I ran across an interesting post from the LinkedIn blog, via Steve Barham from LinkedIn, entitled Where did all the people go from the collapsed financial institutions?. The post was looking at the flow of employees between five major financial services companies:

• Barclays
• Credit Suisse
• Citigroup
• Bank Of America
• JP Morgan Chase

This image shows the amazing amount of data that is available from LinkedIn both via public searches and as a premium paying member, to quote the post:

To be specific, other than two acquiring companies (Bank of America acquired Merrill Lynch and Nomura acquired Lehman Brothers’ franchise in the Asia Pacific region), Barclays was by far the biggest beneficiary, scooping up 10% of the laid off talent, followed by Credit Suisse at 1.5% and Citigroup at 1.1 %.

While an interesting look at talent movement it got me thinking.

A couple of questions came to mind:

1. Do you use external talent movement data in your workforce planning/sourcing strategy planning?
2. Does your workforce analytics program allow you the same sort of analysis?

I would suspect most companies would answer No to both questions. The cynical might also ask why would you want this information. So let’s look at a couple of examples:

Example 1: Your organisation is experiencing rapid growth in one particular area of the business, so you need to recruit more employees. Access this information would allow you to target the “usual suspects” for new talent but you could also look to see if there had been a major exodus to other organisations that may not be on your “usual suspects” list. These organisations may not be prepared for an all out assault on their talent.

Example 2: Can you produce graphs that show where each division of your organisation is getting is best performing employees, covering both internal and external movements? Not a purely LinkedIn example but highlighting similar talent flows.

A final note there is no reason why your HR/Payroll/ERP/People Management/Whatever System should not be launching these sorts of features. For example LinkedIn opened its API up to developers almost 6 months ago.

For several years now I have been watching the development of social media and its eventual impact on both the HR and Recruitment professions. I have attempted to define social recruiting, run presentations on the development of a strategy, and worked with several clients on creating a strategy.

If you attended some of my presentations in the last year you might have seen two basic diagrams that I have used to start getting the message across. The first designed to highlight the social media can be used through the full recruitment process. The second trying to map the process to the four C’s of social media. Neither really got the message across and all the time I have felt I was still missing something.

The haze is clearing.

Following the Altimeter Group’s release of their 18 Use Cases for Social CRM, I got to thinking again. While I am still not 100% happy with the result I thought I would release this revised model to the world.

A few of things stand out for me now. There are 18 use cases within this model, an accident more than intent, not each one is relevant for agency recruiters, but all are relevant for in-house recruiters. As with the Altimeter Group’s model each starts with a listening and reflection phase, this is intentional as listening is the first part of any social strategy. Each of the 18 use cases can deliver a return on investment to an organisation that implements them.

Next step is build out each of these use cases into more detail, I also suspect a couple will be killed and more will be added as I go along.

(If you read the Altimeter report you will see I have re-used a number of their ideas in the image which is one of the reasons the model is released under Creative Commons.)

Last night I had the privilege  to see François-Frédéric Guy perform in his Sydney debut as part of the Sydney Symphony’s International Pianists in Recital Series. François-Frédéric performed three Chopin and three Beethoven pieces to a packed crowd of piano lovers. In particular he performed:

CHOPIN 
Nocturne in C minor, Op.48 No.1 
Nocturne in E, Op.62 No.2 
Polonaise-fantaisie, Op.61 
BEETHOVEN 
Sonata No.31 in A flat, Op.110 
‘Tempest’ Sonata, Op.31 No.2 
‘Moonlight’ Sonata, Op.27 No.2

I was lucky enough to be in the front row, just out of hand sight but still awesome seats, essentially I was able to get up close and personal with François-Frédéric during his performance. I could see the emotion in his body, the sweat dripping from his face, the frantic movement of the pedals and hammers in the amazing Steinway concert grand. The music was awe inspiring.

In recognition of how much he had put into his performance the audience responded with round after round of applause, resulting in 2 encore performances.

I could not help but reflect on how engaged François-Frédéric was; the emotion, the love, the sweat he poured into his work, and how if organisation could replicate this then they would succeed beyond the expectations of any board directors or group of shareholders.

Each note he played must of been practiced thousands and thousands of times. But every note he played had passion and feeling to ensure that his customers had the best possible experience he could deliver.

Now he was not perfect, he made several errors most undetectable to to the average listener but they were there. However none of the experts (my mother is a piano teacher and musical educator) in the auditorium said anything, they all came back from the interval and continued to enjoy the performance.

So let’s contrast this with the average companies talent management practices. How many organisation’s employees are so engaged that they would give everything into every single transaction they perform? How many managers would still provide a stand ovation to their employees for a fantastic job, even if there were a few hiccups along the way? How many organisations would give prizes (François-Frédéric received flowers) every time an employee completes their daily job?

All of these things took place last night during François-Frédéric’s performance.

So I ask what are you doing to make your employees want to work as tirelessly to succeed as François-Frédéric did? What are you doing to have policies and procedures to enable such a performer? How can your performance review processes be enhanced so that a meaningful standing ovation can be provided for outstanding work?

Finally how are you providing a meaningful and supportive environment?

On Monday my colleague Philip Tusing, co-author of the Sources of Talent Report, released his latest report, Executive Monitor. An eye opening look at what 1,332 executives are thinking in Australia about all sorts of different topics from compensation, education, recruiters and personal branding.

Philip gives a great run down on the key findings on his site, so go read them there as I do not plan to reproduce them here. Instead I wanted to look at what the results mean to me.

I see the key issues from the report being how do employers keep their senior employees both engaged, motivated and working towards the goals of the organisation, instead of just their own personal goals.

Another message from the report I found was that Australian executives are motivated primarily by money and their own success. While this is not necessarily a bad thing, and nor is it limited just to the executive ranks, I think some of the key findings show us a fairly dangerous future.

The number one trigger for a change in job is not growth, development, experience, cultural fit or anything that a majority of HR interventions focus on it is money at 30%. With almost 80% of these employees expecting yearly pay rises between 6 – 10%, way above inflation, and almost 70% see salary as the primary reason to do a good job.

Further concerns are found in the expectations and intentions of these executives. Work life balance while a stated value by the survey respondents was not a primary driving factor when undertaking a job search, money was still number one. All is not good on the branding side either with 90% of executives felt that personal branding was more important than developing that of their employers.

So where do I think this leaves HR? With massive opportunity.

What are your thoughts?

So after getting being accepted to your Dream University–after painstakingly editing college applications, obsessing over grades, finding extra-curricular activities that sparked your interest AND would somehow impress a college admissions committee–you thought it was all over, right? Once accepted, you’d think the next logical step is to finish your degree and get a job.

But, especially in today’s economic climate, in which employers are consistently scaling down their college grad hires, a full-time job is one more step away. Welcome to the world of internships.

Even though internships are largely unpaid, applications for what are considered absolutely necessary precursors to scarce jobs are on the rise. That means more competition for positions that will force you to pay for work, and not the other way around.

A recent Chicago Tribune article describes students struggling to raise funds for their internships, sometimes with the help of their parents.  Two internship placement services, The University of Dreams and The Washington Center, are charging as much as $9000 just to help students FIND internships. That, and the cost of living, means some students–who have traditionally worked service related jobs as waiters during summer months– will now be forced to run into serious debt, or miss out on ostensible opportunities.

The value of an unpaid internship, however, goes without saying. Even though we’re all familiar with the coffee-fetching, copy-machine-running clichés, many internships do provide some real, hands-on experience in fields as varied as publishing, marketing, software engineering, and teaching.

An internship gives students the opportunity to get a taste of a prospective career before they dive head-first into a full-time job they may not enjoy.  Since internal hiring is a favored practice among employers, the only way for a recent college grad to work for certain companies is to have worked within the company first. So even if you are fetching coffee, you’ll benefit from being considered an “internal” hire. In fact, an acquaintance of mine did just that–after two unpaid summer internships with Sports Illustrated magazine, he now has full-time job as a sports reporter in SI’s New York City office.

Although unpaid internships seem like an inherently unfair practice, universities often offer stipends to fund internships, and internship placement services do have a variety of need- and merit-based scholarships. What’s more, unpaid internships can offer students an opportunity to learn the difficult lesson of budgeting and living independently.

To get a better idea of what it’s like to be an intern, read former college student Steve Kent’s harrowing but entertaining account of his unpaid internship experience.

Yesterday I made a few minor visual changes over at Inspecht and a fairly major change on Inspecht TV. There will be some more changes coming over the new few weeks, along with an upgrade to the blog, but for now I am running with these themes.

The Inspecht TV changes were in direct response to the feedback from you the readers. Overwhelmingly there has been very positive support for the idea, with many people subscribing to the feed. Also in response to feedback there will be some Inspecht produced content coming very soon.

The Inspecht site is now based on the 960 grid system, an interesting method of laying out content on a page. While Inspecht TV is using a premium Wordpress theme that has been modified and upgraded with a number of different plugins.

I hope you like the changes.

Last week I did a short podcast with Nick McCormick, author of Lead Well and Prosper, looking at tips for managing social media in the workplace.

We spoke about implementing guidelines/policies within the workplace along with some of the potential issues and how to manage them.  However given the short format of the podcast, it is only 8 minutes,  it is hard to cover everything but makes the podcast very easy to listen too.

I thought it would be good to also cover some of the tips for creating guidelines/policies here to help you out. The resulting document, in whatever format, needs to achieve five major things:

1. Have people stop and think before posting, both professionally and personally.
2. Focus people on thinking about what they are doing and the implications.
3. Highlight that while disclaimers are good, you cannot hide behind them.
4. Remind people to keep their online interactions real and authentic.
5. Ensure people respect the culture of the tools and services you are using.

If you want to learn more about social media in the workplace you can watch my presentation from RecruitTECH 2009 over on Inspecht TV or contact me for more information.

Given the press coverage we have had in Australia, and overseas, this week I would suggest everyone needs to implement these five tips when online.

Over the last few years there has been a significant growth in the number of people using general search engines to search for jobs. In Australia alone the word jobs appears in around 30 million searches per month!

However what does this really mean?

Does it mean that Seek, MyCareer and CareerOne will be going out of business because everyone will be using Google?

Not at all!

So does it mean you can ignore the world of search engine optimization or SEO for short?

Again not at all!

Very few people who use search engines look beyond the first one or two pages of results. If your website is not returned within those two pages, preferably on the first page and ideally in the number one position, your competition is beating you.

So then what is SEO? At it’s core SEO is designing your web site in a manner that makes it easy to be found, and indexed by search engines. Simple.

Well to a point. Obviously the best way to optimize your site for search engines is ensure that your content contains the keywords that people might use to find your product, brand or organisation. However by just adding these terms to your web site will not magically promote your site on top the number one page or into the number one spot.  This means you must learn the art of SEO.

There are many other tricks that you need to master such as making sure your keywords are used in headings, appropriate naming of your pages, meta data, links and having relevant content. However you should always keep in mind that for some keywords there is lots of competition which makes it very difficult to get your site in the number one spot. This means you need to undertake keyword research to know which keywords to target.

So why is this relevant for recruiters in Australia?

Because the word jobs appears in 30 million searches per month. But so do the brands, products and names of your clients. This means that the potential for searchers to find the job advertised by you significantly increases if you know what you are doing.

Let’s not forget that potential clients also use search engines to find new recruiters. So your business also benefits from effective use of SEO.

To learn more about search engine optimization and how it can benefit your recruitment activities register for the March Webinar, SEO for Recruiting.

(Image from Flickr by Search Engine People Blog.)

Industry heavy weights Gerry Crispin and Mark Mehler will be releasing their 9th Annual Source of Hire report on Friday US time on the CareerXRoads web site. I was lucky enough to be sent an advanced copy by Gerry.

Once again the reports details where corporations in the US found their employees during 2009, this year they look at 176,420 hires.

While the report is not generally available I will share some of the results with you below. However beforehand please note the the quote from Gerry and Mark that appears at the beginning of the document:

If the reader assumes that the data sliced and diced in this whitepaper is truly representative of where firms find their hires in the US, then you will have missed our point entirely. Indeed, this whitepaper, which we have published now for nearly a decade, is constructed as a lab report to examine the problems and the promise of how well corporations measure one part of the staffing process.

Our intent is to hold up a mirror so firms can look at themselves and their increasingly critical and vulnerable supply chain. Vendors can help, but only if staffing leaders are disciplined enough to do their part and get vendors to focus on needed changes as a priority.

So on with the results.

Internal Hires

51% of all hires were internal movement or promotions. Indicating the continued trend of internal talent management activities around succession planning and development. The report highlights that one of the stated employee value propositions (EVPs) of most organisations is to develop their employees. A result of around 51% of hires through internal placement tends to indicate that these organisation are fulfilling this development promise.

The bad news in Australia is when compared to the 2009 Sources of Talent Report it was found that only 6.29% of hires were through internal promotion. What does this say about how Australian employers fulfill their EVPs?

External Hires

75% of all external hires came from 5 sources:

1. Referrals
2. Career Site
3. Job Boards
4. Direct Sourcing

Referrals have been consistently the number one source of external hires for the last five years.

When comparing to the Australian report referrals were the number four source of external hires, at only 7.57% of all hires. Once again there is a huge opportunity for Australian organisations to increase their use of employee referral programs instead of continually relying on the “post and pray” approach through job boards. Don’t know how to do referrals, check out our ebook.

Direct Sourcing/Internal Recruiters

One very interesting area of the report is where they try and define what is direct sourcing. As part of the survey they asked the participants what do they consider direct sourcing to be, the options:

• Mining our internal ATS for candidates who have not applied
• Mining external candidate databases for leads we can convert into prospects and candidates
• Researching profiles on social networks such as LinkedIn, Facebook etc
• Developing Search Engine Marketing campaigns to create prospects from leads
• Cold Calls/contacting individuals from internal or external research

The results are shown in the table below.

Given internal recruiters are the second largest source of hire in Australia what do you consider direct sourcing?

Further Thoughts

Throughout the report Gerry and Mark write about many of the same challenges Phillip Tusing and I encountered when preparing the Australian report. For example, the devil is in the detail and it is very hard to keep everyone working on the same definition of each source. And even if you place a job in print it will still end up online, so is that a job board or print source. What is a source vs a channel, or a tool vs a process?

At the end of the report that provide some good suggestions on how we can all improve the tracking and usage of source of hire data. These include:

• Fixing the inherent issues with candidates self reporting source
• Deciding where the source starts, in the channel or at the destination
• Look at additional methods to capture source of hire data to supplement self reporting
• Understand patterns in your source data
• Implement more discipline in process and practices

I would highly recommend you go and download the report when it is available.

Many companies during the last 12 months have experienced either a reduction or at best no growth in revenue, not local vendor PeopleStreme . PeopleStreme, who sell talent management solutions recorded a 30% increase in revenue.

According to Lyle Potgieter CEO of PeopleStreme:

“Organisations have got two problems, the first being getting their people productive, the second looking after their top talent. Both needs require systems and know how and industrial age paper shuffling systems don’t cut it anymore.”

These challenges have fueling their growth over the last 12 months and I would suspect this growth will continue into the next year or so.

I was lucky enough to spend a couple of hours with Lyle and his Principal Software Architect Dale Smalley to review their product line. Overall PeopleStreme provide a comprehensive, fully integrated, toolset for the management of people within your organisation. Their product line covers:

• Talent Management
• Performance Management
• Recruitment Software and Applicant Tracking
• Employee Engagement Survey
• Workforce Planning
• Employee Recognition
• Exit Survey
• eLearning Management
• Succession Planning
• Organisation Charting
• Position Description Software
• Human Resources Metrics

They also happen to have based a vast majority of the product features on their research work that they undertake jointly with the Performance Management Institute, RMIT and La Trobe University.

PeopleStreme also happen to be the producers of some of the recent videos over on Inspecht TV.

I was updating my feeds today and decided I had better add the news/press/media release for a number of local vendors. I had not done this earlier as last I had looked most did not provide RSS feeds, I had hoped this situation had changed.

Unfortunately I was wrong.

Of the 12 vendors I check before writing this post only 1 provided RSS for news updates and this was provided through a blog as their news source. Most had some form of email news/newsletter service.

The vendors without RSS news updates are:

• ADP Australia
• Aurion
• Empower
• Fasttrack
• Frontier Software
• Inzenius
• Neller
• NGA
• Pageup People
• Recruitment Systems
• Talent2
• Turbo Recruit

The only vendor with RSS?

• PeopleStreme

I just picked this list at random to add, they range in size and scope, and are a mix of recruitment,talent management and HR/Payroll software providers.

Lucky Google Reader now has the ability to create a feed from a static HTML page so I can sort of subscribe to the vendors updates via my RSS reader.

“I wish for everyone to help create a strong, sustainable movement to educate every child about food, inspire families to cook again and empower people everywhere to fight obesity” – Jamie Oliver

I posted the 20 minute video of Jamie Oliver this year’s TED Prize winner over on Inspecht TV but wanted to cross post here as well. In the video he shares stories from his anti-obesity project, specifically food in schools call for an all-out assault on obesity. At one point he shows a classroom full of young children who do not seem to know what some of the most common vegetables even look like!

What struck me was only this week here in Australia burger chain Hungry Jacks has admitted to breaking advertising rules that limits the advertising of high fat foods to children. The reason? Contractual obligations to the “US-based licensor of The Simpsons which specified how and when the children’s meal promotion was to be advertised.”

Now just think of the workplace impacts in 10 to 15 years when all these children start suffering type 2 diabetes and requiring time off for medical treatments! (Yes I had to connect this to the blog in some way.)

An interesting move last week international vendor NorthgateArinso acquired Adelaide based HR/Payroll vendor Neller. Finally giving NorthgateArinso a decent foothold of the Australian marketplace. Based on the press announcements all of Neller’s employees will remain and local Neller CEO will take up the reins on the combined entity.

Several years ago Northgate, as it was called back then, acquired vendor Rebus however this never really translated into major growth in Australia. With Neller the outcome could be very different. Neller’s Preceda People product pays around 700,000 employees across about 1,000 customer including large corporates such as Woolworths.

In 2006 Neller re-developed their AS400 based system into a fully functioning web based application using tools provided by LANSA. Since this time Neller have continued with strong sales growth.

It is not surprising that in Australia we are following the global trend of consolidation in HR/Payroll/Talent Management marketplace.

Over the last week there have been several videos published over at Inspecht TV and lined up content over the next few weeks. So if you are interested in the latest HR and recruitment video content go subscribe.

In the meantime if you have not subscribed here are some of the videos:

• Recruitment Video – Defense
• Macquarie Bank employee watches girl on TV
• Did You Know HC Edition
• My RecruitTECH 2009 presentation in 3 part, 1, 2 & 3

Some of the content lined up includes presentations by Seth Godin, Jimmy Wales, Clay Shirky, Dave Ulrich and others.

One of the most important tasks of any project is building and maintaining your business case. Unfortunately the business case is so often a single document not covering full life cycle costs and produced to obtain funding approval and never looked at again!

Bad!

In fact your business case needs to document the full cost of the business change you are creating and be monitored for viability on a regular basis.

A business case has many components and will usual vary by organisation and it’s own requirements. However in general a ”good” (I use the term to define the scope of a business case not the output) business case will include information on:

• Background reasons
• Expected Benefits
• Anticipated Costs
• Known Risks
• Timelines
• Investment Appraisal and Evaluation

This content will help your organisation ensure that the business cast is justified and that the reason for your project to continue is aligned with overall corporate strategy.

The business case is also a living document. As such you should review and update the contents at regular/various stages in your project, at least when ever something significant happens within or to the project. The project board or steering committee should be reviewing the ongoing viability of the project and if the business case is not longer valid the project should be stopped. Stopping a project is always a political issue however if the benefits no longer outweigh the costs (sunk and future) then it should be stopped.

Best in class organisations also conduct post project reviews including benefit realisation assessments to ensure that the project achieved the expected outcomes.

So does your current technology project have a valid business case?

(Photo Flickr User: alancleaver_2000)

Over the years I have thought about creating a local HR or Recruiting focused podcast or video podcast, however each time I decide I really do not have the motivation to keep something like that up.

Well today I launched Inspecht TV. So what changed?

Several things did actually. Firstly Inspecht TV is not a regular show, it is not even a podcast, which satisfies my first requirement of not requiring a heap of work to get going.

Secondly I have been playing with video over the last few months as part of the ATC Social Media event (Youtube videos as well) and with the Inspecht webinars. As part of this work I have got myself a new camera, and figured out how to use video editing software (even if I am bad at it), convert to flash and deliver via Wordpress.

The finally, Justin Hillier over at Social Recruiting 360 has been talking up video for a while and is even doing a real video podcast with interviews and topics etc.

All these things came together to become Inspecht TV.

What is Inspecht TV?

Yes there will be the occasional Inspecht produced video however the majority of the content will be showcasing other people’s videos. Inspecht TV will bring together a curated list of content for you to consume, you can subscribe to our special RSS feed to receive the latest content.

If you have been following some of the other HR and Recruitment blogs in Australia there has been a bit of talk about using video, even I joined the discussions with a bit of a technology review.

Today I want to highlight a fairly unique use of YouTube Video. (If you are in marketing circles you might have seen this already.)

Ad agency BooneOakley moved their whole web site on to YouTube! Yes you heard it their whole web site onto YouTube.

A couple of years ago the Collab@Work blog wrote a very interesting article on how leadership in MMORPG’s, such as World of Warcraft is temporary. They provided reasons why in these MMORPG’s it makes sense to have temporary leaders:

In those games, leadership is a temporary position. At one point in time, you’re leading, the week after you’re following another leader. Reasons vary: too much pressure, less availability, someone else better suited for the job at hand, …

Unfortunately they highlighted that in traditional business leadership is virtually never temporary. Over the last couple of years the growth in this idea around temporary leadership in the way many small business collaboratively work together, especially when it comes to businesses based around the web. I would say that this is in part due to the fact that people in small business are very engaged in what they do, otherwise they would go out of business. Engagement is a key attribute required for temporary leadership to work.

Temporary leadership has many benefits again to quote Collab@Work:

• having been a leader makes you a better follower. You understand better what the leader is trying to achieve
• being a follower makes you a better leader. Your experience as a follower is still recent
• from an organizational perspective, you can “test” more leaders including the ones that wouldn’t have been considered. That can dramatically increase your leadership bench, and see who are the best leaders rather than the best leader potentials.

The post was based on a HBR article from May 2008 which pointed out that  in today’s business:

A lot of work will be done by global teams—partly composed of people from outside the institution, over whom a leader has no formal authority—that are assembled for a single project and then disbanded. Collaboration within these geographically diverse groups will, by necessity, occur mainly through digital rather than face-to-face interaction.

Sounds like an MMORPG to me.  For example it makes sense that people who can successfully execute a 6 hour raid with 50 guild members based in 10 countries is developing the right skills needed for business in the future. They are also learning how to effectively leverage all of the social technologies we have available.

So as both articles say do not necessarily dismiss the hours spent by your children or friends on these games, they may in fact be learning the critical skills to be the next world leaders.

Yesterday afternoon I sat in to listen Bill Boorman’s Downunder Recruiting show where the discussion was on video, an interesting topic. I am very interested in video within a talent acquisition strategy as this has been a topic for many many years and I am glad to see people are starting to move away from the “Video Resume” as quite frankly that is probably the worse use case for video.

Before we go too much further we need to see video as just another form of content, it just happens to have audio and moving images. This is the key as I see people get stuck with video as just a method for having a talking head, video today can be far more than that.

However for all it’s benefits there is still a low take up of video, especially in Australia. One reason I believe we have not seen a broader take up of video is it is still a fairly hard technology to master both functionally and technically.

Another barrier I see is performance. This is a big issue in Australia, where we are ranked about 42nd on performance for brandband downloads and 72nd for uploads. This can mean it will take hours to upload a large video to your hosting provider and when people are watching your carefully crafted message it keeps stopping due to caching issues.

Technical Mastery

The first challenge is you need to produce good quality audio and images. Many people are uncomfortable with having their voice recorded, let alone appearing on video. Once these hurdles are overcome, a good quality script and plan needs to be prepared.  One aspect often over looked is the location needs to be right, lighting, background images and noise are all aspects to consider.

Then there are the technical aspects, starting with video capture, while webcams are very popular they generally do not produce good quality video, and they are also difficult to move around. But webcams are a great tools for interactive video, such as Skype. Don’t forget you still need to think about composition aspects, what will the other person see in the background of your image?

If you are producing a video for others to watch at a later time your jobs just got a lot harder.

After the captured of the video editing can be a challenge. You need software, which under Windows is a problem (yes Mac OS X users have a much better time here), yes there are open source products but to get that truely polished look you need to purchase software. Then actually rendering of any video beyond 3 – 5 minutes takes a lot of CPU processing power. A high quality video also takes up disk space, think 100MB per minute at standard definition with even more when you go high definition.

Once you have produced your video where do you host it? There are many public services for example is YouTube right you can only host 10 minutes and you have limited controls over security. Vimeo is another service that allows hosting, and for a fee you can control exactly who has access to the video, however the terms of service limit commercial usage. If you want your video to be viewable on mobile phones then things become even more complex as flash, the typical delivery method, has limited penetration on mobile devices.

Internal communications also need an environment to deliver the video, do not underestimate this otherwise your IT team will not be happy with you.  These tools need to be set up before you can begin to use video.

Ok with the negative aspects is video still worth getting involved in? Yes!

Potential Video Usage

Below is a short listing of where you can use video within your HR processes.

1. Employer branding
2. Attraction
3. Training
4. Employee communications
5. Job advertisement
6. Job interviews, with Skype or similar
7. Candidate videos
8. Anywhere where audio and images would enhance the message

Video Examples

Job Advertising

A recent job advert video from Australian company Noble Samurai looking for a new Agile Development Lead. During this 4 minute 40 seconds production you get to understand what the roles is about, who you would be working with, the working environment and culture.

The video starts with an interview with the CEO covering some of the things they are looking for. Followed by quick review of the office and some introduction to some of the team. While there are a couple of composition issues but generally the quality is very good.

Branding/Attraction/Employee Communications

Another good example is actually a excellent example on the use of social media in general, ASDA’s The Green Room. The site integrates all sorts of content, but the item I want to highlight is a recent message from the CEO to their employees.

Good practices in using video

Like all of this social media “stuff” quality content is critical. You need to add value to viewers otherwise they will turn off. If you are using video as part of your attraction process, make it real, keep things honest but professional. Keep the video focused, engaging and overall fun. Here are my top 10 production tips:

1. Spend time planning up front
2. Tell a story
3. Have a good microphone
4. Think about lighting and background composition
5. Plan your delivery methods
6. When capturing the video try not to pan too much or too fast
7. Also limit you use of the zoom
8. Use a tripod when shooting (whenever practical)
9. Shoot from different angles, use multiple cameras
10. Include lots of wide angle shots

Also have a look at Justin Hillier’s views on video.

While we are still in the first few weeks of the new year I through it would be good to look at come of the things you should focus on during 2010 to.

In no particular order here is my list of 10 things to do in 2010:

1. Have an HR/Talent Management/Recruiting application blueprint

The IT environment in many organisations is complex and needs constant management, even in the smallest of organisations. To help with managing the complexity ensure you have a strategy/roadmap/blueprint to follow.

2. Learn about Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

It seems finally organisations are starting to take note of the value that can be achieved from a decent career’s web site. While content and design are critical understanding a bit about SEO can help your jobs appear in the elusive number 1 spot of search results. Even if you do not have a career’s web site having your personal brand appear in search results can be a great thing.

3. Implement a workforce planning program, with a foundation around competencies

The recent CedarCrestone HR Technology survey found that organisations who were using workforce planning and competency management tools had significantly higher sales growth than those that did not. While they say they are not suggesting causality but over the last few years there has been stronger linkage between sales growth and these areas.

4. Think beyond Facebook and Twitter when looking at social media

With so much talk about Facebook and Twitter I feel people have forgotten that social media is more than just these two sites. Remember social media is about user generated content, including blogs, images, video, audio, ratings, reviews etc.

5. Focus on high quality hires, never settle for less

This should always be the best line of your hiring decisions. Period.

6. Ensure your HR/Recruiting function is metrics driven

Related to workforce planning is being metrics driven and I am not talking just about lists of headcount either. Gaining a deep understanding of your business and it’s drivers is critical to success. Do you know the best performing source of talent? What about the performance of your succession plans? But do not create an environment where you have an over reliance on benchmark based data as this basically turns the measures in to commodities by assuming what works for one organisation will work for yours.

7. Don’t be afraid to experiment

This one is for the Australian’s out there, experiment and fail!! As a population we tend to be afraid of failure. Do not be afraid. Organisations that experiment and fail regularly then to succeed.

8. Learn about Web Squared

You might be asking web what? Web Squared is the next evolution of the whole Web 2.0 idea. Web Squared builds on the idea that everything and everyone in the world cast “information shadows” or data. This data when leveraged provides extraordinary opportunities to organisations.

9. Begin to think how you can bring real time into your operations

The first part of web squared that you can bring into your organisation today is leveraging real time data. Look at real time data as key signals that form part of your business processes.

10. Never ever forget about change management

One of the biggest reasons for projects, of any sort, to fail is a lack of acceptance in the final outcomes being sort by the project. This can be alleviated through an effective change management program.