HR is HUGE, I could not agree more. The ROI that can be demonstrated by an effective workflow solution can pay for itself very very quickly. It does not even need to be a top of the line (complex) implementation to get major benefits.

Dubs describes in his second example agent based computing, and according the SAP one of the next big things. Agent based computing is a very broad area and will impact all areas of the business, including HR.

I Dubs third example where disparate systems are interacting with each other you are starting to move into full cross process automation. Typically these scenarios have been implemented by the use of a message based architecture. In the late 90s there was a big movement towards a standard called CORBA, however this proved very costly to implement. In the last couple of years the growth in web services and XML has meant that we are getting closer to applications being able to communicate with each other.

The only downside with all of this technology is you must have your processes clearly defined and consistently applied across the enterprise. While this is not too hard in a single legislative environment the more sets of legislations and cultures that need to be included the more complex and costly things get. Very very few organisations have been able to effectively implement even relatively simple processes such as leave requests across different countries. You need to have a very good understanding of what you are trying to achieve and be able to document the scope in a clear manner, otherwise your projects have a very high chance of failure. The other very important aspect of workflow is testing. Testing of workflow solutions can be difficult and requires a slightly different approach. For example many workflow systems allow for escalation rules to be built into the process, ie when a manager does not action a task it gets escalated via the workflow to another manager. If the escalation time frame is set to 5 days, you need to ensure your tests take this into account and the result might be longer test cycles.

Blog anonymously

(Via blog*on*nymity)

The EFF have published an interesting item on how to blog anonymously. The post has some good tips and some not so good ones, many are also only relevant if you live in the US which while might be good for a lot of bloggers does not cut it for the rest of us.

Again not being an IR/ER expert I do wonder about these sorts of things, does actively trying to hide your blog when you know the content might get you fired actually makes things worse if you do get caught? I guess it would depend on your local legal environment.

A final thought, it is very hard (if not impossible) to really be anonymous in the internet. So it is easier to just “Be Smart”!

Quick Jobster Review

Just a quick post before I leave for work. Yesterday I had lunch with Dave Lefkow from Jobster who was in Australia on evangelising-type trip, and thanks again to Dave for picking up the tab.

After lunch we sat at a bar in Southbank and he gave me a quick demo of the product. Unfortunately the demo was just Flash-based as we had no WiFi, when will be get more Wife spots in Australia? From what I saw the tool is very easy to use and solves a simple but complex problem for recruiters. While a smart recruiter could probably run similar referral campaigns themselves, Jobster gives you so much more.

They have based the product on several similar ideas, social networks, employee referrals and the fact that many times your best candidate comes from a recommendation, from here the tool builds on this base to provide recruiters (both internal and external) a fantastic framework/baseline for to be build and manage referral campaigns. On top of this they provide further features/reports for recruiters to understand where leads are coming from ie referrals or recommendations and to understand how many degrees of separation exist between each lead.

The web interface is clear and easy to navigate once you have had a bit of training. You can see at each set of the process where your campaign is up to, how many people have received it and how many people have registered. Each time someone registers they end up in your talent base, and such they might match a job you have in the future. Jobster have worked very hard to reduce the amount of information you need to collect about a person before they end up in the talent pool. Another nice feature is Outlook integration, which provides an easy mechanism for recruiters to select their initial contacts for the campaign.

Reporting is a little light however as Dave explained they wanted to get people using the tool and then with customer feedback understand what was needed. Having said this the reports I saw were useful and informative about your campaigns.

Their pricing model is also very sensible and would appeal to most corporate recruiters.

My only concern is around the implementation and change management of such a tool, another item confirm by Dave as being recognised by Jobster. To this end they have begun to find top recruiters and recommend deploying only to a limited set of people so that the system gets success before total deployment within an organisation. This is a very sensible approach and if there are issues down the track it shows that it was not the tool, more the process and practices used by the other recruiters.

In the end if you have hard to fill positions and people who might fill those positions have email then you would find a benefit from using Jobster.

More on dot jobs.

There have been several posts over the last 48 hours in response to the new dot jobs domain on both sides of the argument.

John Sumser from The Electronic Recruiting News provides a balanced view of the new domain and in the end determines that then new domain will not help job seekers. Gerry Crispin has a slightly different view on The CareerXroads, which is not surprising as Gerry was a advocate of the new domain from the beginning. Joel Cheesman provides a fantastic top 10 thoughts on the new domain as well.

There seems to be agreement that the main winners from all of this are SHRM and EmployMedia, as there is going to be the traditional land grab as we all rush to get our domains. Jason wants recruiting.job, in reading Gerry’s post he views that Jason won’t get it, but he should. Gerry also mentions we won’t be seeing domains like blow.jobs, but what about Blow Off in the UK at http://www.blow.co.uk/, they might want blow.jobs I can’t see why but there is the possibility. This land grab will result in more money going to EmployMedia, SHRM and ICANN.

Let’s look at the whole global aspect of the new domain. Most US based organisations struggle to provide consistent recruiting approaches to all countries around the globe. Look at Microsoft as a good example. The corporate careers site is at http://www.microsoft.com/careers, the Australian/New Zealand site is at http://www.microsoft.com/australia/careers/. Are we going to end up with microsoft.jobs and microsoft.jobs/australia or microsoft.jobs.au? How are the subsidiaries going to be catered for? Another issue, take National Australia Bank one of the largest banks in Australia have the domain national.com.au, however if you look at national.com you end up at National Semiconductors in the US, so who should have national.jobs? Are job seekers going to have to learn new domains just to see the careers site, nationalaustraliabank.jobs? How will SHRM clearly and evenly promote this new domain around the globe, or will they promote it first to their members, primarily US based and then to people outside of the US as an after thought? Maybe they will need to partnership with similar groups like AHRI around the globe.

Then there are the technical issues. As John mentioned any tech person can point microsoft.jobs to http://www.microsoft.com/careers, so where is the value? Joel brings up the idea of the registration process needing to be very easy for non-technical people. If only a qualified candidate can apply, ie someone who complies with the same code of conduct as SHRM members, then it will have to be very easy because many HR people are still trying to come to terms with technology as it is. Joel also talks about search engines and the waiting they give, the quality of the data so that .jobs does not end up like .net. There is speculation that .jobs will mean organisations will want to post jobs firstly to their own sites so job seekers can find them quickly. I feel this is missing the take up of vertical search with sites like Indeed, however dot jobs will make things much easier for Indeed and others to join the market place.

Now if these items, and others, can be addressed then dot jobs might have value to add in the internet, unlike dot tv. EmployMedia and SHRM could learn a thing of two from how the .com.au domains have been handed out, ie you must provide a valid government identifier to show that you are a valid business. But even this process has been full of headaches around trademarks, brands and other identifiable attributes that companies have wanted to use preceding the .com.au.