Headline: Submit a nomination to RecruitingAwards.com and you earn a chance to win an iPad 2. And you make the person you nominated feel great. How’s that for a worthwhile weekend chore?

In the spirit of actually rewarding the act of recognition, The inaugural Recruiting Awards from TalentHQ.com is giving you a chance to nominate a recruiter or Talent Managent Pro and be entered in a drawing to win the illustrious iPad 2. You can even nominate an entire recruiting team or organization.

You don’t have to dance or sell your soul. But feel free to do either, especially dancing.

Submit your nomination to RecruitingAwards.com by Monday, September 12 (5PM EST deadline).

Go on, do your good deed for the week.

~julian

Really Honest Disclaimer
This post is my good deed for the day. Jason is a good friend and I work with him on his websites and online marketing. I’m biased and admit that happily. This bias doesn’t change the fact that recognition is an important part of helping people in their life and career. So, that’s why I’m happily stumping for a friend. Have a great weekend.

I co-author EXCELER8ion with my better half Shannon Seery Gude. EXCELER8ion is a blog about digital engagement.

Most of the time I’m a pixel farmer for my clients at exceler8 and LOCAL Na8ion. A long time ago, in a galaxy far far way, EXCELER8ion was a blog about Internet marketing that accidentally transformed in to an online recruitment marketing blog. That was fun. Most of my writing these days is on behalf of clients and I post my own stuff on social media and JulianSeeryGude.com, where I share the best stuff I’m finding on the web.

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Note: The beta is free until the end of 2011 if you sign up today September 6, 2011. 

Are you interested in the stories people tell? How about the stories data tell? 

You’ve probably heard the saying, ‘lies, damned lies and statistics!’ and a chief reason for that is that it’s easy to miss the real story behind the numbers. While truth in statistics for politics aren’t likely to improve, the same can’t be said for Business Intelligence Dashboards.

Business intelligence (in business speak “B.I.”) may well be two of the most important keywords for business owners to research over the next five years as web services transform the data reporting and analysis industry the same way that blogs did for self publishing and journalism. Business intelligence is an arena that is ripe for improvement. Pay particular attention to new web based business intelligence services if you use web services (think Google Analytics or Mailchimp) to run your business and don’t have the time (or a clue) as to how to pull all that information together.

Of course, you’ve thought of all this before. Late at night as you ponder another day trying to figure out which lever of your business will effect your results. We lack time, tools and knowledge about what the most important things are to our business. We often have little or no idea what small actions and results will improve results over the next month or year. We suffer from too much data and not enough understanding about what it all means.

DigMyData is trying to address this by plugging a hole left by various web services from PayPal to Gmail. Here’s how DigMyData describes themselves:

“We claw your business data from the services you use to run your business and expose the secrets it’s been keeping from you

• » See how your business is put together
• » Know how your business is doing
• » Change your behavior to reach your goals faster”

From my early use I can’t say yet if DigMyData is THE transformative business dashboard you’ve been searching for, but they’ve got a lot of stuff right out of the gate. I have tons of websites and loading them in to the default chart view of digmydata is every bit as ‘yuk’ as looking at the source tools themselves but ‘chart sets’ promise a fix for this.  It’s probably worth your time to try digmydata’s beta and take advantage of their free offer through the end of this year. I’m signing up my clients for the free beta and it’s a rare day when I do that with a new service.

Read more about their beta launch here and sign up to try the beta here.

~julian

Disclaimer:  digmydata is extending my beta trial by the same time period as is available to the public by signing up for the beta today on their website. I’d recommend the digmydata trial regardless of any incentives.

Julian co-authors EXCELER8ion with his better half Shannon Seery Gude. EXCELER8ion is a blog about digital engagement.

Most of his time Julian works on behalf of his clients at exceler8 and LOCAL Na8ion.

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Are today

Short answer. For most of us, no.

I was listening to a favorite podcast this morning and the subject turned to blog and article commenting on websites. The podcast panel expressed their frustration and exhaustion with mundane or moronic blog and website comments. They have become the norm, rather than the exception.

Good points were made on all sides of the discussion. Some of the panelists pointed out that you reap what you sew, while others went the opposite direction and said that there’s simply no point with blog comments anymore – the idiots and machines have taken over (trolls and comment spammers). From a practical perspective, I agree with the latter.

My own experience is that commenting on websites is about social give and take (you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours) and less about an honest reaction to the content or a true desire for conversation. We stray from honesty and clarity in our comments because we have bills to pay and people or customers we don’t want to offend. Or, we get trolls or enemies with a bone to pick who are similarly biased, just with a negative tilt. Either way you sidestep reality.

Today you don’t need a comment system on your website to have engagement. People are engaged by good content. Good writing is engaging. Good video is engaging. Good products are engaging. Good design is engaging. What you need is a person to engage with, therefore an active social network, an email address, a phone number, a physical location, or an easy to find contact us page does the trick.

Even if you allow commenting on your website will anyone see it?
Imagine you saw a beautiful whale breach the water or some similarly rare and exciting event. What’s the first thing you do? You turn around to share the experience with anyone around who may have seen it. Even if they’re a stranger you want to share the experience. Have you had the experience of no one else seeing what you did? It’s a little sad. You can’t interact in an empty forest when you’re the only one around to notice the tree fall.

My point is that if you want to interact with people do it in a venue that has reach, social relevance and immediacy. Five years ago you could do that on a blog. Today, forget it. All but the most popular of blogs are desolate islands when it comes to interaction. If you enjoy what used to be possible on blogs in terms of community, friendship, sharing of ideas or values then migrate that behavior to a new venue.

But what about my blog?
If you’re talking about commenting on your blog it may well not be worth your time to have commenting enabled given the administrative headache of dealing with comment spammers. Just the time you spend fending off comment spam (even with myriad plugins and comment spam solutions) makes you question the investment of time for the occasional quip from a friend or associate. Can’t they interact with you elsewhere anyway? Won’t ten times more people see it on a social network if they do?

A great alternative to blog comments these days is to employ an old world method made popular by magazines and newspapers. Publishing reader mail. Done even moderately well, this is comment moderation and content curation that is superior to blog commenting in every way except one – immediacy. But, that’s more than made up for by the value a well curated weekly post with reader comments can have.

Publishing a weekly or monthly reader email post provides much the same benefit that blog commenting once did – it shows you care about other people and ideas and that you’re open to opposing views and dialog. And I’m confident you’ll be able to sleep at night knowing that you edited out a trolls latest diatribe, your readers will too. Given today’s time and attention starved individual a post of reader email shows you’ve taken the time to moderate and curate your own community of ideas – giving your readers quality and additive information versus troll babble, comment spam, or just plain old crap content.

Got something to say? By all means give me a shout.

Julian co-authors EXCELER8ion with his better half Shannon Seery Gude. EXCELER8ion is a blog about digital engagement.

Most of his time Julian works on behalf of his clients at exceler8 and LOCAL Na8ion. Julian is launching an evolving digital engagement practice called Brand Trampoline where his first client is John Sumser of HRExaminer.com.

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If you haven’t read my related post have a quick gander – it will tie some things together for this post. – Julian

The Evolving Engagement Model

The Broadcasting Model

It would be an understatement to say that communications models are changing. Old marketing and communications practices followed a we speak/you listen model. This worked out pretty well for marketers when people used to have more attention to spare or we could rely on the novelty of an advertising medium to break through the clutter. Unfortunately, the expiration date these days on novelty expires in months and not decades.

The issue now is that people don’t have the time or interest in listening. Before they expend their time and attention on your company or product an exchange of value has to take place. For today I’ll call that exchange of value, engagement.

The old model looked something like this.

Ye Old Marketing and Communications Model

The Interaction Model

Interactive online tools like blogs ushered in today’s interaction model and extends today in webinars, livestreams, chat rooms, virtual worlds and social networks. Clearly we have a lot of tools that make it possible to better listen. The influence of these tools has grown and today companies are starting to see the value in listening more. But listening skills aren’t enough and far too many organizations are still stuck in the broadcast model.

The interaction model looked something like this.

The transitional model - think web 2.0

The Evolving Engagement Model

With today’s tools we have what we need to move towards a new engagement model that focuses more heavily on listening, processing, interacting, and broadcasting. Ideally, the net result is tangible engagement and then a lift in your brand.

It probably resembles a formula like this.

Listening 30% / Processing 20% / Interacting 30% / Broadcasting 20% = Engagement

The evolving engagement model

In my next post I’m going to dive into the engagement model in more detail and perhaps in another post or two we’ll bring it all together with an actionable process.

Let me know if you’ve thrown up in your hat yet or if any of this is making sense.

- Julian

Julian co-authors EXCELER8ion with his better half Shannon Seery Gude. EXCELER8ion is a blog about digital engagement.

Most of his time Julian works on behalf of his clients at exceler8 and LOCAL Na8ion. Julian is launching an evolving digital engagement practice called Brand Trampoline where his first client is John Sumser of HRExaminer.com.

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Where you are is where it’s at, The new interaction engagement model

One of our sister practices at exceler8 is called LOCAL Na8ion where we help small businesses harness the web to get more customers from their local city. Our slogan at LOCAL Na8ion is where you are is where it’s at. The slogan hints at how our physical and virtual worlds have become intertwined. At times, where we are is a state of mind, such as when we’re contributing to an online community, while at others we are grounded in the context of our physical location and needs like when we go out to dinner or look for a plumber on Google.

Where your people are at has changed

The slogan is apt for our new service Brand Trampoline because where you are and where your people are (be they job seekers, consumers or buyers of your product or service) has radically changed…if you want your company to be where it’s at you have to participate.

Every aspect of life is converging and connecting

Connections are now happening in multiple contexts and dimensions including our physical proximity and shared interests to our social networks of friends and associates on Facebook, Twitter, email and blogs, and yes offline too. Perhaps the ultimate mashup of all these interactions is  TCFKAP – The computer in your pocket formerly known as a phone. Wait, did I just make a Prince reference?

Facebook is becoming the web’s top source of traffic

The web today is pretty search centric (that’s spelled G-O-O-G-L-E) but times are changing quickly, Facebook is fast becoming the web’s top source of traffic. Real time search results and social search are replacing the way we interact almost overnight. We have new interaction touch points, tools, and communication vehicles and in almost all cases consumers, job seekers, and local buyers are way out head of the typical enterprise - be they the mom and pop variety or the Fortune 500.

Companies of all sizes are making one of three mistakes

1. They’re failing to engage at all.
2. They not keeping pace with where people are moving due to budgets, expertise or red tape.
3. They’re failing to engage in a meaningful way, often in the form of broadcasting their information rather than following an interaction model (what we refer to as digital engagement)

We all need to let go of the paradigm where our company website is where it’s at. Not that we don’t need one, it’s just that your website has already become a spoke in the wheel as far as people are concerned while your business operations, marketing and PR are still treating it like sun that your customers all orbit around.

The new interaction engagement model

We’re going to take up the case of the new interaction engagement model in the coming week but you might not be surprised to learn that success in our new world is based not in technological expertise or marketing gimmicks but old fashioned common sense applied in a contextually thoughtful way. Not to sound smug but it’s called listening. Have you noticed how little room there is today for listening? It’s hard when everyone is an expert and all of us posses some fantasmic skill or solution for becoming wealthy, skinny or successful overnight. Listening and understanding are more important today than in any time in our history.

Rather than rushing to establish an online reputation it’s useful for us all to recognize that we already have one, just like we already have a company culture even if you HR team or CEO failed to launch a multi-million dollar culture initiative in the 90′s.

I look forward to picking up the conversation about the new engagement model (er, old) in the coming week. In the mean time we’ll be out there looking for threads of knowledge in this and other conversations and looking to engage in more understanding.

-Julian

Julian co-authors EXCELER8ion with his better half Shannon Seery Gude. EXCELER8ion is a blog about digital engagement.

Most of his time Julian works on behalf of his clients at exceler8 and LOCAL Na8ion. Julian is launching an evolving digital engagement practice called Brand Trampoline where his first client is John Sumser of HRExaminer.com.

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Companies that will have the greatest success leveraging social media for recruiting will be ones that start inside, where the leadership actively encourages/guides their current employees to connect internally and externally using social media (… or at the very least avert their eyes and don’t block social networks).  Employees should be the most qualified, the most credible, and the best source of information about your company culture, the employment experience and why someone would want to work for you.  By enabling and distributing their stories across the web – companies create a powerhouse of information for job seekers considering working for your company.

You pride yourself on making good hiring decisions, so since you hired them, you should be able to trust them as professionals (I know this still makes many companies uncomfortable, but let’s start with this premise, and maybe that you even already have a social media policy).  So how do you get Employees to talk about their experience online? Educate them.

Are Internal Communications and Recruiting a secret OR not so secret alliance in your company?

In many companies Internal Communications often falls under Marketing or Corporate Comm (and sometimes HR), while Recruitment or Talent Acquisition falls squarely under HR. In my experience, Internal Communications is rarely present at Employer Brand/Recruitment Marketing related meetings (unless their presence is specifically requested). I’ve also observed amazing Internal/Employee Communication Chats that happen all the time on Twitter – but I rarely see any peeps from the recruitment side participating.

Maybe my observations are wrong — but this apparent separation seems to block what could be a friendship made in heaven. Why? From a recent post on The BrandBuilder Blog, Becoming P2P: Principal characteristics of the new Social Business:

Employees of P2P (People to People) businesses don’t hate their jobs. Why? Because they are empowered by their management team to collaborate with employees and the communities they touch. As a result of being  clearly aware of their operational boundaries and because they receive ongoing, multilateral support from their organization, they know how to act professionally when dealing with the public.

Proactively educating employees through internal communications is a critical component to successfully using social media for recruiting.  Employees need to know where/how to help if you want their help listening and responding online.  Continually monitor your online reputation and then let employees know where conversations are happening about you as an employer (hint: Indeed Forums; GlassDoor Reviews; Vault; JobVent). Solicit their support in leaving their own honest reviews, responding and commenting on other reviews, answering job seeker questions etc.

Use your Intranet, email, SMS etc to regularly communicate to your employees things they can do online such as:

1. Where they can help answer your candidates questions (maybe even create a forum specifically for this purpose on your career web site)
2. Discuss why their work for your company, or their latest project
3. Post pictures and videos from Company Events
4. Post reviews and information about you
5. Tweet or contribute to the company facebook fan page (become a “fan” even )

Align with Internal Comms to create an Army of Davids out of your employees, guide them to tell their/your story via social media, and watch your social recruiting machine flourish.

So who’s doing this well?

- Shannon

Shannon co-authors EXCELER8ion with her other half Julian Seery Gude. EXCELER8ion is a blog about digital engagement.

Shannon is a regular speaker in the HR & Talent Acquisition space where she’s known for her work in social media and integrated digital engagement. By day Shannon works at a Recruitment Marketing Agency.

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Video Topic: Online Employer Reputation & Social Recruiting

Earlier this evening I watched Shannon speak live at ERE’s Social Recruiting Summit at Google (it was streamed live on uStream). If you didn’t have a chance to watch her talk live you can catch up by watching the embedded video above.

Shannon’s talk was full of actionable information sure to be a boon to employers looking to engage in social recruiting. As a first step Shannon asks you to start by listening – which in Web 2.0 talk is called online employer reputation management. If you’re looking for a good place to start with social recruiting and online employer reputation management, tools to use, or simply want a good overview of social recruiting strategy, I think you’ll find her talk an hour well spent.

A couple of gems I wrote down during her speech:

“…you don’t build your community, you need to find your community.”

and on engaging your community…

“…you have to move in, not just visit.”

Of course, once I found out there was a live stream of the ERE event I had fun telling family members to go watch Shannon live.

Our six year old son took it in stride:

me: “There’s mum all the way across the country where you were born! She’s live.”

John: “oh. What’s she doing?”

me: “she’s talking with people about the Internet.”

John: “cool, can I have some popcorn now?”

It was also particularly gratifying to have Shannon’s mom posting Facebook status updates about her daughter’s talk as she watched it.

- Julian

Julian Seery Gude, EXCELER8ion Founder and co-author

Julian co-authors EXCELER8ion with his better half Shannon Seery Gude. EXCELER8ion is a blog about digital engagement.

Most of his time Julian works on behalf of his clients at exceler8 and LOCAL Na8ion. Julian is launching an evolving digital engagement practice called Brand Trampoline where his first client is John Sumser of HRExaminer.com.

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I have been writing about utilizing social media and social networking to connect to candidates and build candidate communities here on EXCELER8ion for about 3 years, and in just the last 6 months, I have felt a very powerful wave of corporate acceptance and understanding that they need to have a social recruiting strategy. Large corporate clients are asking en masse to have their teams educated on social recruiting techniques and it is the number one topic that I am asked to speak about.

Does this mean that you should launch a blog (like my favorite MicroSpotting.com), start a facebook page or use Twitter to hold public chats with candidates like E&Y, or should you develop a YouTube channel to distribute video like Deloitte? Should you create widgets to distribute your jobs, events, and other career related content? Should you develop a social game or an employee social network where candidates can interact and ask questions to get the insider’s perspective?

Maybe you should do all of this. But before you buy into the latest service trying to sell you a socket page or build you a community – Do you know the status of your Employer reputation online?

Are you regularly monitoring what people find in Google when they search for information about working for your company? (and they are searching – to the tune of hundreds of thousands of career related searches every month.) Do you know what people are talking about as it relates to working for your company? Do you know who is talking, where they are talking, if it is positive – negative – or just neutral, and why?

No, this isn’t a test. Auditing, analyzing, understanding, and monitoring your online employer reputation should be the first step to developing a successful social recruiting strategy. Without first listening to and understanding what people are already saying about you as an employer, without knowing what issues exist or topics that are already being discussed – your company is in no position to begin effectively participating.

Launching social recruiting initiatives without understanding the state of your online reputation first can be a recipe for disaster. You may discover that launching a recruiting blog is the way to go, but you might also discover that there are issues that are actively being discussed that should be addressed as a first step.

So how do you gather this info about your online reputation? Google “Online Reputation Management” and you will find a myriad of resources from how to set up Google Alerts to full monitoring software packages such as Radian6 and SM2.

The information that candidates find online about you as an employer can be highly influential and considered more credible than the info they find on your corporate career site. I will cover these options, time needed, and how to tailor/focus your monitoring efforts to discussions that affect Employer Brand and candidate opinions specifically in the weeks to come.

Shannon co-authors EXCELER8ion with her other half Julian Seery Gude. EXCELER8ion is a blog about digital engagement.

Shannon is a regular speaker in the HR & Talent Acquisition space where she’s known for her work in social media and integrated digital engagement. By day Shannon works at a Recruitment Marketing Agency.

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• What’s the Value? My comment on Brave New World of Digital Intimacy

  Clive Thompson’s Brave New World of Digital Intimacy in tomorrow’s New York Times Magazine digs into phenomena at the core of microsharing. I’m quoted, but link to it for its objective value. As Boing Boing’s Xeni Jardin writes (he) really nailed a number of things I’ve been struggling to put into words for years.

  Some comments asked for more about the value, so I added this:

  What’s the value?

  It comes in many ways but they take time, engagement and even some serendipity to experience directly. I’ve lived it. I’ve seen it happen to many.

  (tags: Clive-Thompson Twitter social-media social-networking Laura-Fitton)

Shannon co-authors EXCELER8ion with her other half Julian Seery Gude. EXCELER8ion is a blog about digital engagement.

Shannon is a regular speaker in the HR & Talent Acquisition space where she’s known for her work in social media and integrated digital engagement. By day Shannon works at a Recruitment Marketing Agency.

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• Brave New World of Digital Intimacy
  “When I decided to try out Twitter last year, at first I didn’t have anyone to follow. None of my friends were yet using the service. But while doing some Googling one day I stumbled upon the blog of Shannon Seery, a 32-year-old recruiting consultant in Florida, and I noticed that she Twittered. Her Twitter updates were pretty charming — she would often post links to camera-phone pictures of her two children or videos of herself cooking Mexican food, or broadcast her agonized cries when a flight was delayed on a business trip. So on a whim I started “following” her — as easy on Twitter as a click of the mouse — and never took her off my account. (A Twitter account can be “private,” so that only invited friends can read one’s tweets, or it can be public, so anyone can; Seery’s was public.) When I checked in last month, I noticed that she had built up a huge number of online connections: She was now following 677 people on Twitter and another 442 on Facebook. How in God’s name, I wondered, could she follow so many people? Who precisely are they? I called Seery to find out.”

“I have a rule,” she told me. “I either have to know who you are, or I have to know of you.” That means she monitors the lives of friends, family, anyone she works with, and she’ll also follow interesting people she discovers via her friends’ online lives. Like many people who live online, she has wound up following a few strangers — though after a few months they no longer feel like strangers, despite the fact that she has never physically met them.

I asked Seery how she finds the time to follow so many people online. The math seemed daunting. After all, if her 1,000 online contacts each post just a couple of notes each a day, that’s several thousand little social pings to sift through daily. What would it be like to get thousands of e-mail messages a day? But Seery made a point I heard from many others: awareness tools aren’t as cognitively demanding as an e-mail message. E-mail is something you have to stop to open and assess. It’s personal; someone is asking for 100 percent of your attention. In contrast, ambient updates are all visible on one single page in a big row, and they’re not really directed at you. This makes them skimmable, like newspaper headlines; maybe you’ll read them all, maybe you’ll skip some. Seery estimated that she needs to spend only a small part of each hour actively reading her Twitter stream.”

- Clive Thompson, NYTimes September 5, 2008

• (tags: twitter microblogging Web2.0 socialnetworking socialmedia facebook ShannonSeery Shannon-Seery)

Shannon co-authors EXCELER8ion with her other half Julian Seery Gude. EXCELER8ion is a blog about digital engagement.

Shannon is a regular speaker in the HR & Talent Acquisition space where she’s known for her work in social media and integrated digital engagement. By day Shannon works at a Recruitment Marketing Agency.

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Today’s candidates have high expectations for the experience that is offered by a company committed to attracting and retaining Talent. From the type of information that an interested candidate is able to find about working at your company, to how initial connections are made and a relationship established, to the experience on the Career Web Site. And it doesn’t stop there. Once a successful candidate becomes a hire, they also have high expectations for the on-boarding experience, the Intranet, and even after they leave in the form of the availability of Alumni networks.

This expectation isn’t set by the type of experience they are used to having on career or internal company sites, rather it is set by the type of online experience that are available on much of the rest of the web where they are using social networks, blogs and articles that allow comments, and discussion forums to connect and interact.

In order for corporations to successfully use social computing tools to connect and build relationships with talent in an authentic way that builds credibility and trust, an internal resource needs to be identified to foster this “candidate community”. While consultants and agencies can help provide knowledge and guidance, brand reputation monitoring and process research, technical support, web development work, and ROI metrics – the actual building, evangelizing, and cultivation of the community HAS to be done by the people at the company itself.

“But who is going to manage and moderate this?”

Utilization of social tools and the publishing of work related content will/should/already does happen through many employees at a company (how many of your people have facebook pages?) – but the Champion of how encouraging, leveraging, and distributing this work related content should fall under a specific owner.

This position may eventually be known by many different titles, but for our purposes here, I will call this position: Candidate Community Manager (CCM). Jeremiah Owyang outlines the main Tenets of all “Community Managers” in his post from November of 2007 – The Four Tenets of the Community Manager. For the specific “Candidate Community” as it relates to recruiting the best to work with your company, these tenets are just as relevant:

1. Candidate Community Advocation – An advocate for the candidates that focuses on listening and understanding their expectations, monitoring and participating in the conversations that are taking place in a variety of online channels such as social networks like facebook, job seeker forums like Indeed.com Forums, and feedback sites such as JobVent. By being good at listening and understanding the candidate community, the CCM can focus all content programming on the interests and needs of their candidate community members and help to evangelize these needs with company stakeholders.
2. Employer Brand & Reputation Ambassadorship – The employer brand evangelist heads the team that communicates career opportunities, company culture, promotes career events, and highlights awards and news items through tradition and channels. I currently know of no better example of using social channels to communicate company culture and shine a light on the many employer brand evangelists (read *your employees*) than what Ariel Meadow Stallings is doing for Microsoft through her blog Microspotting and the corresponding flickr photstream, Twitter profile and videos.
3. Online communication and analysis skills – A candidate community manager has to “get it” when it comes to social computing. They will need to be savvy users of social networks, understand RSS and content portability and distribution, blog participation even if they do not author one, how to create and respond to forum threads, how to encourage comments, as well as how to effectively and authentically use microblogging sites like twitter and plurk. The successful CCM literally has to be an active member of the online communities. Having a deep understanding of the best way to respond to the community and how to address negative or even inflammatory issues and deal with online trolls. Finally, in order to understand user patterns and site effectiveness, the CCM need to know how to get access to and to understand site analytics reports.
4. Candidate focused site requirements gathering and process improvements – In order for a candidate community manager to be able to meet the needs of their community, they have to have a true understanding of their on and offline reputation as an employer, as well as an understanding of the effectiveness and candidate perspective on the current recruiting process. In short – they have to be the expert at knowing how their members define an “excellent recruiting experience” and be able to communicate this internally and to consulting/agency partners in order to present the business case to secure funding, as well as to communicate actual solution requirements to the teams that will develop and implement them.

This begins to outline the tenets for a true champion of social recruiting and the candidate community within a company. The results for a progressive company that implements a social recruiting strategy, lead and fostered by a Candidate Community Manager will be increased relevant and real online conversation about their employer brand, their culture and job opportunities that exist. This will lead to increased credibility, exposure and most importantly, an increased understanding of your target – The Candidate.

Shannon co-authors EXCELER8ion with her other half Julian Seery Gude. EXCELER8ion is a blog about digital engagement.

Shannon is a regular speaker in the HR & Talent Acquisition space where she’s known for her work in social media and integrated digital engagement. By day Shannon works at a Recruitment Marketing Agency.

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Shannon isn’t one to toot her own horn but I don’t mind doing it for her. Er…Coming from her husband that sounded a little dirty didn’t it? Bill Vick published a great interview on Friday with Shannon on XtremeRecruiting.org about using social media in recruiting. Check it out here.

I think Bill asks excellent questions on all his interviews like this session with Jibber Jobber’s Jason Alba or this one with Chris Brogan.

My focus these days is helping small businesses attract clients in their local town or city using local online marketing and social media. Because of their small budgets, the small business market is one that doesn’t get a lot of attention from our Recruitosphere or ad agency types (or bloggers for that matter). Since there are so many recruiting experts who visit EXCELER8ion I would love it if you could stop by my latest post on recruiting for small business on Local Na8ion and give them some of your words of wisdom in the comment area – it will really help my Local Na8ion readers a lot.

Thanks so much!

- Julian

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Is corporate HR and their executive team receptive to social media?

A commenter recently asked:

Curious of your thoughts regarding how receptive HR is in including social media strategy as part of their marketing and media mix. I think for many of us it is a no-brainer, and I believe Executives are beginning to understand the power of social media and the habits of their target, but from your experience, are you finding HR Execs receptive and willing to allocate appropriate portions of their budgets for this?

Julie O’Reilly
Marcom Village

What do you think when you hear “do you have a social media strategy?” Do you think about making media buys to run banners on sites like facebook and LinkedIn; or maybe placing employment messaging within other publisher’s podcasts? In recent years the number of sites where you can place ads and the forms these ads are offered in have increased. The introduction of these options for interactive recruitment advertising is exciting and the possibilities are growing by leaps and bounds. But, this is advertising – which doesn’t happen to be the core compentancy of social sites and mediums. These sites are forums where millions upon millions of potential candidates are connecting with one another, participating in active conversations, and changing the very definition of thought leadership. The potential for social media to completely disrupt how companies find and build relationships with candidates is powerful, if they can be convinced to learn how to harness that potential.

I have spent the last eighteen months speaking with corporate HR leaders at some of the largest organizations in America on this very topic – urging then to adopt social computing in their recruiting and retention efforts. It is just in the last month that I have seen corporate HR realize that they have to begin “thinking” about adding social media to their recruiting and retention efforts. But when I discuss crafting a social media strategy, I am not talking about using these sites for advertising, I am talking about efforts such as:

• Publishing employee-generated content that shows the real soul of the company and tells the stories that make the company what it is.
• Using photo, video, audio sharing sites to help those stories come to life.
• Using RSS to distribute this content outside of the corporate career site.
• Having real FAQs sections where candidates can ask questions, get real answers, and have this exchange be indexed and searchable for others.
• Evolve the definition of “relationship marketing” to include building and cultivating your candidate community on your career site through real two-way exchange of information.
• Encourage recruiters, hiring managers (all employees really) to seek out potential hires and build relationships within online communities.

What is the “right” strategy for one company is not necessarily right for the other. The key is to allow your employees to express their stories in the way that is RIGHT for them, thereby authentically and quite literally showing candidates who your company is and what it might be like to work there.

So to answer Julie’s question, in my experience, “how receptive is HR in including social media strategy as part of their marketing and media mix?” I think that companies are starting to view advertising within social networks as the no brainer, and they are using budget that they already have allocated to interactive advertising, but just changing where those dollars are being spent. When it come to harnessing the power of social media to connect to candidates and literally give them the a behind the scenes view into the making of the organization – I would say, “not so much.” The fear of creating “too much risk” for the organization due to not being able to control the message is the root of the hesitation.

I have spent so much of my time passionately trying to explain to HR execs what social media IS, describing the changing of the guard that is happening, how thought leadership is changing, how the ability to spread and amplify the affect of messages has evolved, all of this can be seen so clearly through growth and impact of social computing – that I have probably done a poor job of making a traditional bottom-line focused business case for why companies would benefit for using social media to attract and retain the best.

Shel Holtz, an author and blogger with 30 years of organizational communications experience in both corporate and consulting environments, just wrote a terrific post addressing the business case for using social media as a communication channel entitled, Business adoption of social media: It’s not about employee rights, where he simply states:

My position on employee engagement in social media is based on my belief that doing so will produce far greater benefit—in the form of enhanced constituent relations—than risk, particularly when it is managed strategically. There are many dimensions to these benefits, some of the most important of which include the following:

• Recruiting and retention—Deloitte is frequently named the best company at which to begin your career. Deloitte is also the company that hosted an employee film festival, in which employees submitted creative videos articulating the company’s values and culture. The best of these are now on YouTube. Deloitte has engaged in social media in a variety of other ways, which in part accounts for the company’s ability to choose from the cream of the crop. Meanwhile, Clive Holtham, a professor at the Cass Business School, notes some California firms “are finding they cannot attract or retain staff because their IT infrastructure fails to meet the demanding standards of the new generation,” according to an article in Data Storage Today. Let’s face it: If employers in the don’t want to pay for the lion’s share of employee medical coverage. They do, however, because without it, they wouldn’t be able to attract the talent they need to implement their strategies.
• Employee engagement—Companies with populations of mostly actively engaged employees tend to outperform those with populations of mainly disengaged employees. Engagement flows from a number of factors, but it won’t flow at all without trust. Once employees are engaged, they produce discretionary effort on behalf of their employers.

In my view, using Social Media to provide a window into what it is like to work for an organization provides validation for a candidate against the marketing messages. This validation leads to a feeling of trust and genuine interest in the company (engagement), credibility (feeling that working for this employer is a good career decision) and ultimately loyalty (retention). I participate in social media everyday, it has become part of how I work, how I provide thought leadership, and how I judge the thought leadership coming out of other companies – that I know the potential for what it could mean for recruiting and retention – literally in my bones. Is it the only way? No, of course not. But the expectations of candidates are changing. They EXPECT to be able to find out what it is really like to work for a company, and they respect the companies that enable that process and help bubble that relevant information up to the top for them.

Shel says:

People may still want to work there even if they cannot engage in social media. The pay, the experience, the benefits all may carry greater weight than the ability to talk about work on a blog.

In general, though, based on dramatic shifts in culture, society, business and communication, most organizations will be well-served to integrate social media into their communication models.

But for any F500 company, it comes down to money – not passion for an idea. So my goal for the next month is to put together that financial business case for why Corporations cannot afford to ignore the potential of social media for attracting and keeping their best people.

Shannon co-authors EXCELER8ion with her other half Julian Seery Gude. EXCELER8ion is a blog about digital engagement.

Shannon is a regular speaker in the HR & Talent Acquisition space where she’s known for her work in social media and integrated digital engagement. By day Shannon works at a Recruitment Marketing Agency.

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Wanted to share a quick tip that I discovered today that hiring managers and recruiters can use. It is a search string that tells Google to search just social networking site profiles (such as from LinkedIn; public profiles on Facebook; MySpace) and pull back relevant results for the purposes of finding passive talent to build connections with and add to your candidate community.

How is it done? Leveraging Google’s ability to pull back search results from a specific URL, use the following methos to build a search string to find candidate profiles: keyword (such as a name, company, location etc) and then the profile URL. For example, all profiles on LinkedIn start with the URL: www.linkedin.com/pub or www.linkedin.com/in. All ‘public’ profiles on facebook start with www.facebook.com/people. All MySpace profiles start with http://profile.myspace.com and so on. If you can figure out the URL structure of the profile pages for any socnet that you are interested in, you are off and running.

So what does this look like: using the Exact keywords of Shannon Seery and these sites, connected by “OR” site:linkedin.com/pub OR site:facebook.com/people OR site:profile.myspace.com (e.g., “Shannon Seery” site:linkedin.com/pub OR site:facebook.com/people OR site:profile.myspace.com)

Hope that is helpful. Enjoy!

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At work a few weeks ago, I was asked to answer questions for an upcoming InsideCRM story on the promise of Web 2.0 technologies for human resource departments looking to make internal changes. My focus is really on employer branding and the candidate/employee experience, so I have no idea if my input was ever used, but thought I would post my responses here on EXCELER8ion as well to see what our little community has to say. How would you answer these questions?

1. How would you define Web 2.0, especially as the concept relates to technologies that might be adopted in an HR setting?
2. What sorts of solutions are now available to HR shops? How do these technologies differ from more traditional offerings?
3. What improvements could technologies based on Web 2.0 possibly bring to a corporate HR department?
4. Do you have any other thoughts on these or related issues?

Here are my responses:

How would you define Web 2.0, especially as the concept relates to technologies that might be adopted in an HR setting?

Web 2.0 is a term used to describe the tools that people are increasingly using to connect to one another and share opinions, insights, experiences, perspectives and more. The information that is shared can take many different forms, including text, images, audio, and video. This ‘user-generated content’ and the web sites that contain it are often grouped into the term “Social Computing” or Web 2.0 web sites. Popular social mediums include social networking web sites that allow two-way communication, message boards, as well as videocasts and podcasts, blogs, wikis, social search and tagging, and rss are connecting people and distributing information in new and efficient ways.

What sorts of solutions are now available to HR shops? How do these technologies differ from more traditional offerings?

Utilizing the web 2.0 principles of authenticity, collaboration and participation – solutions are being developed at a rapid pace to allow companies to easily incorporate real first hand stories into their career web site and within social networking groups such as those on facebook. As compared to more traditional offerings, web 2.0 is about communicating, not advertising. Creating, publishing and distributing authentic information about an organization creates opportunities and forums through which to directly connect with customers, employers, or talent. Utilizing these principles will introduce a level of transparency, authenticity, and credibility into how an employer is perceived. Building employee social networks or participating in social networking sites, such as LinkedIn and facebook, allow companies to communicate with customers and candidates where they already spend time online.

What improvements could technologies based on Web 2.0 possibly bring to a corporate HR department?

The authentic information that is generated and shared through social web sites can powerfully influence the overall perception of a company and give the audience, customers, as well as potential job candidates, a deeper and real understanding of an organization as an employer – greatly affect their consumer and employer brand. Concepts such as Social Search, tagging and ranking could be introduced into the career site. Social search results that are validated by the candidate community help to highlight the pages that they found most useful:

• Tagging: Candidates could tag content themselves based on words that they would use to describe the content. It will create “bottom up” categorization, which will be more relevant to the candidate community.
• Audience Rankings: Candidates rate the importance of content, pages, announcements or news, which will make it simpler for other candidate to uncover what is important and create a mechanism to provide feedback to the employer regarding where the career site user interests really lie.

HR specifically would benefit from utilizing evolving applications and tools that use concepts from web 2.0 such as social bookmarking and social networking to enable the sharing of information; collaboration; sharing information across different units and to help the important information bubble to the top – but within a secure framework.

New ‘web 2.0’ mash-up technologies are enabling the aggregation of data from multiple data sources, saving time for the HR staff by putting their most important information and common reporting tasks at their fingertips and adding insight to their most important work in order to work facilitate better decision making processes. Such data aggregation mash-up tools help bring disparate data point together (ATS Metrics; Job Board Metrics; Career Site metrics; Employee Research Data etc) and summarize existing data into useful new forms that promote analysis and informed action.

Do you have any other thoughts on these or related issues?

When making a career choice, candidates are searching for real “behind the scenes” information about a potential employer and they are often willing to spend the time to look for it. Web 2.0 tools and principles enable employers to make there career site that authentically communicates their employer brand and provides a window into the “employee-experience”. It has never been easier to literally “show” candidates the employee-experience by incorporating social features into the corporate career web site. Effectively communicating what your company’s community believes in, and what it is driven by, will determine the kinds of people you attract and keep.

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• Intranets: A Reflection on your Corporate DNA
  The intranet is a direct reflection of the ethos, soul, and culture of a company. An intranet is important, it’s the collective knowledge of your employees, a collection of resources, and directories that should enable business to move forward faster (
  (tags: Intranet employer-brand Employee-Experience corporate-culture employment-brand)

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Hat Tip: Geek And Poke

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• Blogging Is Not Dead, InternetGeekGirl Is Just Really Busy
  Ditto…just read this post and replace Internet Geek Girl with “Shannon” Saved me from having to write this, Thanks…LOLOL!!
  (tags: blogging personal-brand)

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• Share your candidate experience
  One thing that all of us have in common is that we have all at one point interviewed for a new job. I am really interested in hearing about your positive interviewing experience. What did the company and/or recruiters do to go the extra mile for you as a
  (tags: candidate-experience career-site careers-site Employee-Experience employer-brand employment-brand)

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• Seely takes over from Goldberg as Jobster CEO
  (tags: jobster jason-goldberg)

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• RecruitPress
  Welcome to the Job Board application for WordPress. RecruitPress is a free application to create a job board built on the powerful WordPress blogging software.

  RecruitPress is not a plugin for WordPress. It is a group of widely available WordPress plug

  (tags: Recruiting wordpress ATS job-posting career-site careers-site)

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As some of you know, Shannon is a Vice President at Bernard Hodes, the online recruitment marketing agency that makes next generation careers web sites and the like. Shannon was very fortunate to hire some former Jobster talent this year and one of those people was Adam Einiger. During a recent video shoot for a client the video and client team were testing the cameras when they asked for someone in the team to get on screen for the video and mic check. This is Adam’s version of a mic video/audio check…

I don’t know about you, but I really enjoyed his rendition and I’m pretty impressed by Adam’s creative side (awfully important at an agency where creative solutions are a must). I asked Shannon for a few words about what Adam does and she gave me this…

“Solutions Provider, Interactive Producer, Sales Engineer, Magician, F-bomb dropper, flip-flop wearer, new daddy, all around straight up good guy!”

There’s only one thing missing as far as I’m concerned with this content and it’s easy to fix. Get it front and center on the main Hodes web site. Hodes has some good video content on their site but I feel this content is better because it isn’t staged and it demonstrates (rather then telling) a creative mindset, technical ability, and a healthy culture.

While it’s a great example of personal branding it also represents a fantastic employer branding opportunity. I hear many people lament that they don’t have any good employee video to put on their careers sites. When was the last time you searched on Google and YouTube for your company name or the names of employees with the mindset of finding valuable content you can leverage? Right, social media has much better uses than as a recruiters tool to bust recent college applicants with wild Frat party pictures!

Just because the video isn’t about how great your benefits are doesn’t mean it won’t work when placed in context of an employer branding theme. More and more, there is fantastic employee generated content that employees would be only too happy to have featured in a positive light on your corporate site. Just ask and ye shall receive.

[tags]Adam Einiger, Bernard Hodes, Omnicom[/tags]

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Readers here on exceler8ion know that Shannon and I are social media advocates and practitioners. As geek marketers we use this stuff, we live this stuff, and we make this stuff. Joseph Jaffe of JaffeJuice.com, a respected colleague and conversation leader in our space is hosting an online book sale today over on Amazon.com. His latest book is called Join The Conversation and promises to share new research, case studies, insights, along with trends in social media that are happening right now in businesses around the world – large and small.

Joseph is using OUR network of bloggers and blog readers along with his offline and online social networks to make a statement about our collective voice today by selling as many books on this day as we can (Sunday October 21, 2007). I just purchased a copy for Shannon and I, and I hope you do the same. Joseph does very good work.

Buy the book today using this link and Joseph will donate all the affiliate commissions from today’s book sales to charity.

If you want to enjoy more of Joseph’s work I’d also suggest you listen to his weekly podcast Jaffe Juice and visit his company Crayon, a social media company among the first agencies to build online communities in Second Life.

[tags]Conversational Marketing, Word of Mouth Marketing[/tags]

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Twittereferral, originally uploaded by e8blog.

Example of the power of social networks to source external referrals via Twitter. Thanks Chris Brogan

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twittercruiting, originally uploaded by e8blog.

Example of how to Use the power of the online community and network to source top talent.

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