Viewing December, 2010 Archive

Black Hole 3.0

Are we evolving, devolving or simply going in circles?

The Black Hole of Recruiting is not new, it’s been around for a long time.

Black Hole 1.0:
The old joke in applying for a job used to be about your resume and cover letter ending up in the “circular file” (the trash can).  But it was fairly standard process to send a courtesy “reply” to anyone who sent in a resume saying “thanks for the resume but we aren’t hiring”.

And then the internet happened.

Black Hole 2.0:
Technology and the internet provided a way to send in a resume (apply on line) with no stamp and no “snail mail” waiting time.  And the Black Hole hatred was officially born.  The Black Hole of Recruiting refers to the situation where an applicant fills out an online application, gets a cursory electronic “thank you” and then hears NOTHING back – ever – never.

For those of you who are all too familiar with this situation you may be asking WHY IS HE BEATING THIS DEAD HORSE AGAIN!!

Because we are in Black Hole 3.0 – it’s called “Social Media”.

The promise of social media is to more easily connect, share and interact with each other.  People are connecting at frenetic rates, sharing stuff that many probably shouldn’t be sharing (or wouldn’t in any other situation) and interacting with both friends and strangers.

Companies are now using this new media to try to apply these “personal” features to speed and facilitate business objectives (marketing, customer service, sales etc.) and few have really cracked the code on how to effectively do so.

RECRUITING departments have jumped into this mish mash of speed dating online and are trying to use the new media to facilitate hiring.

The challenge they are having is that by connecting faster, more lightly and more frequently, most are simply creating a faster, lighter and pervasive BLACK HOLE 3.0.  Following companies on Twitter, Liking them on Facebook or joining their Company Page on LinkedIn do nothing to alleviate the frustration that job seekers feel, in fact, it has great potential to make it worse..

Here’s how recruiting is currently using Social Media and the potential effects it is having:

1. Job Casting – a newer faster way to broadcast jobs with the hope that it gets virility and finds the right candidate.  Getting your jobs out to a wider audience will produce more quantity and potentially less quality of applicants (remember, a job description puts the decision of qualification in the applicant’s hands)- is that the goal or the result you desire? (Tweetmyjobs, Facebook pages)
2. Candidate Service – like customer service, some companies are using Twitter and Facebook to provide candidates updates on application status etc..  While on the surface this may seem like a good use of social media, having a dedicated team to monitoring your tweets and Facebook posts is a luxury few recruiting departments can afford.
3. Branding – using social media to enhance your employer brand is probably the best way I’ve seen to leverage the tools.  By putting brand messages out and keeping the “dialog” of social media at a brand level, you are neither exacerbating the over applicant problem or breaking your budget on “monitoring”.

Perhaps you are using Social Media for recruiting in other ways (if so, please let me know how) but no matter how you use it beware: if you are setting the expectation in a prospect’s mind that they are taking a step “CLOSER” to your hiring process, you need to make sure that you live up to the expectation and communicate with them, give them feedback etc. lest you simply create the Black Hole of Recruiting 3.0.

Talent Community or Talent Network?

It’s been a while since I posted and in that time I’ve been busy talking to companies about building groups of people they can communicate with about jobs.  For those of us old timers, this was called a pipeline and it usually resided in an excel spreadsheet.

Today however, these groups are living, interacting mechanisms and require much more attention than our old spreadsheets.

First of all, we need to delineate the terms “community” and “network”.  I see many vendors and companies using the term “community” and after we define both, you may want to rethink which term you are using.

Community; a community is a social network of individuals who interact through specific media, potentially crossing geographical and political boundaries in order to pursue mutual interests or goals (key word here is interact)

Network; a social network is a social structure made up of individuals (or organizations) called “nodes”, which are tied (connected) by one or more specific types of interdependency, such as friendship, kinship, common interest, financial exchange, dislike, or relationships of beliefs, knowledge or prestige. (key words here are common interest)

The key differentiators are that in a “community” there is “interaction” and in a “network” there is simply shared “common interest”.  This is key to setting up your situation for one reason:

EXPECTATION MANAGEMENT

One of the things that I think all recruiting leaders can agree on is that we do a really poor job of setting the expectation in the job seeker/candidate/prospects mind.  This is the whole reason for the discontent of job seekers with applying to your company – they EXPECT that they are now going to be treated as a candidate for the  job they applied to – whether they are qualified OR NOT!!

Today, it is an emerging best practice to set up a group situation OUTSIDE your ATS for prospects to be visible to your company.  The danger to the recruiting department, the employer brand and the company brand is that if you set the expectation that these people are joining a community they are going to expect interaction. Are you prepared to interact with your community?  Allow them to interact with each other?  OR – do you want to simply connect them around the shared common interest of working for your company by forming a Talent Network?

In a previous post, I mentioned that WORDS COUNT – be assured that they are counting in your candidates’/prospects’ minds when they think they are joining something.