Social Recruiting: History and Future

Social Recruiting: History and Future

Last modified on 2013-02-07 22:16:04 GMT. 1 comment. Top.

Social Recruiting: History and Future

So far, social recruiting hasn’t really delivered on its promises. The constant drumbeat of evangelism (hurry up or you’ll miss the boat) turns out not to be true. There’s no boat and missing it doesn’t mean much.

We’re in the very early days.

When you compare the rate of adoption of social recruiting with that of first generation digital recruiting, it looks like we’re going 50% slower, maybe more. Linkedin is playing the role Monster played in the first wave. There is no CareerBuilder. (And, if you wanted to get a little clearer, the LinkedIn recruiting model is not significantly social.)

For some reason, we’re stuck in the early adopter phase. There’s a ton of arm waving. The facts and figures are either ridiculously self-serving (like the Jobvite surveys) or derived from trends in social recruiting as a whole. We’ve developed no standard for measuring ROI.

We’re stuck in the early adopter phase.

It’s not a permanent thing. But, it does look like the original notions of how to execute social recruiting bear rethinking.

Take a look through this presentation. I gave it last week at the amazing Social Recruiting Strategy Conference.

It’s not that Social Recruiting is dead. It’s that we haven’t figured out a way to deliver it to the uninitiated. That’s pretty normal for this stage of development.

We’re about to head into the second stage of social recruiting history. It will look like content recruiting. It will be able to handle applications from the job ad.

Five Links: Talent and The Net

Last modified on 2013-02-13 16:30:33 GMT. 2 comments. Top.

Five Links: Talent and The Net

Be sure to read the study that says “68% of Talent Managers think they are in the top 20%.

• Hiring Great Engineers
  The gist of the story? Do it in person. Know who you want and meet them for coffee
• An Internet for Manufacturing
  “The factory has more than 10,000 sensors spread across 180,000 square feet of manufacturing space, all connected to a high-speed internal Ethernet. They monitor things like which batches of powder are being used to form the ceramics at the heart of the batteries, how high a temperature is being used to bake them, how much energy is required to make each battery, and even the local air pressure. On the plant floor, employees with iPads can pull up all the data from Wi-Fi nodes set up around the factory.”What’s usually missing in these early description of the next internet is the fact that human capital and its development is an easy thing to monitor and direct in the new manufacturing world.
• Internet 2012 in Numbers
  Bookmark this for presentation data
• State of Talent Mangers Report
  From HRExaminer Editorial Advisory Board member Marc Effron’s New Talent Management Network comes this study of the aptitudes, attitudes and perceptions of over 700 talent managers.
  “For those who ponder why few CEOs emerge from HR’s ranks, here is one answer. HR leaders have little desire for that role or others in the C-suite. TM professionals set their sights even lower – fewer than one in five aspire to be CEO.
  Across HR, our ambitions lie largely within our sub-functions (TM, L&D, BP). Just 14% – 31% aspire to our penultimate role being in a different sub-function.
• MeetAlex
  Alex is like Siri for benefits enrollment. It comes in mobile and Spanish as well as online and English

Events, Happenings and New Resources

• HRExaminer Radio:Industry News and Commentary. Fridays @ 11AMPST (2PMEST)
  • Friday Feb 8: Kevin Grossman
  • Friday Feb 15: China Gorman
  • Friday Feb 22: Chris Russell
• Open Course: Learning Analytics and Knowledge (online, free, Starts Feb 11, 2013) Good place to experience large scale online learningon an interesting Talent Management issue
• HRTech Europe: Spring Warmup (London, March 19-20, 2013) Sumser on Where Ideas Come From and a half day of Cutting Edge HR
• NeuroGaming 2012 Conference: (San Francisco, May 1-2, 2013) The place to learn about human-sensor integration

Mobile is Free

Last modified on 2013-02-07 15:49:05 GMT. 1 comment. Top.

Mobile is Free

Have you noticed that all of the heavy breathing and evangelism isn’t working in mobile? My research suggests that 11 of the Fortune 50 have usable mobile recruiting tools and that about 10% of the fortune 500 have done anything at all. My committed pals (most of whom are consultants) beat the drum loudly. It doesn’t seem to increase the adoption rate.

Mobile recruiting is a bad idea in most of the cases where organizations spend money on that kind of thing. It doesn’t work and is more expensive than the alternatives. I hear that the cost per hire using mobile exceeds job board averages by $600 to $1,000.

Ouch.

While I’m bullish on the long term prospects for mobile, it’s at least three to five years away. Those figures of 10% adoption? Why, they are exactly the limits of the early adopter category.

Early adopters see risk very differently from other adopters. They go first because competitive value accrues to people who do. You can’t produce a spreadsheet-able ROI calculation when it’s an early adopter phase.

Mobile has a place today in the hourly world. Companies like PeopleMatter are figuring out shrewd approaches to mobile scheduling and job application. It works in a world that can be managed as text messages.

Mobile separates fast work from slow.

That means that there are serious limitations to what can be done with mobile recruiting today. Ultimately, the consumer side of the equation will look like a tool that filters the crap that a job hunter is exposed to while directing her towards the most beneficial job spam. For recruiters, mobile will ultimately be a place where algorithm driven decisions are approved.

The work between here and there involves collecting enough data to make currently slow decisions into fast ones. The current crop of mobile initiatives are all about surface issues. The work of making mobile actually produce value involves a good deal of heavy lifting.

Today’s mobile recruiting advocates get their panties in a bunch over the idea of ‘mobile apply’. For the initiated, that’s code for the fact that you can’t actually apply for a job on your phone yet (in most cases). An army of competing entrepreneurs are hot on that task.

Because there are so many competitors, it’s just a matter of time before the mobile function becomes a give away. It’s likely to happen before this year’s HRTech. Some well funded startup will drop its price to $0 and everyone who wants to stay in the market will have to follow suit.

And then we’ll discover that the problem isn’t really mobile apply after all. Removing that obstacle will show us evermore clearly that mobile recruiting is just one more rectangle. (Unless you want to add real value)

I write using an HTML generator called Dreamweaver. At the bottom of the work window are three rectangles. You click on them to see how your content looks on a variety of platforms. Mobile is one of the choices.

That means if I want to care about it, I have tools that will make my content mobile-friendly. There is no difference between mobile and not- mobile. In other words, creating content for mobile is not different from creating it for a desktop. You already can do both without any extra effort.

This is what they mean by responsive design. It’s a content design that works well on all screen sizes. It doesn’t cost more than a regular design.

The real bugaboo in mobile design is traffic acquisition. You can make it look pretty but it’s useless without traffic.

Nobody just goes to your mobile site. You have to acquire the traffic and persuade it to go where you want it to.

This is where all of the expense in both mobile and social really lies. The cost of traffic acquisition (which is buried in the cost of a job posting on job boards) is way higher when you’re an individual buyer (and not a job board). Learning how to acquire and segment traffic is very far beyond the current work practices of recruiters.

The traffic isn’t free, it’s expensive.

The other stuff in mobile is basically free.

Advancing the Gender Agenda: Three Reasons Companies Should Mean Business

Last modified on 2013-02-05 14:50:51 GMT. 1 comment. Top.

According to McKinsey Quarterly’s November 2012 report “The Global Gender Agenda,” companies are making progress in gender equality, yet the numbers remain disturbingly low when it comes to inclusion of women in business leadership.

• “Women hold 15 percent of the seats on corporate boards and 14 percent of those on executive committees in the United States.”
• “Norway’s representation is currently at 35 percent and 15 percent, respectively.”
• And, that number is “less than 10 percent on both boards and executive committees in China, India and Japan.”

As a VP, I have my own perspective on this topic, and it begins with this: at its root, day-to-day business operations must be gender-blind. I don’t have woman in my title. The reality, however, is that gender politics are part of business. With that said, what follows are three ideas that I believe are part of the business case for the future of women in leadership.

1. The talent supply and demand equation is a great equalizer

The competition for critical talent, including specialized skills and leadership, remains high. The reason is simple: the talent supply in key areas is not keeping up with demand, and companies must do all they can to boost that supply. That makes a compelling business case for improving engagement with the female workforce and hiring women at all levels, including leadership. For context, here are BLS statistics from November 2012 on the relative numbers of men and women in the US civilian labor force:

• Men, 20 yrs and over: 79,539
• Women, 20 yrs and over: 69,897

Why should companies pay attention to women in leadership?  Is it because it’s a social obligation, a cultural push, or a nice thing to do?  Or is it because women represent more than 45% of the over-20  talent pool in a talent-scarce environment? The business case speaks for itself.

2. Women have established themselves as business leaders

Today, according to Catalyst.org, only 19 of the Fortune 500 companies have female CEOs. Being a woman drew much attention to Marissa Mayer when she stepped into the lead role at Yahoo! What few people realize is that the history of women entrepreneurship and business leadership in the US goes back a long way.

A great short internet diversion to highlight this is 10 Remarkable Women Who Shaped U.S. Business History. They include a former slave who developed “a small real estate empire” in Los Angeles in the 1800s. There are more recent examples such as cosmetics leader Mary Kay Ash (who started her company at age 63) and late Katharine Meyer Graham, long-time publisher of The Washington Post. Today, a woman can set out to become a leader in business, and if she persistently puts the proverbial glass ceiling to the test, she will break through—but women in business leadership is not a new idea.

3. Corporate culture is evolving beyond the “work-life balance” cliché

One of the most curious terms we continue to hear, particularly in relation to women in the workforce, is an embrace of “work-life balance.”  In many ways, work-life balance is an obsolete concept and particularly misleading when it comes to the gender agenda. Many (myself included) have come to regard work and life as intertwined, even as we raise children and support our families. If our work is rewarding and fulfilling, then we are happy to go the extra mile. There is a book on the subject that reflects that idea, so I must not be alone in this thinking: Off Balance: Getting beyond the Work-Life Balance Myth to Personal and Professional Satisfaction by Mike Kelly.

Of course, the ideas behind work-life balance remain important. In fact, they are more important than ever, but I’m not joining a company to achieve work-life balance. I’m expecting work-life balance, but I’m working towards financial security, opportunity and fulfillment.  Those are the real values that companies must embrace and support for all of their workers, men and women alike.

The Biggest Challenge Remains: The Pace of Change

Great companies hire great people, so it’s natural that those most open to fostering leadership from the women who represent 45+% of the U.S. workforce will have an advantage over those that do not. Unfortunately, the pace of economic natural selection is slow, but the role of women in leadership is greater than at any time in history. Companies are doing what they do best: finding the right people to do the right job to drive the healthiest level of growth and profitability.  While natural competition will continue to drive the growing role of women in the workforce, great companies know that a conscious push for culture change is the only way to make progress at a meaningful pace.

Social Recruiting Questions

Last modified on 2013-02-07 22:13:14 GMT. 3 comments. Top.

I attended the Social Recruiting Strategies Conference last week put on by the Global Strategic Management Institute. For a great recap of the conference see Jason Webster’s Top Quotes post at Ongig.

It was one of the most refreshing and thoughtful series of talks I’ve attended in a long time. That’s because the BSq (bullshit quotient) was so low.

Most of the speakers agreed it’s early and no one knows what, if anything, works yet. Instead, they explained what they were trying, and what they had learned so far.

I came away with more questions than answers. But having great questions is always far more valuable than someone else’s answers anyway.

Here’s what I’m wondering.

Does a “like” really mean anything?

A like, or +1, or even a comment, only takes a couple seconds. Liking a company page on Facebook means that someone clicked. It doesn’t mean they actually like it, they know anything about it, or they will ever give it another thought. What I liked 5 minutes ago has nothing to do with what I want now, or two hours from now, or next week.

Clicking is not “engagement.” Choosing from “like” or nothing doesn’t tell you much at all.

Recruiting and hiring is really about developing relationships. Relationships require time, trust, and mutual interest. So while setting up a jobs page on Facebook or a company twitter account may be great for brand awareness, I’m not sure what it does for finding the right person to hire.

What are you really measuring?

Measuring social media activity is a lot like measuring a jet’s contrial. You can see that a jet has been there, and learn something about the direction of travel, and maybe something about the wind and turbulence. Mostly though, it just tells you about the humidity of the air the plane flew through.

Looking at a contrail won’t tell you about the jet itself. You don’t know where it was going, who was on it, or why they were going there. A contrail just tells you about the conditions surrounding the exhaust.

Clicks are digital exhaust. Measuring clicks tells you someone was there. That’s it. It won’t tell you why they clicked, what they want, or anything about what they like or dislike enough to do anything other than click.

How will Recruiting and Marketing sort out the social media turf battle?

Once Recruiting starts building pages on Facebook, tweeting, and promoting the company, they make marketing nervous. An undercurrent from many of the recruiters at the conference was concern about the turf battle between Marketing and Recruiting.  Since Marketing has been the primary public voice of the company, it’s uncomfortable for Recruiting to be more than just a “career” page on the website. Now that Recruiting is involved in social media, there is competition for control, resources, budget, and credit/blame.

Messaging and branding should be consistent, or at least compatible, between recruiting and marketing because it affects the public perception of the company as a whole.

Is the information people put in online profiles true?

In high school, some of my friends managed to create and graduate a fictional person.  It required having inside access to administrative records, tremendous ingenuity, and a lot of work. The fictional (former) student now has his own Facebook page, which was easy.

All the recruiting software, every application, all the cool tools and sourcing tricks, are based on the assumption that the people and information online are real. They aren’t.

It’s not just college football players with fictional girlfriends. Job hunters have figured out how to create multiple pages to try to control what information is seen where. Online information is no more accurate than any resume; and people lie on resumes all the time. It’s so easy to make things up and put them online.

It’s also easy to learn all kinds of things about people online. So we are beginning to see the tension between what people say and what they do. It will be interesting to watch how this tension evolves as we can track more of people’s online actions. As people figure out that really nothing online is private, I expect more guarded disclosures and more disinformation to protect privacy.

My overall takeaway is that social recruiting is an important part of a company’s employment brand. Yet, it has to be more than just putting up a Facebook page and posting self-serving ads. In order to gain and keep people’s attention, you still have to give value and invest the time and energy to build real relationships. And that is often the opposite of social media.

 

Speakers: Four of the SRSC speakers were HR Examiner authors: John Sumser, Hank Stringer, William Tincup, and David Kippen, who each gave an insightful and funny presentation. Well, David Kippen wasn’t that funny, but his talk was great. We also enjoyed the excellent presentations by Jennifer McClure, Lars Schmidt, Craig Fisher, Jason Webster, Cloe Rada, Stephane Le Viet, Kellie Thompson, Shannon Van Curen, Elizabeth Brown, Francene Taylor & Gary Zukowksi, Carolyn Thompson, and Dustin Carper. As always, Dwane Lay did an incredible job as the Master of Ceremonies.