Top 25 - Internet Influence in Recruiting

Top 25 Online Influencers in Recruiting v5

Last modified on 2012-01-11 15:57:01 GMT. 0 comments. Top.

Bodega Bay, California January 11, 2012

Fifth publication of recruiting online infleuncer list adds industry context to influencer conversation.

Here we go again.

There are a ton of ways to think about influence and how it operates. When we publish a Top 25 list, the idea is that the list should represent the most important voices on the topic at the moment the list is published. In that way, we get at the fact that influence is volatile and that social media is unforgivingly focused on what you’ve done lately.

There’s no future in social media and precious little past. You are exactly what you’ve done recently. It’s faster paced and higher pressured than the old world where one could rest on one’s laurels.

This time around, we’ve started using SocialEars, a new service from the folks at HRMarketer. SocialEars is a database of content from people and publications in the industry. The material is scraped and mapped. The mapping process is interesting because it allows social ears to recognize content related to various key words.

A search in SocialEars is done by keyword. The results display scores from Klout and Peerindex along with a relevance and importance ranking from SocialEars.

SocialEars is designed for use by marketers who are trying to get their message to the HR community.

The world has changed dramatically in just a few years. Where it used to be simple to tell who could reach the HR audience (they were all journalists who worked for very specific outlets), the game has become more of a free for all. The point of the SocialEArs service is to help marketers figure out exactly who the right people to talk to are.

That process isn’t exactly a question of which person is at the top of the list. Rather, it’s a question of what is the right group to build relations with. The flaw in most media relations plans is the human temptation to place all of one’s eggs in one basket.

The SocialEars database contains Tweets, Articles, Blog Posts and some LinkedIn data. We liked it because it left the question of relative importance of a topic to us. (Other services prioritize clusters of keywords).

What makes SocialEars different is its inherently limited view of the world. Recruiting, for example, is done for sports, fraternities, gangs, and multilevel marketing schemes. By keeping the engine focused on the HR universe, SocialEars drowns out the noise that limits the effectiveness of other services.

The results were somewhat surprising. Here’s the overall scoring list. From now on, we are going to try to make the process as transparent as possible and this list takes us the next step of the way.

The SocialEars approach really emphasizes how powerful Twitter has become as an influence. Each tweet and retweet act like transmitters of a core idea and give that idea validation in search engines.

Scoring Process

SocialEars tracks the movement of ideas around our industry. Rather than trying to focus on hard to define categories (like the standard HR Silos), SocialEars tries to keep a comprehensive view of the industry. Where most ‘credibility trackers’ boil the ocean with their comprehensive search of all industries, SocialEars starts with a defined universe.

In other words, the SocialEars difference is context. There is not much chance that searches for payroll will turn up articles about payroll loans. That’s because the voices that SocialEars tracks are all from the industry.

It’s not a small group.

With over 1,000 primary voices (and an additional 4,000 voices who have been referred to), the SocialEars database contains one million distinct pieces of content. Links included in tweets are brought into the database and scoured for relevance.

1. In order to use SocialEars for this iteration, we did eleven keyword searches (see the bottom of the page for those key words). Each search gave us a list of ‘voices’ ranked by score.
2. We took the top 25 from each list and placed them in a spreadsheet
3. The total list contained 125 names.
4. We weighted each score. In each category, Number 1 got 25 points and number 25 got one point.
5. We then added each persons scores across all categories.
6. The list was sorted so that people were ranked by score.

You can see the entire scoring list here. Each keyword search is a column. The list is ranked by cumulative score.

Each keyword is treated equally in this particular analysis.

Conclusions

Measuring influence is still in its infancy. It’s not clear whether the field will even refer to the idea of influence in its final form. But, for now, measuring influence and talking about it is the best way to try to navigate the huge flow of data we swim in.

Keywords Used in this Analysis:

Employment Brand, Hiring Interview, Job Board, Social Recruiting, Sourcing, Staffing, Recruiting, Recruitment Advertising, Talent Acquisition, Talent Community

Resources

• How Kred Calculates influence
• Components of the Klout Score
• Klout Moves Towards Predictive Social Media
• Understanding the PeerIndex Score
• How Traackr does measuring and monitoring
• 5 KPIs for Measuring Your Brand’s Influence

The Latest HRExaminer Pieces on Influence

• Defining Influence 2012 (influence vs power)
• Measured Influence
• If It Doesn’t Matter, It’s not Influence by Heather Bussing (great dialog in the comments)
• Another Look at Influence (Principles we’ve uncovered)

Another Look at Influence

Last modified on 2012-01-13 14:55:29 GMT. 1 comment. Top.

Before we unveil the latest edition of the Top 25 Influencers in Recruiting tomorrow we take another look at influence.

Increasingly, what’s online is the influence that really matters.

The last time we published a list of influencers was in August, 2011. In the intervening five months, there has been an explosion of services that measure and evaluate an individual’s influence online. From the obvious contenders (Klout, PeerIndex, mBlast, Kred to the sort -of-in-the-game offerings from CrowdBooster and EmpireAvenue).

The debate about influence, is now the topic of sessions at conferences, the source of increased sales of heartburn remedies and the cause of long harangues. Topics in the debate range from the relevance or lack of relevance in the measures to whether or not what is measured is actually influence. In the conversation, scant attention seems to be paid to the ultimate utility of measuring the phenomenon.

Sometimes we hear the disappointment in the voice of someone whose name wasn’t included. Sometimes we hear the voices of 20th Century influencers whose opinions decreasingly matter. Occasionally, we hear the voice of someone who gamed the system and didn’t figure it out all the way.

It’s not clear what we measure in these exercises. It’s clear that the combination of links, content, audience and network create a world of possibilities. Anyone who ends up on these lists has an impact on the way that the world views the subject at hand. A simple way of thinking about it is that these are the voices one is most likely to encounter in the search engines.

Increasingly, what’s online is the influence that really matters.

We’ve discovered some interesting things along the way:

• People who have the discretionary time to write and publish are the ones whose names turn up. People who do not write and publish may have influence within their organizations (and perhaps some impact regionally). But, without the ability to publish and participate, it is difficult to have sustained impact. In shorthand, that means that academics, consultants and marketing folks are likely to have a disproportionate impact.
• Seasoned, highly visible members of the ‘echo chamber’ also seem to fall out of these analyses. It takes a certain level of discipline to continuously use the keywords that define the entry level of the game. Seasoned consultants, analysts and academics are involved in conversations at the next level.
• Impact is fleeting. Social media is unforgiving. If you haven’t published regularly and recently, you disappear.

As we’ve been noting, influence itself is a scalable concept that covers the smallest of networks through the largest of networks. Our definition, “the ability to increase the likelihood of action” is a little lighter than “must have observable consequence” idea put forth by some critics.

Like the actual act of hiring used to be in Recruiting, the problem isn’t that there isn’t an impact, it’s that you can’t get that personal with current tools. The influence is there, it’s just hard to measure for a couple of reasons: the influenced person may not be aware of the influence, the influenced behavior may not be visible online, or the influence is something that inhibits behavior.

Currently, it is not possible to begin to measure influence in interpersonal (extremely local) relationships. That doesn’t mean that the data isn’t there. It just isn’t publicly available in a useful form. The flows of SMS message, Skype calls, eMail and other electronic breadcrumbs precisely show who influences whom. It’s just a hassle to discover it.

Electronic communication has so completely permeated the fabric of society that many heretofore unmeasurables are becoming quantifiable.

Tomorrow, we’ll be unveiling the latest edition of the Top 25 Influencers in Recruiting. We’ve taken a new approach which produces some interesting results. Stay tuned.

For a couple of pieces that really illuminate the question, see:

• Heather Bussing’s If It Doesn’t Matter, It’s Not Influence (read the comments) and,
• Neil Morrison’s Social Influence or Social Propagation

Resources

• How Kred Calculates influence
• Components of the Klout Score
• Klout Moves Towards Predictive Social Media
• Understanding the PeerIndex Score
• How Traackr does measuring and monitoring
• 5 KPIs for Measuring Your Brand’s Influence

The latest Pieces on Influence

• Defining Influence 2012 (influence vs power)
• Measured Influence
• Another Look at Influence (Principles we’ve uncovered)

Jay Cross: People Not Technology

Last modified on 2012-01-06 12:47:08 GMT. 0 comments. Top.

Jay Cross is a champion of informal learning, web 2.0, and systems thinking. He has challenged conventional wisdom about how adults learn since designing the first business degree program offered by the University of Phoenix. Full Bio

Jay Cross | Founding Member, HRExaminer Editorial Advisory Board

People Not Technology

by Jay Cross

The future is people, not technology

Recently, I called for the abolition of corporate training departments. Now some instructors and traditional instructional designers see me as a job threat. They needn’t worry. Enlightened e-learning requires more people, not fewer.

Ten years ago, venture capital firms issued lengthy reports explaining why e-learning would take the world by storm. Their underlying economic argument was cost-cutting: less travel, fewer facilities and no more salary expense for instructors. It was a classic industrial age proposition: Replace humans with machines. That first round of e-learning largely failed for precisely this reason. You can’t remove the humans from learning.

Companies should embrace network-supported informal learning because it works better, not because it reduces labor costs. People learn more efficiently at the time of need, in the context of work, from people in the know and through virtual conversation.

When my colleagues and I advocate cutting back on workshops and classes in favor of building “learnscapes,” we aren’t suggesting firing the instructors. Rather, we recommend redeploying them in new capacities, serving as connectors, wiki gardeners, internal publicists, news anchors and performance consultants.

There’s no cookie-cutter formula for assigning these new roles and responsibilities. An active community of practice is a different animal from a bottom-up knowledge management network or a corporate news channel. New communities have different requirements than old.

In their book Digital Habitats: Stewarding Technology for Communities, Etienne Wenger, Nancy White and John Smith describe different community orientations in terms of meetings, open-ended conversation, projects, content, access to expertise, relationships, individual participation, community cultivation and service context.

Digital Habitats posits the role of the community technology steward. Technology stewards are people with enough experience of the workings of a community to understand its technology needs and enough experience with technology to take leadership in addressing those needs.

A steward’s initial task is to shape a vision consistent with the community’s orientations. The steward then selects the simplest technology to advance the community as both the technology and the organization progress.

Digital Habitats also assigns these duties to the technology steward:

• Bringing new members up to speed with the community’s technology.
• Identifying and spreading good technology practices.
• Supporting community experimentation.
• Assuring continuity across technology disruptions.
• “Keeping the lights on” (including backups, permissions, vendor payments and domain registrations).

Internet Alliance’s Clark Quinn sees the need for a learnscape architect who nurtures the health of the learning network for collaboration, communication and learning opportunities. More a leader than a technician, the learnscape architect is the network champion who carries the vision, monitors metrics, promotes network participation and encourages continuous experimentation.

Mzinga’s Dave Wilkins describes several production roles. Producers manage the contributions of others, drawing out the best in them while also opting not to include contributions that aren’t as good. Moderators help ensure an environment of high trust by ensuring that people play by the rules. Expert moderators may vet the accuracy and clarity of information in their domains. Yet other moderators seed discussions to channel conversations in ways that might provide insight to the organization. Reporters and bloggers unearth what is newsworthy and document it for the community.

These tasks won’t happen by themselves. Furthermore, people throughout the organization will need to share the burden of helping everyone learn. Distributing learning throughout the social fabric of an organization requires storytellers, mentors, bloggers, community elders, schedulers and editors. We’re all in this together.

Some instructors will continue to instruct, but they will increasingly do so with network support and in smaller bursts. It’s a better use of their time. Face-to-face instruction packs a punch but is difficult to scale. Economics dictate that traditional instruction will play a diminishing role in corporate learning.

Traditional instructors and instructional designers are ideally suited to excel in these roles. They understand how adults learn and how to transform information into learning. It’s important for corporations to benefit from their learning people, not give them pink slips

Adaptation (Five Years Ago Today)

Last modified on 2012-01-09 13:53:23 GMT. 0 comments. Top.

(from the Archives)

(Jan 9, 2007) Whenever the demographic noose tightens, employers always learn to discover employable talent where it once looked like there was none. The people who own and run businesses are astonishingly adept at the art of solving intractable problems. Redefining and reframing are survival level business skills. When types of employees are scarce, employers routinely redefine the job requirements so that someone else can do them.

This is particularly true today.

In Western economies (starting with Japan in the 1990s), the population is aging. This means that there are proportionally more older workers and fewer younger workers each passing day. Tasks that were routinely performed by young people are increasingly performed by older people.

The speed at which employers adapt to changes in the composition of the workforce is pretty amazing. Before the trend can begin to be communicated, businesses shift their hiring practices. The need for people to produce revenue always trumps the need to pigeonhole them. Businesses adapt to market changes faster than you can talk about it. That’s what a business is.

If you need a dynamic salesperson, knowing that this year’s revenue depends on having one, it doesn’t matter what the societal assumptions about a particular candidate are. If you have plenty of promising candidates, you can discriminate all night and day.

People are somewhat different. They accumulate wisdom through experience. The old saying goes, “Experts can not be taught.” In other words, ‘common sense’, or the accumulated wisdom of a culture, is often wrong these days. Demographic shifts and technological revolutions routinely turn our assumptions inside out.

Businesses are more adept at responding to changes in the market than are individuals. That’s a funny sounding notion but it’s particularly true in the area of age bias. Businesses can not afford to discriminate when it gets in the way of making money. People’s perception that age bias influences decision making appears to exist regardless of the facts.

Age discrimination is the act of making a hiring decision based on beliefs about the impact of age on suitability for a particular job.

Businesses believe that age discrimination is decreasing. People believe that it is a universal phenomenon. The two views can be accounted for  by the speed at which the two groups learn about these sorts of things. Businesses learn faster because they must. People can have nearly opposing motives.

As a result, employers are likely to forget the impact of their hiring process on people’s perceptions. Given the fact that people are very likely to believe that a company discriminates based on age, a broad range of normal organizational behavior will be interpreted as evidence of age discrimination.

For example, the hiring processes at most companies are unfriendly and threatening. Resumes and job applications routinely go unacknowledged. Jobs are won and lost with limited or no feedback to the candidates involved in the process.  These routine experiences take on a darker tone when viewed through the lens of age discrimination.

The job hunting process is a quest for meaning for the people who are looking for work. This means that they analyze the minutiae of their experience for feedback to improve the results of their search. Everything is under the microscope when you are seeking employment.

If you are predisposed to believe that the employment process is rigged against the group you belong to (and the belief in age discrimination is nearly universal), that will be the way you interpret otherwise meaningless trivia.

Now, more than ever, businesses have to manage the way that their employment brand interacts with conventional thinking. If candidates are inclined to see things a certain way, savvy employers will work with that perception. Current practices ignore candidate perception and, as a result, allow widespread assumptions to go unchallenged.