Michael Specht

Excellent operational service delivery

This is the third instalment in my look at the hype around social recruiting, if you have missed them see the intro, parts 1 & 2.

HR/Recruiters should focus on ensuring their operational service delivery is excellent instead of creating unrealistic expectations that social recruiting will save them. Like any business there is no point trying to work out how to integrate Twitter, Facebook or any other fancy technology into your processes if your processes are fundamentally broken!

This excellent operational delivery includes treating candidates (and clients) as people, not as a commission. Here is a personal story of how bad third party recruiters have become in Australia. At the end of 2008 as the GFC started to really bite I had an amazing interaction with a recruiter from a well known agency.

Week 1

I was called ask if I was interested in contract SAP Project Management work. During the discussion the recruiter refused to provide the client name until they had an updated resume. I explained that they had called me because they had “found” my details in their system therefore if they wanted my resume they needed to open up. Eventually they told me the client and declined from applying as I did not like the employer. At the end of the call they asked for an updated resume, which I decided to send over.

Week 2

I was called by the same recruiter, not just agency the same person! However initially I did not recognise their name so I said nothing. The discussion was the same they had “found” my details in their system, was I interested in contract SAP Project Management work. By the end of the call I had remembered this was the same person I was speaking to last week, and they wanted an updated resume. I thought it would be fun to re-forward my original email to them as a subtle hint.

Week 3

About 4pm on Friday another blocked number called my mobile. Bingo a recruiter. Not just any recruiter my friend from the last 2 weeks who seemed to have no idea who I was! No they had “found” my details in their system, was I interested in contract SAP Project Management work and could I send an updated resume to them! I declined.

6 months earlier when there were jobs a plenty this type of interaction was very common. But in December 2008 I was shocked.

So forget about fancy technology until your processes excellent.

Organisational challenges for social recruiting

There are four major challenges facing organisations from integrating social recruiting into their business operations, again I am stealing from the Mckinsey Cloud Computing report. Before we get into them I want to remind you of my current working definition of social recruiting:

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

So what are the challenges?

Financial
Technical
Operational
Organisational

Let’s look at each in turn.

Financial

Many current approaches to social recruiting left unchecked actually increase the cost of hire and as my colleague Markus Hafner aka eskimo_sparky on Twitter said:

@mspecht I tend to agree with @trib. Many co’s also forget that using socmed poorly can damage brand plus increase cost per hire.

While the use of social media can be seen as “free” ie limited actual dollar spend there can be a massive time sink if not used in an educated manner.

Technical

The technical issues are everywhere for social recruiting. They range from data security, privacy, ability to access the services from within the firewall, integration with existing talent management systems to actually how does one use the tools.

Operational

How does the recruitment process get modified to include these new technical tools, organisational approaches and ideas? Clear management of both hiring managers and senior leaders expectations needs to be undertaken. Both from a “it’s cheap” and “it’s fast” point of view. What processes and procedures need to be modified to incorporate these new approaches?

Organisational

The overall structure of HR and recruiting functions will need to be modified to operate within a social recruiting world. What new roles need to be introduced? What roles need to be removed?

I am not setting out to answer all or any of these questions within these blog posts more just putting some thoughts out there to see what happens.

Cedar Crestone HR Systems Survey

The 12th Annual Cedar Crestone HR Systems Survey is in progress. Over the years many of my clients have participated in the survey and also used the results to define their go forward strategy. If you are in a position to participate I would highly encourage you to do so.

Not sure about the survey here is a quick run down from Aleixa Martin Cedar Crestone’s Director or Research and Analytics:

CedarCrestone is requesting participation in the CedarCrestone 2009-2010 HR Systems Survey: HR Technologies, Service Delivery Choices, and Metrics Survey, 12th Annual Edition through June 22, 2009. The survey is a comprehensive research effort designed to provide organizations with important data to plan, justify, benchmark, and execute HR technologies and to address key deployment options. The survey questionnaire is available online at www.cedarcrestone.com/hrssv3.

The 2009 HR Survey is broad in its coverage, including questions about:

Technologies to support talent management, business intelligence, service delivery, and workforce management as well as SOA and Web 2.0 innovations

Deployment options and related expenditures (on premise, software-as-a-service, hosting, business process outsourcing, etc.)

Comprehensive metrics such as employee/HR staff ratios, administrative costs per employee, links between technology adoption and financial performance, and many others

The survey collects responses from HR and IT management with knowledge of the HR technologies in use and planned, as well as those with an overview of key deployment decisions. The survey is targeted to respondents from organizations in all industries (commercial, public sector, and educational organizations) with over 500 employees.

While you are into surveys remember to take the Australian Sources of Talent survey and join over 390 Australian organisation’s who have already participated.

Google Wave and the Enterprise

With a fair bit of fanfare on May 28th Google pre-released a brand new tool/suite/ concept/framework for collaboration called Google Wave. I am not going to cover all the technical details, you can see them over at http://wave.google.com. But you do need to understand that Google Wave is actually three things all in one package.

The Google Wave product (available as a developer preview) is the web application people will use to access and edit waves. It’s an HTML 5 app, built on Google Web Toolkit. It includes a rich text editor and other functions like desktop drag-and-drop (which, for example, lets you drag a set of photos right into a wave).

Google Wave can also be considered a platform with a rich set of open APIs that allow developers to embed waves in other web services, and to build new extensions that work inside waves.

The Google Wave protocol is the underlying format for storing and the means of sharing waves, and includes the “live” concurrency control, which allows edits to be reflected instantly across users and services. The protocol is designed for open federation, such that anyone’s Wave services can interoperate with each other and with the Google Wave service. To encourage adoption of the protocol, we intend to open source the code behind Google Wave.

Think of a wave as the combination of an email and instant messaging but on steroids! Google describes wave as being equal parts document and conversation, which sounds very strange, essentially it is a fully integrated collaborative communications framework. Technically the tool is amazing; for example real time edits of a wave appear on all participants’ screens immediately and the ability to “replay” edits of a wave to see how the wave developed. The only part missing from the wave product is a VOIP client, but given that Google has open sourced the core of wave and the extremely flexible API framework a smart engineer should be able to hook one up very quickly.

Within an enterprise Google Wave, or at least the concepts behind it, have the ability to revolutionise the way people work! The flexible streamlined approach to communication and collaboration is both amazing complex and simple at the same time. For example:

Real-time foreign language translation allows everyone to easily collaborate naturally in their own language.
Real-time updates on waves allow teams to create documents wiki style at a rapid pace.
Changes that happen while you sleep can be replayed using the play back feature so you can see the context that trigger comments, suggests and ideas to be added to the Wave.
Drag and drop images, and in the future other media types, allows fast real time collaboration of prototypes and ideas.
The open API allows full integration of other products such as production schedules, or CRM tools.
The protocol allows you to federate with other organisations for collaborative purposes.

Now this revolution will not happen overnight given the massive investment organisations have made on Microsoft Exchange and Sharepoint over the last few years. So initially I would predict Google Wave being picked up by smaller organisations and freelancers who need to collaborate with different people on projects across multiple locations.

A word of caution given Google’s track record of letting services die off time will tell if Google Wave becomes the next Gmail or Google Base.

HR Technology Trends

The Future
Credit: Flickr dbilly

Last month Watson Wyatt released their 2009 HR Technology Trends Report. So I grabbed my credit card and laid down US$45 to get a copy so I could see what they had to say.

Some thoughts:

The report is very hard to compare with their 2007 HR Technology Trends Report as the format has changed.
Intranets are still the most favoured method of communicating with employees 72%, with newer technologies making an entrance such as social networking 13%, Blogs 11% and podcasts 6%.
Organisations are still use manual processes when it comes to some core areas of talent management; succession planning (53%), career development (48%) and workforce planning (55%).
However 56% of organisations are planning to increase their use of talent management technology over the next two years. With leveraging existing ERP’s being the primary approach, 29%, integrated talent management systems are next with 27%.
Across all talent management areas organisation have a higher satisfaction with external solutions than internally developed ones.
However internally developed systems have a higher satisfaction than outsourced solutions in the areas of Recruiting, Compensation Administration, Annual Pay & Bonus Delivery, Succession Planning, and Workforce Planning.

So what next?

Technology vendors who have best in class succession planning and workforce planning solutions have the potential for growth over the next two years as organisation move to automate these processes.
Outsource providers in compensation administration, succession planning and workforce planning need to clean up their act otherwise they may see business dropping off.
Emerging technologies will continue to grow in usage within organisations to streamline communications with employees.

Is social media a SCAM for recruiting

Credit:Flickr cambodia4kidsorg

Last week a US recruitment expert Peter Weddle called social media a SCAM for recruiting. He stated that it was a waste of time with no ROI, although he did not use the term ROI. Finally his prediction was that social media will not be the future of recruiting until 2014 while job boards will remain the predominant method of finding a job. His source two survey’s one his own and the other by AfterCollege:

Social media came in at number 15 on the list of choices and was selected by just 10.9% of respondents which, of course, included those most celebrated for their use of social media—Millennials.

Well Peter’s comments got a few people all flustered, including Paul Debettingnies and Jim Durbin also known as The Social Media Headhunter.

I am not going to comment on the posts more a comment on the ROI of using social media for recruiting in Australia (some have links to stories others are examples I have picked up in the marketplace):

First up Darryl King from Ireckon hired his new Project Manager via Twitter.
The boys from Happener use social media as the backbone of their business.
Amneisa Rasor Fish hired their Director of Social media through Twitter.
Amy Cato from Cato & Hall hires a vast majority of her placements via Facebook.
Thomas Shaw has many customers placing candidates through his Facebook apps.
V set up a dedicated careers site on MySpace to allow young Australian’s access to 60 ‘never-to-be-advertised’ positions. 4,000+ applications and all positions were filled and V achieved over $750K in marketing exposure.
Deloitte Australia actively uses social media sites as a talent pool source.

I could continue but I think you get the point this also ignores all of the recruiters using LinkedIn and LinkMe to source candidates.

I have said it before and will continue to say it social media does have a place within your recruiting strategy but it is NOT a recruitment strategy on its own! The key is to understand where the talent hangs out online and then develop a strategy to engage with them on their terms.

Case Study

The Forrester Social Technographics 2008 report shows that Gen Y (18-28) are significantly higher Creators, Critics, Collectors and Joiners then other generations up to 49 index points. While Gen X overall are more likely to be Spectators (63%), Joiners (41%), Critics (32%) and finally Creators (24%). Young Boomers do not participate with social media anywhere as often as Gen Y or Gen X, Young Boomers are Spectators (48%), Critics (29%), Joiners (27%) and Creators (17%) which is not a lot different to Older Boomers or Seniors.

So if your target market is Young Boomers (43-52 year olds) leading with a social media is not the right move. If you market is Gen X you need to develop a method for them to be consumers of social media or even critics.

Do you know the Australian Sources of Talent?

Over the last couple of months I have been working with Phillip Tusing from Destination Talent to look at the most successful channels for finding talent in Australia. Our initial thought was how hard could it be to pull a survey together and send it to a few people. We were a little mistaken, but finally the survey is ready.

I am very happy to announce the launch of Australia’s first Source of Talent Survey!

If you’d like to contribute to this, as well as receive a free advance copy of the report, click here to begin our short online survey (it takes less than eight minutes to complete). You’ll also go into a draw to win a Nintendo Wii or one of five book vouchers.

While there are international results on sources of hire by Gerry Crispin we are very interested to see the results from Australian organisations. For example, do Australian organisations collect this information, if so what systems do they use, and are they experimenting with social media as a source of talent.

This is a joint project between myself (Inspecht) and Phillip Tusing from Destination Talent, with support from our sponsorship partners: JobAdder, JobGenie, PageUp People and PeoplePulse.

To find about the survey and the report visit our microsite http://talentsource.com.au for more information.

Twitter in the recruitment process

I am sorry but I have to call this out.

The RCSA is the peak Australian association for the recruitment and on-hire sector (according to their web site) but I do wonder sometimes if they know what is going on. (Disclosure I am not a member and have only attended a few of their events so my comments are very biased.)

The RCSA is running a “How to use Twitter in the Recruitment Process” webinar in June. Which on the surface is a great initiative.

Except.

They are changing $143 for non member! Um hang on didn’t Thomas Shaw run one for free last month? You missed his session don’t worry just download my free guide! No don’t download my guide, have a search on Google for a guide.

Sorry it had to be said.

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