If you have been following this blog for a while you would know that I am always looking for the next thing. I have been doing the same thing with using social media in business.

Social Recruiting has a lot of  buzz at the moment. How do I know there is a buzz, well 200+ people attended the Social Recruiting Summit in New York City last week, we have almost a full house at the ATC Social Media event, RecruitTech 2009 had social media as a primary theme.

But let us take a step back, for most social recruiting is just about using social media as another marketing channel. A terrible waste in my eyes.

My definition of social recruiting is:

• Using social media tools as part of the recruiting process
• Building a community of potential candidates
• Engaging with candidates as people not numbers

From an employer’s perspective recruitment is about fueling organisational growth, renewal, building the most efficient and sustainable business. This can only be done through personal relationships and cultural fit. (Yes there is a bit of sales and marketing in the mix but that is just attraction, the rest of the process is all personal.)

This brings me to Doc Searls’s recent blog post “Beyond Social Media“. If you do not know Doc Searls you should, also you should read the book he co-authors 10 years ago, Cluetrain. In the post Doc raises several very good points.

• Twitter is now as necessary to tweeting as Google is to search. It’s a public activity under private control.
• Most other popular activities online are not owned by anyone, they are public.
• Personal and social go hand-in-hand, but the latter builds on the former.
• Today in the digital world we still have very few personal tools that work only for us, are under personal control
• Individually-empowered customers are the ultimate greenfield for business and culture.
• What we’re not doing because “social” everything is such a bubble of buzz right now

Are we really finally about to enter the age of Brand You or is it another 10 years away? If the individual is now the key to business and culture what does that mean for:

• The recruitment process?
• The HR Management practices in your average corporation?

I hear recruiters complaining they do not have time to develop relationships with candidates or use Twitter etc.  But what happens when the candidates are developing that relationship with a potential hiring manager or potential peer? Where do recruiters add value in this transaction?

For HR the issue is just as difficult. When employees view themselves as individuals who own the ideas, conversation and intentions to create the “business”. How do structured learning and development programs remain valid in an era of so much open information? How do you keep employees engaged? How does that traditional compensation plan survive?

I could go on, but I hope you get the picture. So if what Doc Searls is saying, “individually-empowered customers are the ultimate greenfield for business and culture”, is true then the companies who first leverage these concepts will be the ones we are talking about in 5 years time. Just as recruiters now marvel at Microsoft and the like who all started on their paths in around 2005.

Earlier this week Twitter and LinkedIn announced a partnership whereby you can now share updates between both services. Given that according to Pew Internet & American Life Project a total of 19% of American online adults have posted a status update this change is significant.

Firstly it will give all those professionals on LinkedIn who feel they do not have time for Twitter a chance to create a Twitter presence that complements their LinkedIn profile.

Second Twitter users who want to provide their professional LinkedIn profile with a bit of fresh content can do so. But this is the trick.

Most people with a LinkedIn profile want to keep it professional, well the folks at LinkedIn and Twitter have thought of this.

You can set up the integration so only Tweets with the hashtag #in appear on your LinkedIn profile.

All of this new content on both platforms is a gold mine for Recruiters and Employers.

How?

Many people keep their LinkedIn profile a little restricted from a public point of view, with their status updates appearing in Twitter you can now get a better view on what they are doing. But it is the integration from Twitter to LinkedIn which has the most potential. If people are using LinkedIn as their digital resume, tweets appearing alongside their professional background will allow recruiters and employers to gain a far greater understanding of a candidate.

For the last couple of months Twitter has been testing out a new feature, Lists, and as of yesterday Lists were available to all users. So what is a list?

Anyone can curate and publish lists, so if you have an idea for one, just click “New list” in the sidebar of your Twitter account and you’re on your way. Add accounts to a list using the “Lists” drop drown on a profile page. We believe Lists will be a new discovery mechanism for great tweets and accounts.

The ability to group Twitter accounts into personalised but meaningful groups that provide you a real time view on what this collection of accounts is doing. In typical Twitter style they have provided us with an open API so we can build our own applications via the Lists API.

Lists have several features that make them very interesting:

• Want to keep up with lots of different people but do not want your main timeline cluttered with noise, create a List
• What to follow some high volume feeds, create a List
• Want to create a list of people for new Twitter users to follow
• Create a list of Twitter users from your company, maybe a list of public officers
• Lists can be public or private, so create a private list of your family/friends
• Create a list about anything!

But where things get really exciting is with the API. Where you can create lists, see what lists a particular user is on, show the timeline for a list, add accounts to a list, review accounts on a list, find out who has subscribe to your list with more to come.

Some example lists:

• http://listorious.com/JobHuntOrg/employers-recruiting
• http://twitter.com/Techonomics1/career-hr-recruiter
• http://twitter.com/pauljacobs4real/recruitment-rebels
• http://twitter.com/ThomasShaw/jobboards-industry
• http://twitter.com/smange/aussie-news
• http://twitter.com/recruitingblogs/community
• http://twitter.com/CincyRecruiter/hr-recruiting-pros

Want to find more lists? Check out Listorious. Listorious also allows you to recommend to the list curator a Twitter account that should be added to their list.

Yes it seems I have risen to the ranks of a power blog for the first time. Yep I appeared today on the Fistful of Talent/HR Capitalist’s 5th listing of the top 30 blogs on talent management.

Previous listing have been judged by humans to determine if a blog was to be included. This time the selection process was a little different. They used HubSpot’s Website Grader tool. To quote FOT:

They evaluate “marketing effectiveness” which is based on a proprietary algorithm that blends over 50 different variables including search engine data, traffic, backlinks, etc.  Now we realize, this takes out of the equation the human factor, the FOT factor. But this is pretty black and white, wouldn’t you say? And since traffic is a factor in the website grading… let’s hope trust that good content is what drives great blogs with high traffic.

Anyway I scrapped in at number 29 on the list, amongst some very impressive names, head over to FOT and check out the list.

I am a firm believer in the whole “Wisdom of Crowds” process so this article in The Age today made me think a bit. Austereo, Australia radio network, had teamed up with Jelli a US network to provide Australians with the first 24 hour a day crowdsourced radio show. Basically listeners go online to vote on what they will hear next, with the next song being determined only 2 seconds before the end of the current one.

This got me thinking.

Could an organisation crowdsource promotions, or placements?

Yes I know this might upset some of my readers but think about it most employees already know who should get the job so why not let them decide in an anonymous manner?

Innovative organisations could use other influencing factors based on shadow information.

The famous Web 2.0 Summit wrapped up late last week with lots and lots of product announcements and more news stories than I could ever hope to digest. (Not helped by the fact that I have been sick for about 4 days now.)

Anyway here are a few summary items:

• If teens are confused by Twitter but love Facebook what does that tell us? Could it be the nature of the communication, to quote the NY Times:

“Many people use it for professional purposes — keeping connected with industry contacts and following news,” said Evan Williams, Twitter’s co-founder and chief executive. “Because it’s a one-to-many network and most of the content is public, it works for this better than a social network that’s optimized for friend communication.”

• The iPhone is heading towards being the most successful gadget ever.
• Tim Berners-Lee tells us the biggest threat to keeping the Web open is large companies or governments. Also he is not sold on cloud computing.
• Both Google and Microsoft have got into the real time search game, by indexing Twitter with Microsoft including Facebook updates.
• But could Google’s social search be the killer search app?

Yes all of these announcements and trends are great except the most interesting thing for me happened before the conference even started.

Web Squared.

With both Read Write Web and ZD Net providing some good coverage. Basically Web Squared is about the intersection of social web technologies with the emerging trend of real world objects connected to the Internet in some fashion, aka Internet of Things and with “Shadow Information“.

To quote Tim O’Reilly and John Battelle:

Collective intelligence applications are no longer being driven solely by humans typing on keyboards but, increasingly, by sensors. Our phones and cameras are being turned into eyes and ears for applications; motion and location sensors tell where we are, what we’re looking at, and how fast we’re moving. Data is being collected, presented, and acted upon in real time. The scale of participation has increased by orders of magnitude.

So to pull this rambling post to an end I ask this simple question.

Given corporations missed Web 2.0, will they miss Web Squared (or what ever it is called)?

I suspect there will be more on this topic.

A lack of clear communication is cited as a common cause of many relationships failures, be they personal or professional.

Many a study has shown that clearly communicating the employment deal up front is a critical first step in having an engaged employee.

This should be obvious, no one likes to buy a product only to find out that the advertising misled us. If you have not been watching The Apprentice Australia, spend a moment and watch the video below, skip to 3:30  and see what one of Australia’s top businessmen thinks of misleading advertising. Even if it is slightly grey.

Which is why if an employee is sold a deal that does not meet the marketing you are battling up hill to reengage them!

Make sure your job ad, career web site and interview process does not sell something that is not.

While employee testimonials are a great way to provide insight into what it is like to work for your organisation, they tend to be staged, not to mislead but to put forward the best image. Another idea, let your employees blog. Employees who blog openly and honestly will allow prospective employees to see what it is really like in your workplace.

These types of articles really really get me going.

54% of Companies Ban …

I’m sorry but I am not surprised that 77% of employees who had access to Facebook used it during the work day! Ok how many logged onto personal email accounts, made a personal phone call, used their personal mobile phone, had some non-work related discussion in the kitchen while getting a coffee.

Given that 63% of Australian employees are not full engaged at work it is not surprising that they are looking for a distraction. Close down Facebook, Twitter, MySpace whatever you will not see an increase in productivity.

We know from academic research that companies that engage their workforce perform better. Research from Alex Edmans, a business professor from Whartons School, has shown that engaged employees do in fact drive company performance. He looked at Fortune magazine’s list of “100 Best Companies to Work for in America”and found that an annually rebalanced portfolio returned 14% between 1998 – 2005 compared to the market in general of only 6%.

So let’s ignore the research found that employees who “surf the Internet at work” are 9% more productive than those that don’t. Or the productivity benefits of engaged employees? Or the real life statements from employees of Australia’s largest employers.

If your employees are spending too much time using social media I would question do you have a management problem or a technical problem?

We are coming to the end of the early bird discount period for the joint event between Inspecht and ATC Social Media: A Recruitment Revolution. while the early bird discount is good, register 2 or more delegates and you get an even better deal.

So why attend?

1. Listen to Australian case studies from Ernst & Young and Atlassian
2. Hear from Futurist Mark Pesce
3. Participate in workshops on social recruiting strategies, digital branding and the use of social networking for sourcing
4. Watch the debate between Stephen Collins and Jake Andrews, from SEEK, on “Do you need a job board when you have social networking?”
5. Put forward your own ideas and thought in the World Cafe session
6. Listen and interact with your peers in the special unconference session where you get to control the agenda

This event was inspired by the ERE Social Recruiting Summit so I caught up with Paul Jacobs from Tribe HQ a New Zealander who attended the event with me to find out why he trekked all the way from Wellington New Zealand to San Francisco. (These are definitely NOT Oscar winning performances but we had fun.)

Finally if you are a member of Recruitment 2.0 APAC you could win a free ticket to attend

Something I get asked a lot is “How does social media impact the HR department?”

There are lots of ways, including areas that crosses into the recruiting; attraction, branding, onboarding and closing the deal.

Do your offer letters engage future employees like this?

All kidding aside, any company that can give this much attention to detail just in their HR paperwork should be fun to work for.  I am looking forward to this new adventure.

How about something someone would never throw out?

I don’t think I’ll ever throw this out. It’s a keepsake that reminds me of the major move I made from Toronto to San Francisco and all the sacrifices made and opportunities gained.

Or make your experienced hire feel “like a kid on Christmas morning”?

Enter the Apple Job Offer.

(Via Glyph)

These are the feeling expressed by Glyph about his current Apple job offer and Justin Reid’s historical offer.

Just imagine how engaged your new employees will be if they feel proud enough to photograph your paperwork and describe the “tension on the hinge of the folder is perfect: not too tense, not too loose”! Let’s not over look the complete alignment of the above offer packages to the corporate culture of Apple.

Unfortunately onboarding processes are a frequently overlooked part of both recruitment and HR processes.

Late last week Jobvite, who 3 weeks ago secured another $8.25 million in series B funding, launched their latest product Jobvite Source. A product that allows any company to source candidates through a combination of social networks without the need of their larger ATS. Jobvite Source also allows employees to refer jobs on to their contacts across tools such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.

Effectively Jobvite Source is taking the social recruiting portion their ATS, Jobvite Hire, and making it available for any organisation to use, regardless of the ATS vendor.

Jobvite Source includes the following key features:

• Social Networking Sourcing
• Employee Referrals – across Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Email etc.
• Candidate Relationship Management
• Facebook Application

The images provided to me show a comparison searching for a “product manager” in Jobvite Source vs Google. Where as Google provides a mixture of results, Jobvite Source delivers only potential candidates. A full image was a bit large to place in the post but I uploaded it so you can view.

Other features include a metrics dashboard to show recruiters the progress of their jobs across the different networks.

I have requested a full demo of the product and will try and post once I have seen it.

Overall an interesting move, the full press release of the launch is available on their website. With an additional $8.25 million I will expecting some big things from Jobvite in the next 12 months.

While Jobvite Source offers lots of features, Australian vendor JobGenie can provide organisations very similar features for a small monthly fee. JobGenie also offers an open API so developers can build right on top of the JobGenie platform, a very unique offering.

Disclosures:

• JobGenie has been a client of mine.
• Jobvite were very accommodating of me when I was in San Francisco in June.

During my presentation yesterday on social media in the workplace at RecruitTech I spoke briefly about the “Facebook Five” and felt I would expand on my comments here.

In summary six (it was five) NSW prison officers are being threatened with being fired over comments they made on a Facebook page “Suggestion to help Big Ron save a few clams”. This was at a time when the NSW was looking to sell of prisons to save some money.

The case went before the Industrial Relations Commission (IRC) this week where the Public Service Association (PSA) filed an application asking the corrective services workers have the treats revoked. The workers are claiming that the comments were private and outside of work.

The PSA has also stated to the IRC that it intends to seek changes to the award to exclude out-of-work hours activities from being dismissible offences. The claim says:

“An employee shall not be the subject of any disciplinary action by reason of conduct that occurs outside working hours and which is intended by the employee to be private in nature”

However QUT Senior Lecturer Peter Black has commented, quite rightly, that can anything online be considered private:

There is certainly, I think an argument that it is a private conversation, however I think that probably ignores the reality of how these sorts of websites operate,

However because there is always a record kept of these sorts of conversations in an online environment, even where it is private, it is very easy for that information to get out beyond the wall.

Another interesting fact to consider is let’s define the work hours. If I answer work emails on a BlackBerry at home and then use the same device to post something on Facebook, was the post outside of work hours or not?

This case looks like it could be one begin to shape our employment laws around social media and the workplace.

Today I gave a short presentation at RecruitTech in Canberra on Social Media in the workplace. The official bio was:

Many big organisations continue to block the use of social networking tools in the workplace, whilst others encourage their use.  But how much Facebook surfing and Twittering is too much?  This presentation weighs up the pros and cons of social media in the workplace and the impact of an organisation’s social media policy on its recruitment and retention.

Here are the slides from the presentation.

Two interesting things have happened in the last 3 days.

I woke on Saturday morning to the news that Joel Cheesman, the Cheezhead site and from what I can tell brand had been purchased by Jobing. Part of this change is the blog will be no more. This news struck me as very strange, given the huge amount of effort Joel has put into Cheezhead over the last few years. I was also instantly reminded of the Jason Davis, recruiting.com and Jobster scenario which I hope does not happen to Joel.

Yesterday Brett Iredale from JobAdder announced their new recruitment product but also that he is retiring the JobAdder blog for a more integrated, communal way of interacting. Good to see some experimentation in the Australian marketplace.

So does this mean blogs are dead? Nope just they are starting to change the way they look and the way they are used by business.

It has been an interesting week or so since Phillip and I released the sources of talent report for Australia. We have had both positive and negative feedback, which is to be expected.

Some of the commentary available online:

• Gerry Crispin
• Alice Snell
• Ross Clennett
• Six Figures
• Peerlo

I would like to review some of the concerns raised over the accuracy of the data, the process we used and the outcomes.

One concern was how do you define the original source of talent. A very good queston. If an candidate sees an add on job board, then contacts an agency directly is this an agency hire or a job board?

Another concern raised was were we double counting hires? Were agencies providing information on the same candidates that employers were? Our survey did not cover this, but it is a great question, although solving this is not easy either.

Carey Eaton from Seek wold like to see us separating the tools, and resources, from the processes used by organisations.

There were also questions around should all of the organisations who participated been allowed to participate. My understanding is some people would like us to only looking at large employers, like the US report. Unfortunately in the Australian marketplace there are a huge number of employers in the sub 250 employee bracket.

To be honest I agree with most these concerns. However the fact is, we can now have conversations about these issues and work as an industry to resolve them. Generating this conversation was one of the underlying goals of the survey.

Phillip and I will be starting plans for the 2010 report while we are at RecruitTech this week in Canberra so if you have some thoughts leave a comment or drop us an email.

Back in April I had one of my many wild ideas, undertake a sources of hire survey for Australia, I mean how hard can it be?

The idea was triggered by a post from Phillip Tusing from Destination Talent so after chatting over a few days we decided to join forces and get a survey done.

The decision to do something was easier than the process.

We site up a site and grabbed a domain name, http://talentsource.com.au/, it took about 6 weeks to draw up the survey and lock in some sponsors. We ran the survey for about 5 weeks, receiving 409 completed responses. Then we started the report portion, I had thought would be easy but how wrong was I. It has taken about 6 or 7 weeks to get the report done, and I have to say without the tremendous work by Phillip it would have taken a lot longer. In fact I want to publically thank Phillip for his work in pulling the report together.

As mentioned 409 organisations of varying sizes, industry backgrounds and regional locations completed the survey. A total of 92,136 hires were recorded using seventeen identifiable sources of talent for the period July 2008 through to June 2009.

The key findings of the report include:

1. Source of talent varies across Australia with seventeen identifiable source of talent.
2. Job boards, in their various iterations, take a leadership role being the predominant source of talent in Australia with 29.64% of hires attributed to them.
3. Perceptions of the most effective sources of talent by recruiters differ from the reality of where talent is sourced.
4. Different industries use significantly different sources to find talent within Australia.
5. The different regions of Australia also seem to source talent differently, for example in the ACT 49.70% of talent is found through internal recruiters.
6. Referrals as sources are not as developed as expected being only the fourth most successful source at 7.57% of hires.
7. Print media while having a reputation of an archaic channel still exists as the seventh most successful source of hires.
8. Employers and agency recruiters differ in how they source talent with agency recruiters relying heavily on job boards.
9. Social media is in its infancy ranking last as a source talent in Australia, with usage higher in smaller organisations.
10. Data collection is poor with over 7% of organizations have no reliable method of tracking their source of talent.

We are also indebted to Gerry Crispin for providing a comparison to US figures and Dr Ian Williamson for his insights into retention and alumni programs.

There is a lot more in the report so go download it and have a read, we hope that the report stimulates further discussions within the HR and Recruitment industries.

The folks at Recruiter Daily have asked me to do a short webinar for their readers about social media and recruitment called “Plan your social media strategy – connect, attract and recruit“. The event will be 11am September 17 and you can register online now, even if you can’t make the live event the presentation will be available.

So what will I cover?

This online tutorial, brought to you by Recruiter Daily and social media expert Michael Specht, separates the trash from the truth. You will gain a better understanding of social networking – the positives and the pitfalls – and learn how to:

• apply the four Cs of social media – collaboration, content, connection and conversation;
• use social media in the five phases of recruitment;
• move from a reactive model to proactively engaging in social media;
• measure your social recruiting success with meaningful metrics.

It should be an interesting session if I do say so myself.

If you can’t get to the session on the 17th, I will be in Canberra on the 18th at RecruitTech talking about social media in the workplace, if you can’t do either then be in Melbourne 3rd December for the combined ATC and Inspecht one day event on social media and recruitment.

(Just quietly between us I hate the term social media expert.)

Back in June I shipped myself off to the first Social Recruiting Summit at Google HQ in San Francisco. On my return I was approached by the team from Australasian Talent Conference (Trevor Vas, Horace Chai, and Kevin Wheeler) to see if we could pull off a similar event here in Australia.

So on 3rd December in Melbourne we are bringing together some of the biggest names in recruitment and social media to participate in Social Media: A Recruitment Revolution.

The event will be like none other in Australia, combining traditional conference sessions with interactive “unconference” sessions to allow the audience to further develop the ideas and learn from industry peers.

Personally I am very excited about the speakers. We have secured Mark Pesce as our opening keynote speaker. If you do not know Mark he is an author, journalist, regular panellist on The New Inventors, and futurist. (He even has a Wikipedia page.) In addition to Mark, Margie Kwan from Ernst & Young will be presenting a case study on their use of Facebook and the we have a debate between Stephen Collins from acidlabs and Jake Andrew from SEEK on “Do you need a job board when you have social networking?”. Other topics include digital branding, social recruiting strategies, legal issues around social recruiting.

If you want to know more head over to the main site, check out the agenda and register ASAP as we have a space limitation.

I was beaten to the punch by Kelly Magowan with her post yesterday as to why you need to upgrade your corporate careers site to be successful with social media. This was my flow on post from the Corporate Careers Website Report I released on Wednesday night.

However Kelly only scratched the surface of the issue.

Next, it is important to be mindful that the most likely outcome of using social media will be more traffic to your careers site. And herein lies the problem – when they get to your careers site, what happens? Hopefully they don’t take one look at it and bounce!

While right on the money social media will increase the visitors to your site the issue is a lot deeper than this. Deep integration of social media into your external HR and Recruitment practices in a manner that delivers strong ROI requires a hub.

That hub is your careers website.

I have worked with several clients on developing a social recruiting strategy and the key to bringing all of the content together is your web site, in particular an easy to update site. One that allows you to easily add video, Twitter streams, blog content, profile recruiters/clients/candidates etc. Let’s face it, you are unlikely to have your recruitment video on YouTube go viral and by itself deliver ROI.

For employers the same is true you need a compelling careers website. One that respects, engages and informs the candidate about the employment deal you have on offer. For example only 27% of Australia’s BRW Top 200 organisations provide recruitment relevant company background information on their site. Only 32% provide detailed information on the recruitment process.

So before you run off and execute that fancy new social media strategy make sure you have the foundations in place for your hub.

Update: Direct link to the research report

In late 2008 I spent some time reviewing the career websites of the BRW Top 200 organisations within Australia, based on the work by CareerXRoads in the US. The process included a physical review of each of the BRW Top 200 web sites during September to December 2008.

I sat on the report for a long time pondering what to do with the results. About six weeks ago I decided to release the results publically over on Inspecht for the purposes of discussion and review by others within the industry.

Each site was assessed on a series of attributes designed to assess an organisation’s approach to their careers website. The attributes were based on the CareerXRoads Mystery Job Seeker Reports. A comment on the results several attributes covered during the research required a subjective assessment such as; did the site contain detailed information on remuneration and benefits.

If you are interested you can download the report (oh yes it is free).