One of the things that has been going on in the background for the last couple of months has been the building of a social media for recruitment training program, in partnership with InsideJob.

The program consists of three modules; one hour webinar, 1 day introduction and 2 day advance course and is structured to take you from one module to another. (In fact you cannot attend the next module until you have completed the one before.)

So what will you learn?

1. What is Social Media for Recruitment

1 hour Webinar as an introduction and pre work for the Essential Social Media for Recruitment program we will discuss:

• What is Social Media
• Social Media Channels and Tools
• Trends in Social Media
• Introduction to Essential Social Media for Recruitment program
• Q&A

2. Essential Social Media for Recruitment

1 day workshop where you will gain the skills to develop an effective Social Media strategy for your business including:

• Social Media Strategy, Guidelines, Policies and Barriers
• Defining your Business Drivers and aligning your Social Media strategy
• Social Media Best Practice Framework
• Getting Started – what now!

3. Advanced Social Media for Recruitment

2 day workshop where you will gain the skills to develop and deploy an effective Social Media strategy for your business including:

• Effective use of Social Media Channels & Tools
• Developing your Social Media Content
• Search Engine Optimisation & Marketing
• Defining your Business Case for Social Media to gain key stakeholder buy-in
• Aligning your EVP and Social Media Messaging
• Developing your Social Media Strategy in Detail
• Deploying your Social Media Strategy

If you are interested in attending the next sessions head over to the InsideJob web site and register!

At the upcoming ATC Social Media conference (early bird prices until 30 September) I will be talking briefly about mobile recruiting. A topic I know is a little strange to some people, but I think effective use of mobile technology is going to become a critical part of a recruiters toolkit. Let’s face it mobile technology is not something you can ignore, as of December 2009 there were over 4.5 billion active mobile subscribers globally!

I am going to look beyond SMS, Bluetooth and email on smart phones, while they have a critical place in your mobile strategy there are other things to consider.

For example, while a traditional computer is replaced on average every 3.5 years mobile devices are averaging a replacement cycle of 18 months! This means just because something did not work last year doesn’t mean it won’t work this year!

Other topics I will look at include location based services, there is more to it than FourSquare or Facebook Places, areas like sales force automation and the impact of cloud computing on mobiles.

I am also trying to think of a good demonstration for the session so if you have any ideas, leave me a comment.

Last night at around 5.30pm I received a call from Penny Elmslie, the marketing manager at NGA.Net about two topics that they were very excited about. First was they had started a blog, second they had purchased a company.

While the first piece of news is not that earth shattering for some, I personally feel it is great that another Australian vendor has entered the blogging space. Hopefully NGA.Net will use this as an opportunity for people outside the organisation to learn a bit more about what makes them tick. You can find the blog at http://blog.nga.net/, the RSS feed is also available.

The second piece of news is far more exciting, well in my mind. NGA have acquired Acelero, the Sydney based Performance Management vendor. The acquisition fills a much needed gap in the NGA product line and to be honest allows them to meet their marketing claims:

“Software that helps large organisations to connect, recruit & develop their people”

Good news for Acelero staff as it seems 14 of them will be joining NGA, with Managing Director Ken Sheridan remaining as the head of the new NGA Performance Management division.

It will be interesting to see how long it takes to fully integrate the product lines so that NGA.Net customers have a true integrated talent management solution. I am not aware of the technical platform that Acelero was using, however it is good to see NGA were sensible and purchased an existing SAAS vendor so at least architecturally they are somewhat aligned.

Yes once again I have gone AWOL on this blog, I know I’m a bad blogger. Well if there are any readers left I will try and post some more here.

The last 2 months have been filled with lots and lots of work two major projects not to mention the planning for the ATC Social Media 101 conference in December, more on that later, and the InsideJobs Social Media for Recruitment Course.

That’s it, just a short post to let you know I have not forgotten about the blog.

Last week while I was at ATC Sydney there was lots and lots of talk about employer brands and who really controls them in today’s social media world. For example Steve Fogarty, Recruiting Captain, from adidas in North America covered the topic highlighting that recruiters need to think more like marketers to attract top talent, not to mention that everything that happens online create meta-data about your brand. Kevin Wheeler touched on the topic during his closing keynote saying the personal brands are taking over from corporate brands.

So what does this mean?

Like consumer brands your employer brand is not longer “owned” by you the employer, candidates, employees, ex-employees, analysts, everyone can now shape how your brand is viewed by the world. From a consumer perspective just look at the fake BP Public Relations Twitter account, who has many thousands more followers than the real BP PR team, and their comedic look at what is shaping up to the worlds largest environmental disaster. Every tweet has a hashtag #bpcares creating a creative and funny stream of tweets however I doubt the BP PR team is very happy.

About 3 weeks ago Facebook released a new feature, Community Pages (read the official blog post) where they are aggregating Wikipedia content, along with user generated post from across the web to create a “profile” of brands, places, organisation etc. The difference between these pages and corporate sponsored pages is that right now no one controls the content on the Community Page! Now Facebook has said they are looking for passionate people to help curate the pages content. But for now your brand is at the mercy of automated collection of content. To make matters worse Facebook profile pages have been changed and now there are links attached to employers, likes and interests, favorite books, music and movies!

You do not own what Facebook is displaying on these new Community Pages, and you may never own the content.

Still think you own your employer brand?

For the last 12 years CedarCrestone has been conducting research into how organisations are using technology to support their HR functions, the resulting report is a must read for anyone involved in the HR Technology industry.

Once again it is time for the survey and I really encourage all of my readers who are part of organisations with 500+ employees to participate.

Below is the invite from Alexia Martin Research Director from CedarCrestone:

CedarCrestone requests your participation in its CedarCrestone 2010–2011 HR Systems Survey: HR Technologies, Service Delivery Choices, and Metrics Survey, 13th Annual Edition through July 5, 2010. The survey is a comprehensive research effort designed to provide organizations with important data to plan, justify, benchmark, and execute HR technologies. The survey questionnaire is available online at www.CedarCrestone.com/hrssv3.

All respondents will receive an advance copy of the results in late September 2010. We will invite you to a special webinar of results thereafter. The first 100 respondents completing the survey will receive a $5 Starbucks card. There are further enticements described at the end of this letter.

The 2010–2011 HR Survey covers questions about:

• Application adoption
• HR software acquisition and deployment trends
• “Going global” trends
• The value of HR technologies

“For six years in a row,” says HR Technology® Conference co-chair Bill Kutik, “we have asked CedarCrestone to debut its survey at our event because it is the most thorough, highly respected and useful survey on technology usage in HR. Clearly, HR and IT practitioners know that, too, because it draws standing room only attendance every year.”

The survey collects responses from HR and IT management with knowledge of the HR technologies in use and planned. We invite representatives from organizations in all industries with over 500 employees to participate. All responses are anonymous and will be kept confidential. We will only use your information in the aggregate. The survey questionnaire is available online at www.CedarCrestone.com/hrssv3.

We appreciate your contribution to the most comprehensive collection of data focused on HR technologies usage and overall HR service delivery.

Best wishes,

Alexia Martin
Director, Research and Analytics

I noticed an interesting development over night, Twitter is looking to ban all third-part ad networks from injecting ads into users Twitter streams.

From the Twitter blog:

As our primary concern is the long-term health and value of the network, we have and will continue to forgo near-term revenue opportunities in the service of carefully metering the impact of Promoted Tweets on the user experience. It is critical that the core experience of real-time introductions and information is protected for the user and with an eye toward long-term success for all advertisers, users and the Twitter ecosystem. For this reason, aside from Promoted Tweets, we will not allow any third party to inject paid tweets into a timeline on any service that leverages the Twitter API. We are updating our Terms of Service to articulate clearly what we mean by this statement, and we encourage you to read the updated API Terms of Service to be released shortly.

Now as the terms of service have not been updated we do not know what this really means but this announcement got me thinking with regard to Job Ads.

Are job boards just another ad network? If so will job boards be prohibited from pushing job ads into Twitter?

I’m sure it won’t come to that but interesting to think about the consequences if it does.

Over the last 2 weeks I have been giving a series of presentations looking at how social media (and Enterprise 2.0) can drive employee engagement. While the slides are available on slideshare for download I wanted to give a bit of context.

As part of preparing the presentation I came across a presentation by Susan Scrupski from Soco Partners (I also lifted several other ideas from one of her presentations to the 2.0 Adoption Council, thanks Susan!), where Susan introduced the concept of 2.0 Zen:

• Collaboration
• Trust
• Authenticity
• Transparency

This struck a chord with me. If someone had asked me to describe good social media these are the words I would have used. But I started looking at this a little further, from an HR point of view, and from my research on engagement. I have found five general attributes that enable employees to feel valued and therefore engaged:

• Involvement in decision making
• Feel they are able to voice their ideas, & managers listen to these views
• Have line of sight between employee performance & company performance
• They have career development
• When the organisation is concerned for employees’ health & wellbeing

While looking at this it occurred to me that an organisation that had a highly engaged workforce exhibited the same attributes as Susan’s 2.0 Zen:

• Collaboration
• Trust
• Authenticity
• Transparency

From this I built the rest of the presentation, which you can find below.

Every employer wants to get the most productivity from their employees. If you push too hard, though, you risk making employees unhappy, causing unwelcome turnover and costing you money. So the question remains, how do you motivate your employees to work their best?

Praise

Employers are often amazed how well this one little trick, which costs nothing, can so strongly motivate employee behavior. Bosses often think that their employees are only motivated by money, but the truth is, employees want to like their jobs. They want to like their bosses and the companies for whom they work. This can be a huge leverage for employers, especially in tough economic times when money just isn’t there for performance bonuses.

Every employee performance review should highlight two or three positive aspects of the person’s performance for every negative aspect. Show appreciation for the work the person does for you every day while asking for better performance in certain areas. Don’t make performance review time something to be dreaded, but rather something the employee looks forward to.

Make the employee newsletter a chance to praise and highlight high performing, rank and file employees. Institute “Employee of the Month” or even week programs. Rewards can be as simple as a preferred parking spot, but it’s the recognition that will gain you loyal employees.

Talk to Your Employees

Something as small as time spent with company management can help motivate employees. Have a weekly brown bag session with randomly selected employees. Allow them to give feedback and feel like their voices are heard. Let them ask questions, and answer those questions seriously.

Take time to walk through your production areas, greeting employees and chatting for a moment. If your production is industrial, then do this in the lunchroom. Better yet, eat in the lunch room once or twice a week. Be present to your employees. The more you show that you care for your employees, the more your employees will care about you and your bottom line.

Invest Employees in the Bottom Line

Many companies have a performance bonus plan, but it’s often limited to management. Why not provide performance bonuses to all employees, at least at some level. Employees will be more conscious of the bottom line if they have some stake in the company’s quarterly and annual outcome. Watching waste in the little things can add up to big numbers at the end of the year. Finding ways to streamline production, save steps, or use less can have a big impact. If every employee is invested in finding ways to make the company more profitable, instead of just management, your company can make a big turnaround.

Provide Careers, Not Just a Job

Providing opportunities to grow in their career is a great motivation for many employees. Have plans in place for a career path for your employees. Talk to them about what is required to grow from one level to the next. Help provide training for those who with to move up in the company. Whether it’s sending your assistant to a yearly professional conference or having a tuition reimbursement plan, helping your employees’ careers helps you in the long run.

Remember, employees are not just motivated by money. They spend almost half of their waking time working for you. They want to feel like that time is an investment, not just a necessary evil needed to pay the rent. Employees want to enjoy their work and their work environment. They want to feel good about their work and the company they work for. Filling these needs can go a long way to motivating long term, loyal, and productive employees.

Marshall Goldsmith opened the 2010 AHRI National Convention with a highly interactive and thought provoking talk looking at how to be a better coach. Marshall began the session by saying his focus is to teach leaders what to STOP doing instead of teaching them what to do.

Marshall provided us 5 key challenges of successful leaders that they all need to overcome to be truly great:

1. Winning to much
2. Adding too much value
3. Telling the world how smart we are
4. “I already knew that”
5. Passing judgement

He then went on to demonstrate that the key to solving each of these challenges is starting to think more about others than about you. For example, when you try to add additional thoughts and ideas someone’s idea the quality of the idea might go up 5% but their commitment to the idea goes down 15% as it is not longer their idea. Further focusing just on achievement is really all about focusing on me, whereas leadership is all about focusing on other people.

Marshal provided an amazing statistic that the percentage of all interpersonal communication time spent on people talking about how smart they are and people talking about how stupid, bad, inept others are is around 65%!! He did a quick survey of the room and found we felt the average was around 70%, very close. Essentially if business wants to increase productivity then just look to reduce this number as these activities are not revenue generating.

A great coaching tip from Marshall is he has found that creating an environment where people lose small amounts of money creates very large changes in behavior. For example, fining yourself $1/$5 or $10 whenever you do one of the following:

• Start a sentence with no, but, or however
• Start a sentence with Great, but or however
• Give destructive comments about someone

He asked everyone in the room to raise their hands if they had said something negative about someone else in the last month that they didn’t really need to say, hands in the whole room went up. He then fined us all $1 we had to place it on the floor, proceeds went to breast cancer research. He had several very interactive and entertaining activities where we all learned how to give and receive feedback.

He suggests a really good question to ask to your coworkers and family is “How can I get better at work/home?” Unfortunately we don’t ask it enough as we don’t want to know the answer.

Marshall wrapped up the session talking a lot about while these practices are good in business they are critical in your personal life. The guy sitting next to me even mentioned how emotional he had felt during the session when talking about creating better relationships with your partners, parents and children.

All in all an awesome session.

The team at Navigo, distributors of OrgPlus, have released their 2010 reasearch report into HR technology usage by larger organisations in Australia, you can get your copy of the report at http://hrtechreport.com.au.

The report is an interesting read focusing more on organisation’s satisfaction with their solutions than looking at overall trend in usage. Having said that the team at Navigo have been able to extrapolate 8 key conclusions and recommendations:

1. HRIS use in Australia is diverse
2. Technology-based solutions are more satisfactory
3. Organisations satisfied but rarely “very satisfied” with systems
4. HR targets efficiency in drive towards strategy
5. Reducing costs is not a motivator despite the GFC
6. Organisations are ill-prepared for an aging workforce
7. True business intelligence is elusive
8. No one size fits all

From my work and research I agree with every one of these conclusions.

I do not 100% agree with their breakdown of the solutions areas as they are more heavily weighted in the area of talent management, at the expense of other areas. However given the importance of talent management focusing more on this area makes sense given the confusing that exists within most HR departments on what HR technology they are running.

Some stand out pieces of information.

SAP and Chris 21 stand out as the top two HRIS vendors used in the organisations with 500 and above employees. Interesting Neller, who was recently acquired by Northgate Arinso was 5th.

The biggest motivator for improving HR Systems and Technology is still reduce time spent on administration and increase efficiencies. I say still as from my experience has been the number one of two for many many years. One has to wonder about the success of all of the recent projects to implement Employee and Manager Self Service the number one way to drive these two objectives.

PageUp People, PeopleStreme and Successfactors are the most popular systems being referenced as supporting Performance Management processes.

Thomas Otter, Gartner Analyst by day cyclist by night, posted on his Gartner blog last week about the new XING Competency Card and how it raises questions around the need for “complex, expensive, poorly maintained HR competency management applications behind the firewall”.

The competency card allow you to add skills to your XING profile (think a LinkedIn profile), back them up with commentary detailing your experience and then have your contacts validate this experience.

I decided to give the process a bit of test, as such I signed up to XING and created my own profile including a Competence Card (which you can find under the Applications tab). I have to agree with Thomas, while a basic implementation the look and feel are nice and very easy to use. The simplicity of implementation is part of the attraction, making the tool one of the easiest competency tools I have used.

The idea of peer validation is great and something that is really needed for inside the firewall applications, with a bit extra. The ability to have validations from both internal and external contacts, as not competency can be validated internally, especially in a world of partnerships, outsourcing and the like.

The peer validation process reminded me of survey feature found in PeopleStreme, which allows anyone to create a quick survey to collect feedback on their performance. A feature especially liked by the “validation seeking Generation Y” (yes vast generalisation).

I note in the comments of Thomas’s post Jon Ingham raises the point of still seeing a need for internal competency maps, agree. However a tool that supported both internal and external validation would allow for these maps and still incorporate the user generated aspects of XING’s Competency Card.

So who will be the first vendor with such a feature?

Over the last few weeks I have had a new site/service built, the Inspecht Software Directory.

Basically a service to help Australian and New Zealand businesses learn about the different options they have for their HR/Payroll/Talent Management/Recruitment/Applicant Tracking systems. Right now there is basic information on over 100 vendors who service the Australian and New Zealand across  seven different major categories:

• Business Intelligence
• Consultancy
• Core HR/Payroll
• HR Service Delivery
• Recruiter Tools
• Talent Management
• Workforce Management

Each free listing provides some basic information about the vendor including:

• Company Name
• Short Description
• Website
• Major Category Listing
• Social Media Links
• Inclusion in the soon to be released API

There will be premium listings which allow vendors to take complete control of their listing covering logos, detailed descriptions, multiple category listing, target markets, and tags.

While there are other similar services by some of our associations and media publications the Inspecht Software Directory is slightly different. Along with the default features there are several designed to help organisations make their purchasing decisions.

Some examples.

• Users can quickly see who within their LinkedIn network they might know who works or has worked for the vendor.
• Each vendor enter has multiple method of client reviews, free listings allow a 1 to 5 vote to be placed.
• Featured listing allow vendors to have clients provide written reviews and testimonials of their products. Which can be rated for their usefulness.
• Single click to review the least Google news about the vendor.
• Direct links to company blogs and Twitter accounts if the organisation has them.
• Share price data for public companies.
• Initial background information on the vendor from ASIC based on ACN searches.

Each of these features are designed to help organisations save time and money in creating short lists of potential vendors.

While the service is free to use and place initial listings, access to the premium features do require the vendors to pay an annual subscription.

A bit of lighthearted humor following a few days of heavy posts, from BackoftheClass. The video is a hair metal anthem for anyone whose mom mum is ruining Facebook!

Finally part four!

In case you missed the reason we are here have a look at the last few posts. In the first post we looked at laying a foundation for the discussion and about how social media allows you access to a unique view on a candidate’s character. In part two I discussed the issue of cultural fit and it’s important and how social media can help assess the cultural fit of a person. In part three I looked at some of the possible legal issues with using the information found online as part of the selection process.

In the final part of this series I want to bring it all together. A statement between the time I write this and when it is published others may have joined in on the discussion, I know Recruiter Daily will, I may have missed some critically posts in the story, sorry.

The Social Contract

Last week I was chatting with Jared Woods and Kelly O’Shaughnessy and it would be fair to say we probably have slightly differing opinions on the subject, or we did last week . One of the out comes during our chat was that more agencies need to disclose what they are doing when it comes to social media content. If you are going to use data you find online, is your Privacy Policy and Collection Statement up to date to cover these activities? Secondly if you are an agency have you spoken with your consultants to ensure that they understand their responsibilities? A really good example comes from SKM’s Graduate Recruitment Blog, which given their target market actually makes sense not sure the same could be said if they were hiring CFO’s.

Education

A big part of this whole issue is not privacy, disclosure, ethics etc, it is the fact that recruiter, employers and candidates do not fully understand this new world of social media.

Recruiters (agency and internal) need to learn how to assess the content for it’s suitability to be used as part of the recruitment process. This includes understanding the culture of each service. A not so suitable photo may appear on Facebook but that is the nature of the beast, the same photo on Flickr or blog or even LinkedIn is not really sensible. The very nature of Twitter makes it easy for a “short off the cuff” comment to be posted, recruiters need to understand these dynamics before using the data. This is one reason as part of the work Inspecht does helping clients understand the service culture is part of the listening phase.

Objectivity

Another major question that has been drawn from the discussions so far is how can someone objectively assess what is online for truth and accuracy? One way maybe to use the DIKW model, where once intelligence is overlaid on data it turns into information, knowledge and eventually wisdom. It is through this process we are able to turn these “online clues” into insight about a candidate and objectively assess the online content (thanks to Ross Clennett).

A key method in demonstrating objectivity is to have a defined process on how you use social media as part of your selection process. If you are going to Google candidates, then every candidate needs to undergo the same treatment, and the result stored so that you can demonstrate fairness in your processes. Further when developing your selection criteria for the role, make sure you include statements around the relevance or not of social media information.

Jared Woods provides some great examples on how hard can be to assess a candidate objectively by using data found online. Unfortunately in each one of these examples if used in selection the recruiter in question has breeched the discrimination laws and should be punished. The anti-discrimination laws are very clear sexual, religious preferences cannot be used as part of the recruitment process.

Background Checking Recruiters

I wonder how many recruiters have thought about the issues of candidates and clients background checking them using social media before engaging their services?

The End Game

A lot of the discussion is on ethics, social contracts, discrimination, education and the like actually come down the the fact that when we are online we loose access to many of our traditional social inputs. This is why we have flame wars. In fact this need for social skills was covered just last week by my colleague Kate Carruthers in her post Real world social values and social networking to quote Kate:

Social media is now providing us with tangible evidence of how many people lack (or fail to demonstrate) the basic skills required to get along well in the playground. And these are the same skills we need to work successfully with other grown-ups, both online and offline.

Recruiters and Hiring Managers who lack the sufficient level of Emotional Intelligence will find it very difficult to objectively assess a candidate regardless of if they research candidates online.

However in the end I see this whole issue is actually about the candidates, not agencies or employers. Candidates need to learn that they should be proactively their online reputation. Before you say why should they? I would ask why did you go to school, university or attend training? Why do you network? To proactively manage your career. So the same should be true for your online reputation.

In closing this was a fairly long journey however I hope this has given you something to think about and not bored you in the process.

Over 6 months ago Deloitte released their 2009 report on ethics and the workplace this time focusing on impact social computing is having on reputation risk for organisations. The results are very interesting, and given the recent background checking and social media discussions, they also impact individuals and their online reputation.

Let’s review the result:

• 74% of employees said it’s easy to damage a company’s reputation on social media
• 58% of executives agree that reputational risk & social networking should be a board room issue, but only 15% say it actually is
• 53% of employees think employers should stay out of their social networking pages
• 40% of executives disagree with employees and 30% informally monitor sites
• 61% of employees said even if employers did monitor they would not change their online behavior, because they know it’s not private, and have already made significant adjustments to their online profiles
• Almost 50% of employees said they would not change their online behavior if their company had a policy
• 27% of employees do not consider the ethical consequences

These figures worry me because to quote James Lovell; “Houston, we have a problem”. (Yes I know he did not actually say that but the real quote won’t work.)

74% of employees agree it’s easy to damage a company’s reputation on social media but only 27% actually think about it.

So let’s break this down

For me this calls for more education of people about their activities online so let’s re-look at The Mother Test:

1. Make sure you have a consistent profile you are willing to show your mother. It is very hard if not impossible to remain completely anonymous online, even if you never use your real name. For example I know of several bloggers who blog under anonymous names, but I also know who they really are.
2. Make sure you don’t do/say anything you would not be proud to show your mother. You might not want your mother to see what you have done, but if you had to show her and example yourself would you be proud of what you had done?
3. Make sure you don’t post pictures/videos you would not be willing to show your mother. Like doing or saying things online, if you had to explain yourself could you and would you be proud of what you have done?
4. Is your reputation online one your mother would be proud of? You might not specifically say or post anything that is suspect but we all have a reputation, even on sites that are password protected.
5. Would your activities online make your mother trust you? Trust is the ultimate test of what you are doing and defines your integrity, ability, or character.

(Image: Flickr)

This is part three in my four part series on social media and background checking.

In the first post we looked at laying a foundation for the discussion and about how social media allows you access to a unique view on a candidate’s character. In part two I discussed the issue of cultural fit and it’s important and how social media can help assess the cultural fit of a person.

In part three I want to look at some of the possible legal issues* with using the information found online as part of the selection process.

Discrimination

The first potential issue is that of discrimination.

I would suggest if you want to learn more about discrimination in Australia head over to the Australian Human Right Commission website and review the information for employers. One thing to remember is there are five primary federal laws that cover this area and each state has their own discrimination Acts. While the overall content of the different laws cover essentially the same areas there are discrepancies at both a Commonwealth and state level and even between the states. Add to this sometimes Commonwealth law applies where at other times both Commonwealth and state  laws apply and finally times when only state laws apply. This is a fairly complex area and a legal minefield.

If employers are to use social media as part of the recruitment process to comply with Commonwealth law they need to ensure that the selection process is not influenced by information around race, colour, national or ethnic origin; sex, pregnancy or marital status; age; disability; religion; sexual preference; trade union activity; or some other characteristic specified under anti-discrimination or human rights legislation.

It is the last point that is the one for concern, “some other characteristic” which is fairly broad and I suspect where the specific state laws come into play. However other than NSW all states cover similar areas in their laws which is basically you cannot discriminate on grounds of (from Victorian Act):

Sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, pregnancy, breastfeeding, marital status, status as a carer, age, race (including colour, nationality, ethnic or national origin), parental status, physical features, childless or a de facto spouse, lawful religious or political belief or activity, impairment (including physical impairment, mental illness, mental retardation), industrial activity, lawful sexual activity, or personal association with persons having any of the above attributes.

The NSW Anti Discrimination Act 1977 is fairly limited in its coverage; Race, (including colour, nationality and national or ethnic origin), sex (including pregnancy), marital status, disability, homosexuality, age (compulsory retirement only), transgender, carer’s responsibility.

There is nothing in any of the laws that explicitly prohibits the use of information about a person’s character as part of assessing organisational fit through what is posted on social media. In the same manner that assessing their character based on simulations of values based questions are not prohibited.

However given a lot of social media is about personal information there is a very large chance that you may discover information about a candidate that falls into the broad categories above. Which if the candidate does not get the role may have grounds to attempt to sue you on discrimination. Part four will deal more about this.

Privacy

The next area is that of privacy. It is well known in Australia that the Privacy Act 1988 and Privacy (Private Sector) Act 2000 applies to recruitment activities, specifically with regard to the collection, use and storage of personal information. Now this is where things differ between recruitment agencies and employers. Over the last few years agencies have worked very hard to develop clear and consistent policies around how the comply with the Privacy Act’s specifically in the areas of a collections statement, referral consent, reference checking and access to information. Employers while required to comply with the same principles, have not necessarily been under the same specific pressure to openly state how these policies apply to recruitment activities. Most employers do provide some form of privacy policy and larger ones require you to agree to it before applying for a job.

The issue here when it comes to social media and background checking is around how have you been complying to your organisation’s Privacy Act’s during the process. Have you collected information that is broader than your collections statement? Have you extended your reference checking process beyond the stated personal information within your privacy policy?

It is the breech of this policy and the ethical implications that have been stated by some as a reason not to use social media as part of background checking. However I would say the same about verbal reference checks as well. But let us review some privacy policies.

Now in reviewing the publicly stated privacy policies of six Australian agencies (three large and three small) five out of the six stated something along the lines of they will collect both specific information and “any additional information about you” that you provide. The last agencies policy had the broadest catch all statement that they may “source personal information from an external third party, or a publicly available source”. At all times the policy went on to say the agency would take reasonable steps to inform the candidate that this information has been collected. Excluding the broadest statement all of these policies could be read to say that information a candidate has published about themselves in the public domain is information provided by the candidate. Potential grey line I know but that is where lawyers come in. The one policy which covered any publicly available source already covers social media.

Essentially if you use social media, make sure you store the sources and inform the candidates that you will use “publicly available source”.

Part four will try to tie this all together, address some of the outstanding issues and provide some potential best practices.

* Although this post discusses legal issues related to recruiting processes, I am not a lawyer nor do I provide legal advice or services as such this post should not be construed or used as such.

(Images: Flickr Hippie and Privacy)

This is part two in my four part series on social media and background checking.

In the first post we looked at laying a foundation for the discussion and about how social media allows you access to a unique view on a candidate’s character.

Now another method of assessing character is through a process HR calls cultural fit.

Cultural Fit

To start let’s look at the DDI Australia Research Report on Recruiting for Culture Fit. DDI use the terms motivational fit from two distinct perspectives; job and organisation. Let me quote their report:

Job Fit Motivation refers to the degree to which the activities and responsibilities of a particular job are consistent with the activities and responsibilities that an individual finds personally satisfying. In short will somebody want to do the job?

Organisation Fit Motivation is defined as an individual’s compatibility with an organisation’s values and mode of operation. While organisational fit covers a range of organisational attributes the most common and frequently cited element centres on the congruence between individual and organisational values. This is often referred to as Culture Fit.

The DDI study found that 90% of respondents rated recruiting as very important to essential, they also reference several other studies that have found the same thing. However only 36% said they always recruiter for cultural and it went down from there.

Why is cultural fit so important today? Well a related article from Human Resources when the report was released had Bruce Watt, Managing Director from DDI, provide us some further information.

While an individual’s knowledge and skills may appear to be more important on the surface, the reality is that current knowledge and skill sets quickly become redundant. This is why culture is so important. While cultural change is not uncommon, most organisational cultures are enduring and therefore provide an anchor for individuals and organisations.

I would say recruiters who do not help their clients recruit for cultural fit have the risk of not having them as client much longer. (Ok agency recruiters you can have a go at me for saying that in the comments below .)

So it is clear people want to do this, but HOW are HR departments assessing for cultural fit?

The DDI report also looked at this.

The top four methods for assessing cultural fit were:

• Behavioural interview questions specifically targeting values (91%)
• Panel interviews (61%)
• Reference checking against values (58.3%)
• Informal meetings with team members and colleagues (48.6%)

What might surprise some of my agency readers other methods included social situations.

On a final note 90% of HR professionals surveyed said that while assessing cultural fit was difficult it still should be included in the process.

Two of the top four methods of assessing cultural fit, reference checking against values and informal meetings with team members and colleagues, benefit from using social media information as part of the process. While we have not yet solved the objectivity side of things what candidates place online provides a unique insight into potential fit of them and the organisational values. Pictures on Flickr from their local cricket team games shows an candidate who has a balanced life, yes they might include some from the end of year party but they are meaningless to the assessment. Video on YouTube from the candidate’s work on the local primary school’s fête shows a commitment to community values.

A key point here, as put by Aaron Dodd on Twitter:

Crux of the matter is the testing of the info as to its accuracy and relevance.

It is this assessment of accuracy and relevance coupled with objectivity is critical to the assessment.

In part three I want to look at some of the potential legal issues the final post will try and bring all this together.

Right now the Australian online recruitment community have started some very health debate/discussion about the concept of using the content from social media as part of background checking. All started by Riges Younan from Peerlo*.

Most of the discussion from the agency perspective is focusing around the ethics of using what is in the public domain to access candidates. There is a sub-discussion on disclosure and relevance.

In my recent post on social recruiting I highlighted social background checking as one of the 18 use cases. So I thought I would chime in on the discussion, not to mention I have a comment to answer on that post as well. But I am going to try and bring some facts into the discussion as well, because so far everyone is talking opinion, which for me is not enough.

Also before I get going most of the posts and comments have been from the point of view of agencies using the information, not employers, again something I want to expand upon.

A final note this post begins to lay out a foundation, part two looks at the cultural fit, part three legal issues and part four will pull it all together. I split this up as a single post would have been huge.

On with the main program.

Social media provides hiring managers a unique insight into candidates before they join the organisation. Now I agree last Saturday night’s drunken party photos have no place in the recruitment process, well maybe they do let’s see where this goes.

Social Media

Let us start with a definition on what is social media.

From Wikipedia social:

The term Social refers to a characteristic of living organisms (humans in particular, though biologists also apply the term to populations of other animals). It always refers to the interaction of organisms with other organisms and to their collective co-existence, irrespective of whether they are aware of it or not, and irrespective of whether the interaction is voluntary or involuntary

From Wikipedia media:

In communication, media (singular medium) are the storage and transmission channels or tools used to store and deliver information or data

In today’s context social media is about using internet technologies so living organisms, humans in our case, can interact in a manner to create channels for the storage and delivery of information or data.

It is more than just Facebook, or Twitter it defines everything we do online where our interactions create and store data that is either in the public domain or being shared privately amongst a closed group.

Background Checking

With the risk of being labeled biased for my sources I want to look at Wikipedia for my definition of background checking. Only because it provides a good source of words, which saves me from making them up.

These checks are often used by employers as a means of objectively evaluating a job candidate’s qualifications, character, fitness, and to identify potential hiring risks for safety and security reasons

The one area I want to look at with regard to using social media as part of your background checking process is evaluation of character. I am going to acknowledge here that the objectivity of any assessment is a key point but that will be looked at in future posts.

Some elements of character are very easy to assess based on someone’s digital footprints. For example being president of the local football team, volunteering to support programs around poverty, giving back to your industry through thought leadership etc. Social media tools all provide a unique way of gaining this insight.

A example (or two) the amazing Jasmin Tragas*, aka Wonderwebby, and her work to help women in developing nations receive investment funding.  Without social media very few people would ever know about all of the things Jasmin does. Now I’ll admit that she might put her investment fund activities on her resume, but even her LinkedIn profile doesn’t really do the project justice.

Next up Gavin Heaton, and his Age of Conversation project which donates 100% of the proceeds to the Children’s charity Variety, again no LinkedIn profile does this justice.

I could go one but I hope you get the point social media, use correctly, can provide you with a very unique insight into a potential employee’s character.

Now another method of assessing character is through a process HR calls cultural fit, we will look at this in part 2.

(* Disclosure: Peerlo is a client of Inspecht, and Jasmin spoke at the Inspecht HR Futures conference last year.)

I have been thinking a lot about how complex the overall HR technology landscape has become in the last five years.

Traditional time and attendance vendors now do all things (Kronos), applicant tracking vendors now do performance management (take your pick of vendors), learning management vendors now do compensation (Plateau ) and competitors are now the same organisation (Micropay and WageEasy ). This doesn’t even start to look at the large ERP’s trying to play in the 50 – 100 person marketplace!

It is not difficult for an organisation with 1,000 plus employees in Australia to still have a maze of systems and dataflows, check out this example I pulled together today. Yes the flows miss performance and development data but I ran out of room and time to clearly demonstrate. Nor I am saying that every organisation is like this, or heavens forbid that this is any target architecture! More that if you were to sit down with the HR and Payroll team in many midsized organisations in Australia you would end up with a maze of some sort. Very few have a clean architecture.

So it is not surprising when we start to ask questions about workforce analytics, integrated talent planning, sources of hire etc a majority of HR departments just roll their eyes. They have no way of knowing how to get this data!

Some questions I ask clients to begin clarifying just how big a mess they are in are:

• What is your master data strategy?
• What are your data standards with regard to people data?
• Which system(s) is the source of truth?
• How to communicate data with external providers?
• How many different vendor’s tools do you have?

The answers are usually not surprising, but they are not good either.

However the challenge is not just to purchase a system that provides a nice integrated framework. That bit is easy! The hard part is part data conversion, cultural change, process re-engineering and IT development.

To get a master data strategy you need everyone to agree on data standards and ownership, only then can one begin to assess the conversion/cleansing/migration effort to get to the new world.

To reduce the data flows you need to have a clear picture of who is using your data, and now just officially using it. How many spreadsheets are manually loaded into other systems? How many IT developed interfaces exist to manipulate and represent your data to email, finance, facilities management systems? Who’s data fiefdoms are you going to destroy in the process? How many forms need to be changed? How many processes need stream lining and upgrading?

It is never as simple as just installing a new payroll or talent management system.

(Please if you are a vendor do not comment to say oh we can solve these issues, this is not the point of the post. However feel free to add to the discussion. Thanks.)