Are your offer letters keepsakes?

Something I get asked a lot is “How does social media impact the HR department?”

There are lots of ways, including areas that crosses into the recruiting; attraction, branding, onboarding and closing the deal.

Do your offer letters engage future employees like this?

All kidding aside, any company that can give this much attention to detail just in their HR paperwork should be fun to work for.  I am looking forward to this new adventure.

How about something someone would never throw out?

I don’t think I’ll ever throw this out. It’s a keepsake that reminds me of the major move I made from Toronto to San Francisco and all the sacrifices made and opportunities gained.

Or make your experienced hire feel “like a kid on Christmas morning”?

Enter the Apple Job Offer.
ioffer

(Via Glyph)

These are the feeling expressed by Glyph about his current Apple job offer and Justin Reid’s historical offer.

Just imagine how engaged your new employees will be if they feel proud enough to photograph your paperwork and describe the “tension on the hinge of the folder is perfect: not too tense, not too loose”! Let’s not over look the complete alignment of the above offer packages to the corporate culture of Apple.

Unfortunately onboarding processes are a frequently overlooked part of both recruitment and HR processes.

Jobvite Source: Social Recruiting for All

Late last week Jobvite, who 3 weeks ago secured another $8.25 million in series B funding, launched their latest product Jobvite Source. A product that allows any company to source candidates through a combination of social networks without the need of their larger ATS. Jobvite Source also allows employees to refer jobs on to their contacts across tools such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.

Effectively Jobvite Source is taking the social recruiting portion their ATS, Jobvite Hire, and making it available for any organisation to use, regardless of the ATS vendor.

Jobvite Source includes the following key features:

  • Social Networking Sourcing
  • Employee Referrals – across Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Email etc.
  • Candidate Relationship Management
  • Facebook Application

The images provided to me show a comparison searching for a “product manager” in Jobvite Source vs Google. Where as Google provides a mixture of results, Jobvite Source delivers only potential candidates. A full image was a bit large to place in the post but I uploaded it so you can view.

Other features include a metrics dashboard to show recruiters the progress of their jobs across the different networks.

PR_source_dashboards

I have requested a full demo of the product and will try and post once I have seen it.

Overall an interesting move, the full press release of the launch is available on their website. With an additional $8.25 million I will expecting some big things from Jobvite in the next 12 months.

While Jobvite Source offers lots of features, Australian vendor JobGenie can provide organisations very similar features for a small monthly fee. JobGenie also offers an open API so developers can build right on top of the JobGenie platform, a very unique offering.

Disclosures:

  • JobGenie has been a client of mine.
  • Jobvite were very accommodating of me when I was in San Francisco in June.

The Facebook Five

During my presentation yesterday on social media in the workplace at RecruitTech I spoke briefly about the “Facebook Five” and felt I would expand on my comments here.

In summary six (it was five) NSW prison officers are being threatened with being fired over comments they made on a Facebook page “Suggestion to help Big Ron save a few clams”. This was at a time when the NSW was looking to sell of prisons to save some money.

The case went before the Industrial Relations Commission (IRC) this week where the Public Service Association (PSA) filed an application asking the corrective services workers have the treats revoked. The workers are claiming that the comments were private and outside of work.

The PSA has also stated to the IRC that it intends to seek changes to the award to exclude out-of-work hours activities from being dismissible offences. The claim says:

“An employee shall not be the subject of any disciplinary action by reason of conduct that occurs outside working hours and which is intended by the employee to be private in nature”

However QUT Senior Lecturer Peter Black has commented, quite rightly, that can anything online be considered private:

There is certainly, I think an argument that it is a private conversation, however I think that probably ignores the reality of how these sorts of websites operate,

However because there is always a record kept of these sorts of conversations in an online environment, even where it is private, it is very easy for that information to get out beyond the wall.

Another interesting fact to consider is let’s define the work hours. If I answer work emails on a BlackBerry at home and then use the same device to post something on Facebook, was the post outside of work hours or not?

This case looks like it could be one begin to shape our employment laws around social media and the workplace.

RecruitTech Presentation

Today I gave a short presentation at RecruitTech in Canberra on Social Media in the workplace. The official bio was:

Many big organisations continue to block the use of social networking tools in the workplace, whilst others encourage their use.  But how much Facebook surfing and Twittering is too much?  This presentation weighs up the pros and cons of social media in the workplace and the impact of an organisation’s social media policy on its recruitment and retention.

Here are the slides from the presentation.

Social Media: Friend or Foe in the Workplacehttp://static.slidesharecdn.com/swf/ssplayer2.swf?doc=recruittechpresentation-090917184246-phpapp01&rel=0&stripped_title=social-media-friend-or-foe-in-the-workplace

Is blogging over?

Two interesting things have happened in the last 3 days.

I woke on Saturday morning to the news that Joel Cheesman, the Cheezhead site and from what I can tell brand had been purchased by Jobing. Part of this change is the blog will be no more. This news struck me as very strange, given the huge amount of effort Joel has put into Cheezhead over the last few years. I was also instantly reminded of the Jason Davis, recruiting.com and Jobster scenario which I hope does not happen to Joel.

Yesterday Brett Iredale from JobAdder announced their new recruitment product but also that he is retiring the JobAdder blog for a more integrated, communal way of interacting. Good to see some experimentation in the Australian marketplace.

So does this mean blogs are dead? Nope just they are starting to change the way they look and the way they are used by business.

Follow up on the sources of talent report

It has been an interesting week or so since Phillip and I released the sources of talent report for Australia. We have had both positive and negative feedback, which is to be expected.

Some of the commentary available online:

I would like to review some of the concerns raised over the accuracy of the data, the process we used and the outcomes.

One concern was how do you define the original source of talent. A very good queston. If an candidate sees an add on job board, then contacts an agency directly is this an agency hire or a job board?

Another concern raised was were we double counting hires? Were agencies providing information on the same candidates that employers were? Our survey did not cover this, but it is a great question, although solving this is not easy either.

Carey Eaton from Seek wold like to see us separating the tools, and resources, from the processes used by organisations.

There were also questions around should all of the organisations who participated been allowed to participate. My understanding is some people would like us to only looking at large employers, like the US report. Unfortunately in the Australian marketplace there are a huge number of employers in the sub 250 employee bracket.

To be honest I agree with most these concerns. However the fact is, we can now have conversations about these issues and work as an industry to resolve them. Generating this conversation was one of the underlying goals of the survey.

Phillip and I will be starting plans for the 2010 report while we are at RecruitTech this week in Canberra so if you have some thoughts leave a comment or drop us an email.

Sources of Talent in Australia

Back in April I had one of my many wild ideas, undertake a sources of hire survey for Australia, I mean how hard can it be?

The idea was triggered by a post from Phillip Tusing from Destination Talent so after chatting over a few days we decided to join forces and get a survey done.

The decision to do something was easier than the process.

We site up a site and grabbed a domain name, http://talentsource.com.au/, it took about 6 weeks to draw up the survey and lock in some sponsors. We ran the survey for about 5 weeks, receiving 409 completed responses. Then we started the report portion, I had thought would be easy but how wrong was I. It has taken about 6 or 7 weeks to get the report done, and I have to say without the tremendous work by Phillip it would have taken a lot longer. In fact I want to publically thank Phillip for his work in pulling the report together.

As mentioned 409 organisations of varying sizes, industry backgrounds and regional locations completed the survey. A total of 92,136 hires were recorded using seventeen identifiable sources of talent for the period July 2008 through to June 2009.

The key findings of the report include:

  1. Source of talent varies across Australia with seventeen identifiable source of talent.
  2. Job boards, in their various iterations, take a leadership role being the predominant source of talent in Australia with 29.64% of hires attributed to them.
  3. Perceptions of the most effective sources of talent by recruiters differ from the reality of where talent is sourced.
  4. Different industries use significantly different sources to find talent within Australia.
  5. The different regions of Australia also seem to source talent differently, for example in the ACT 49.70% of talent is found through internal recruiters.
  6. Referrals as sources are not as developed as expected being only the fourth most successful source at 7.57% of hires.
  7. Print media while having a reputation of an archaic channel still exists as the seventh most successful source of hires.
  8. Employers and agency recruiters differ in how they source talent with agency recruiters relying heavily on job boards.
  9. Social media is in its infancy ranking last as a source talent in Australia, with usage higher in smaller organisations.
  10. Data collection is poor with over 7% of organizations have no reliable method of tracking their source of talent.

We are also indebted to Gerry Crispin for providing a comparison to US figures and Dr Ian Williamson for his insights into retention and alumni programs.

There is a lot more in the report so go download it and have a read, we hope that the report stimulates further discussions within the HR and Recruitment industries.

Social media strategy webinar

Recruiter DailyThe folks at Recruiter Daily have asked me to do a short webinar for their readers about social media and recruitment called “Plan your social media strategy – connect, attract and recruit“. The event will be 11am September 17 and you can register online now, even if you can’t make the live event the presentation will be available.

So what will I cover?

This online tutorial, brought to you by Recruiter Daily and social media expert Michael Specht, separates the trash from the truth. You will gain a better understanding of social networking – the positives and the pitfalls – and learn how to:

  • apply the four Cs of social media – collaboration, content, connection and conversation;
  • use social media in the five phases of recruitment;
  • move from a reactive model to proactively engaging in social media;
  • measure your social recruiting success with meaningful metrics.

It should be an interesting session if I do say so myself.

If you can’t get to the session on the 17th, I will be in Canberra on the 18th at RecruitTech talking about social media in the workplace, if you can’t do either then be in Melbourne 3rd December for the combined ATC and Inspecht one day event on social media and recruitment.

(Just quietly between us I hate the term social media expert.)

Social Media: A Recruitment Revolution?

Back in June I shipped myself off to the first Social Recruiting Summit at Google HQ in San Francisco. On my return I was approached by the team from Australasian Talent Conference (Trevor Vas, Horace Chai, and Kevin Wheeler) to see if we could pull off a similar event here in Australia.

So on 3rd December in Melbourne we are bringing together some of the biggest names in recruitment and social media to participate in Social Media: A Recruitment Revolution.

The event will be like none other in Australia, combining traditional conference sessions with interactive “unconference” sessions to allow the audience to further develop the ideas and learn from industry peers.

Personally I am very excited about the speakers. We have secured Mark Pesce as our opening keynote speaker. If you do not know Mark he is an author, journalist, regular panellist on The New Inventors, and futurist. (He even has a Wikipedia page.) In addition to Mark, Margie Kwan from Ernst & Young will be presenting a case study on their use of Facebook and the we have a debate between Stephen Collins from acidlabs and Jake Andrew from SEEK on “Do you need a job board when you have social networking?”. Other topics include digital branding, social recruiting strategies, legal issues around social recruiting.

If you want to know more head over to the main site, check out the agenda and register ASAP as we have a space limitation.

Are careers website critical to success??

I was beaten to the punch by Kelly Magowan with her post yesterday as to why you need to upgrade your corporate careers site to be successful with social media. This was my flow on post from the Corporate Careers Website Report I released on Wednesday night.

However Kelly only scratched the surface of the issue.

Next, it is important to be mindful that the most likely outcome of using social media will be more traffic to your careers site. And herein lies the problem – when they get to your careers site, what happens? Hopefully they don’t take one look at it and bounce!

While right on the money social media will increase the visitors to your site the issue is a lot deeper than this. Deep integration of social media into your external HR and Recruitment practices in a manner that delivers strong ROI requires a hub.

Are your candidates lost?That hub is your careers website.

I have worked with several clients on developing a social recruiting strategy and the key to bringing all of the content together is your web site, in particular an easy to update site. One that allows you to easily add video, Twitter streams, blog content, profile recruiters/clients/candidates etc. Let’s face it, you are unlikely to have your recruitment video on YouTube go viral and by itself deliver ROI.

For employers the same is true you need a compelling careers website. One that respects, engages and informs the candidate about the employment deal you have on offer. For example only 27% of Australia’s BRW Top 200 organisations provide recruitment relevant company background information on their site. Only 32% provide detailed information on the recruitment process.

So before you run off and execute that fancy new social media strategy make sure you have the foundations in place for your hub.

Update: Direct link to the research report