I suspect that the aforementioned twit, er, Tweeter was trying to look cool rather than gain anything practical from using Twitter instead of other modes of communication. After all, e-mail is so 20th century, and as for the phone — that was invented in 1876. Who would want to admit they used one? Might as well resort to carrier pigeons.

Let’s Go Surfing

Recruiters have a tendency to jump on the latest technology without fully appreciating its benefits or ramifications.

The newest entrant to the recruiting world is Google Wave, soon to be the solution du jour. By this time next year you’ll be told that if you’re not using Wave your career as a recruiter is likely to disappear faster than a burst of flatulence in a hurricane. You will be done with; finished; gone the way of Pontiac and Lehman Brothers — and deservedly so.

So what is Google Wave? Its inventors describe it as what e-mail would be it had been invented today instead of back in 1971. E-mail was a product of its time — an electronic version of postal mail — just faster. Back then the bandwidth was very limited so the best that could be done was send out small amounts of text. Its purpose is to send messages. It is a collaborative mechanism of sorts, but the constant back and forth of e-mail chains can get out of hand very quickly, the chaos increasing exponentially the more people are involved. Enter Google Wave: much better suited to a collaborative work environment than e-mail. A user who sends out a wave creates a workspace shared with all the people that receive it. The participants can add text, pictures, links, maps, etc. Everything is visible to everyone as it happens because all activity is logged in real time since the wave is stored on a central server instead of individual computers. Wave also keeps the activity organized and searchable. Wave brings together the functionality of just about every social media application and online communication tool. You can read everything you ever wanted to know (even if you didn’t) here.

Wave has some appeal for recruiters, not the least of which is that it’s free. As a collaborative tool it can help with activities like group interviews, evaluating candidates, writing up job requirements, etc. That’s the low-hanging fruit. Thinking more broadly, if an employee sends out a wave to a group of friends, then a recruiter could surf it (I just coined a term) to engage with them: an instant social network. Make it reach a large enough group and you could have a tsunami. Maybe not — that has too many negative connotations. Nobody wants to be associated with that. On the flip side, a bunch of disgruntled candidates sick of the shoddy treatment they got could get together and unleash one to wreck some company’s employment brand. That would be a Katrina. The possibilities are endless.

Diamond in the Rough, or Fool’s Gold?

Of course, the path to social media nirvana isn’t all roses. For all its faults, e-mail has some great features — like being able to ignore it or respond on your own time. Wave is a real-time application, which means it demands real-time attention. That can limit its appeal. Not everyone wants to be engaged all the time.

E-mail had another reason for gaining in popularity so fast. It did something that was very familiar and didn’t require a fundamental change in behavior from users. There’s a reason e-mail icons have a picture of an envelope. Using Wave well will require people to make some significant changes in behavior. Collaboration in real-time is not a normal everyday activity.

How much will Wave change recruiting? Impossible to predict. It’s just a tool; no more, no less. It’s only as good as the people who use it. Some recruiters will undoubtedly find creative ways to use it but for many it will only be a distraction. It will generate a lot of buzz and have some value in some circumstances for some people. What is absolutely certain is that it will not be a silver bullet solution for recruiting. There are none.

Get your account, and when you have it, let’s go surfing. Don’t wipe out.

TweetMyJobs, one of the first job distribution services to use Twitter, is now using the service and its followers to promote itself.  TweetMyJobs is running a contest that has a plasma TV or $500 as its grand prize and the only requirement for winning is to watch a video and enter. So far, so traditional. Here’s where the social media aspect comes in: The winner will be the person who accumulates the most points during the contest. Points are earned each time a person clicks on a unique link to access the TweetMyJobs site.

Contestants are emailed a unique link that can be tweeted, posted to Facebook, and shared on over 20 other social sites. The more friends, followers, and connections you have and can convince to click the link, the more points you earn.

It’s a clever contest that TweetMyJobs founder Gary Zukowski says will cost him less than $2,500 and will “show just how powerful social media can be.”

“By using social media we will reach thousands of targeted individuals in a cost-effective manner. It mirrors the service we offer to our clients,” adds Zukowski. TweetMyJobs earns its money by tweeting job postings to job seeking subscribers for a fee.

Zukowski’s contest comes amidst a boom in the use of social media for job hunting and branding. No less an authority than outplacement specialist Challenger, Gray & Christmas is counseling job seekers to profile, post, and tweet.

“We feel that these new networking tools are essential and now advise all of the job seekers going through our program to open LinkedIn accounts and to consider other services such as Facebook and Twitter,” says CEO John Challenger.

The firm cautions job seekers — and this is good advice for recruiters, too — that the various social media are not interchangeable. Nor, says Challenger, will they “replace the face-to-face connections that are critical to a successful search.”

The Challenger announcement cites a recent Jobvite survey that found some 80 percent of companies using or planning to use social networking sites for recruiting. LinkedIn is already heavily used for that purpose, but Facebook recruiting now attracts 59 percent of recruiters, according to the survey. Twitter is used by 42 percent of recruiters.

Because of the pervasive use of widgets and apps, it is possible now for a Twitter message to be simultaneously posted to dozens of sites. Likewise, Facebook status updates can be tweeted automatically, with apps then reposting the tweet to other social media including, say, LinkedIn.

Hence, the warning from Challenger that, “Social networking should be used cautiously.”

He also counsels that online networking is not the only tool. “These online connections are superficial at best. It takes a lot more work to turn them into meaningful relationships that can advance your job search. In the end,” says Challenger, “face-to-face meetings are still the most effective relationship-building tool available.”

Which brings us to Eric Barker. Remember him?  He’s the freshly minted MBA so eager to work at Microsoft that he took out an ad on Facebook to make his pitch. I wrote about him in May.

I got an email from him a few weeks ago. Still no Microsoft job, though he is optimistic: “Did hear from a MSFT recruiter. We’re trying to place me but we haven’t found the right fit yet.”

However he did land a leading role in Facebook Fantasies, an official anthology of Facebook stories, where he is the subject of one of the chapters. The book publishes in February.

The sheer volume of potential directions to follow is confusing, daunting, and at times, just plain overwhelming. While some organizations have stuck a stick in the sand and are pushing forward with a defined approach, the majority of efforts currently underway will fail for one key reason: they rely solely upon a small handful of individuals attempting to maintain visibility in a sea of content growing exponentially.

Relying upon a social media coordinator, online brand ambassador, or a team of recruiters dedicating only a portion of their desk time to social media initiatives dooms such efforts to stumble and underperform. Such efforts produce corporate fan pages on Facebook, where the only comments ever visible are sanitized “PR” posts and boring job announcements! (I actually viewed one such page last week where the only wall post visible was a notice from the organization’s legal department advising visitors to the page not to post negative comments!)

Delivering an engaging, interactive, authentic, and personalized experience requires a scale of participation that the limited resources of the recruiting function simply cannot provide. The alternate approach, the one most likely to drive success, is an employee-centric approach that relies on your employees to build and manage relationships and the recruiting resources to coordinate, influence, and support their efforts.

The 12 Most Common Social Media Strategies

Most recruiting managers fail to think strategically when they develop their approach to social media recruiting. In fact, if you want to test someone’s depth of knowledge of social media recruiting, simply ask them to list the range of strategies that corporations can pursue. Most recruiting leaders will respond that they either don’t know enough about social media yet, or ramble off how they are adapting historical marketing efforts for delivery via social media.

As a corporate advisor, I’ve seen what a lot of organizations are up to, including initiatives already live and others currently in development. To help frame the discussion about this topic moving forward, I’d like to categorize the efforts into the following strategy categories:

Limited Scope Strategies

• The “laissez-faire” social media recruiting strategy — a do-nothing strategy where efforts are not managed or coordinated.
• Reference-checking strategy — a strategy that employs social media solely as another source of information during the reference-checking process.
• Post-and-pray strategy — a strategy that leverages social media as nothing more than another channel to broadcast employment opportunities to.
• Employer brand management strategy — a strategy that focuses on using social media to evaluate and influence the perception of the organization as an employer by distributing content about the employee experience via social media channels.
• Hybrid strategy — A hybrid strategy recognizes a need for different approaches to drive different types of activity supporting unique aspects of the organization. It uses components of nearly all strategies presented here.

Broad Scope Strategies

• Centralized social media recruiting strategy — a common strategy that employs recruiters as the sole agents of the organization and relies upon them to carry out full-spectrum activities including direct sourcing, relationship recruiting, employment marketing, employer brand assessment, and employer branding.
• The employee-centric recruiting strategy — a powerful “full spectrum” approach that exponentially increases the visibility of the organization in social media by using all employees as the agents under the direction/influence of the recruiting organization. (This strategy is the primary focus of this article.)
• The “talent community” strategy — a variation of the employee-centric strategy that has a longer-term focus on building communities and relationships based primarily on professional learning.
• Outsourced management strategy — A strategy that employs a third party such as a marketing or PR firm to manage a significant portion of the effort.

Organizational Strategies

• Banned social media strategy — a strategy that seeks to minimize the impact of social media for better or worse by blocking or severely restricting access to social media throughout the organization.
• Social media committee strategy — this strategy recognizes that where social media is concerned, the needs and wants of numerous organizational stakeholders may cross and seeks to coordinate efforts and more effectively marshal resources.
• Distributed social media strategy — a strategy that provides organizational guidelines on social media usage, but that permits units/groups within the organization to plan, develop, and execute initiatives without oversight.

Organize Your Employee “Army”

Few would argue against the fact that implementing a program to manage and increase the organization’s presence on social media is a hot topic among managers and executives. While the most advanced work is being done in customer service functions, marketing, product development, and HR leaders nearly everywhere are at the very least exploring the possibility of using this new channel of communication.

The majority of early efforts by recruiting leaders struggled to produce meaningful and measurable results, but from experimentation comes innovation and learning.

The primary driver of failure among early adopters wasn’t lack of interest or individual effort, but rather lack of scale!

Social media erupted as tools to facilitate interaction, and interaction in too many aspects of one’s life can be time consuming and exhausting! Fortunately there is an answer to this problem: don’t do it alone. Use employees to build relationships, and then take advantage of those relationships! It’s the same principle that makes employee referrals the No. 1 source of hire at most firms. Both programs rely on harnessing or leveraging other people’s time (OPT) to contribute to recruiting results. Because the ratio of employees to recruiters is extremely lopsided, using employee’s time results in a quantum increase in network size, visibility, and professional relationships that can drive future recruiting successes.

The added benefit: employees are better able to communicate in ways and on topics more valuable to their peers, which makes it easier for them to build successful relationships.

Microsoft’s industry-leading long-term community-building approach, which relies heavily on employee efforts (highlighting employee blogs, displaying ERP advertisement on employee profile pages, etc.), illustrates the direction that recruiting managers should take. Large firms like Google already rely heavily on their employees, and smaller firms have resorted to this employee-centric or employee-centered approach because they simply don’t have a significant recruiting team.

Before you waste a lot of time and effort and become frustrated, shift your recruiters away from doing most social networking and instead toward orchestrating and managing it. Organize your employees, managers, corporate alumni, and even your vendors to become an “army” of social media brand builders and recruiters.

A Close Tie-in With the Employee Referral Program Is Required

The foundation of any social media effort that is employee-centric must be a seamless tie-in with a world-class employee referral program. Without a direct connection, the majority of great prospects your employees identify will never make it into your recruiting process. Nothing frustrates your employees more than putting maximum effort into identifying a superstar who is interested in your firm and then finding out that the organization that asked for their help failed to follow up.

The handoff from employee to recruiter must be smooth and seamless so that the candidate isn’t “dropped” or doesn’t feel like they have been transferred from a caring and highly interested employee to an uncaring recruiter or recruiting process from hell.

To ensure that the back office is ready for your social media effort, audit your referral process for major flaws and ensure that social network referrals are processed in a way consistent with social network users’ expectations. The employee referral process should also be modified to allow employees to provide online profiles in lieu of traditional resumes when they’re not available. You might also add a feature that offers a small reward to network contacts who refer highly desirable names to one of your employees who are part of their network.

Up next week, I’ll discuss why recruiters cannot and should not be on the front lines of your social media army, and offer some tips on how to engage employees in your effort.

It’s hard to argue against the statement that social networking (i.e., Facebook, Twitter, YouTube) is an extremely hot topic in business. But I have yet to find a single CFO or senior executive willing to fully fund a comprehensive social network recruiting strategy based merely on the fact that it’s a hot concept.

Even when budget is made available, most organizations need to develop measures to help direct spending into the right efforts that will provide them with the highest recruiting impact and ROI. There is no escaping it: making a compelling business case must become a priority for social network recruiting champions.

In this article, I’ll provide an outline of the four basic business case steps covering how to secure funding during these tight economic times.

Business Case Step #1: Identify the Potential Benefits of Social Network Recruiting

Provide targeted executives with a list of potential benefits and then simply have them select the ones that (if proven) would be compelling enough to positively influence their decision. Have them eliminate benefits that, whether true or not, wouldn’t influence their decision.

With that guidance in hand, design a process that focuses on proving only those benefits that were selected as highly compelling.

The following is a list of 20 potential benefits and business impacts that can result from effective social network recruiting. They are grouped based on their general level of impact on cynical executives:

Highly Compelling Benefits

• Hire quality — the program may result in hires who perform better on the job and have higher retention rates.
• Candidate quality — those who frequently use social networks may be the highly desirable early adopter; this source may identify higher-quality candidates who can then be presented to hiring managers (including those who are more technically savvy and more innovative). Note: even the simple act of listing the primary source (that generated the resume) on the top corner of every resume will, over time, educate hiring managers and eventually lead them to demand that recruiting shift their emphasis toward the sources that appear most frequently on top of the resumes that end up on a hiring manager’s short list.
• ROI — the dollar value of the program’s benefits may far exceed its cost, and the resulting ROI may be significantly higher than other recruiting programs.
• Vacancy days — because of the high usage rates and the short response times on some social network communications channels, revenue-generating, and key positions may be filled faster, resulting in fewer costly vacancy days in key positions.
• Higher offer acceptance rates — using social networks to attract and communicate with candidates may result in higher offer acceptance rates among finalists.
• Hidden candidates — it may identify qualified candidates who cannot be found or successfully messaged using other sources.

Often compelling benefits

• Employer brand — using social networks may increase your visibility and may significantly improve your “we get it” leading-edge employer brand image among targeted prospects (even if the image-building it doesn’t result in immediate applications).
• College impact — because of the high social network usage rates among college students, it may directly impact the number and the quality of college hire and entry-level candidates.
• Communications responsiveness — because there is less spam and in most cases you must be invited before you can send a message, using social networks to communicate may result in higher response rates and/or in more immediate responses when you send messages to prospects and candidates.
• Message impact — messages sent over social media channels may be perceived by the receiver as being more authentic or have a higher level of credibility and believability than traditional corporate mechanisms. The relatively low cost of sending messages over social networks may also allow your firm to increase the number of messages that it can afford to send. Together, these two factors may result in more effective messages that directly increase applications.
• Job visibility — using social networking sources may ensure that your job openings will be seen and read by a larger number of qualified candidates.
• Candidate diversity — it may provide your firm with a higher percentage of qualified diverse candidates in managerial and professional jobs.
• Global candidates — it may provide your firm with a high number of qualified candidates who reside outside of your headquarter’s country.
• Cross-fertilization — the methods, tools, and approaches that are developed using social networks for recruiting may be directly transferred to other business functions like marketing, customer service, product development, etc. So these functions may find that their social networking results will be directly and measurably improved as a result of the collaboration.

Occasionally compelling benefits

• Candidate volume — social networking sources may provide your firm with a high volume of qualified candidates.
• Lower dropout rates — you must build relationships with your “friends” in order to maintain them as part of your social network. Fortunately, social networks make it easy to build relationships quickly. Once built, it’s not surprising that this relationship may result in more applications, but it may also lower the candidate dropout rate throughout the hiring process.
• Competitive advantage — using social networks may provide your firm with a significant competitive advantage over other talent competitors. The net result may be that you can win more head-to-head battles with competitors over top talent.
• Benchmarking and learning — the time that your employees spend building relationships that may lead to recruiting successful candidates may also help gather benchmark information and improve employee learning.
• Increase sales — because using social networks directly improves your visibility and your firm’s “we get it” image, it may also influence the sales of your consumer products among those that equate product quality and being a desirable employer.
• Cost per hire — the recruiting-related transactional costs may be lower compared to other sources.

Business Case Step # 2: Identify And Counter Additional Resistance Issues

Merely convincing decision-makers that the program has significant benefits isn’t enough on its own to get funding. Unfortunately, almost all executives have some often-powerful preconceived issues that must be successfully countered. In the case of using social networks, these roadblocks almost always include issues related to:

• Employees “wasting” numerous work hours on social networks.
• Protecting the release of company information and secrets.
• Maintaining a single corporate message when you can’t control what your employees say on the Internet.
• Privacy-related issues.

At the very least, demonstrate to the COO, CFO, CIO, PR, and the corporate counsel that their potential concerns are overblown.

Start by showing that other benchmark firms that are allowing their employees and recruiters to use social networks are realizing benefits far greater than the potential costs. Next, present external research data that shows how employees use social networks for professional purposes. While studies that determine what percentage of social network traffic is professionally versus personally relevant are rare, informal studies among organizations piloting looser controls on social network activity found between 40%-65% of activity posted during work hours was professional in nature; the majority either requesting or sharing information from/with peers.

Additionally, show skeptical managers that you have developed a formal process for identifying, countering, and burying undesirable information on the Internet. Educate them that, in a connected world, they have already lost complete control of what is said about their firm, and that strategies that involve doing nothing are tantamount to giving up entirely.

Show the naysayers examples of what’s already out there. Show them how having numerous active employees on social network sites, talking positively, will directly counter the existing negative information and actually increase the number of positive messages that people can easily access.

Business Case Step # 3: Use Logical Arguments to Gain Agreement on Some of the Remaining Benefits

After narrowing the list of potential benefits to the most impactful ones, make every attempt to get executives to accept the likelihood of some of the benefits based exclusively on logical arguments. Whether you write a report or provide a PowerPoint presentation, minimize the number of benefits you have to prove with hard data.

With social network recruiting, executives might accept your professional judgment on benefits like its effectiveness on college recruiting; the value of cross-fertilization; the availability of global candidates; and the employer branding impacts.

Business Case Step # 4 – Prove the Remaining Benefits with Data

Out of the 20 possible benefits that you started with, you are likely to have to prove the actual impact of at least five of them with data. I will outline each of the five data collection methods in the remaining bullet points. Please note that the methods are listed from the least convincing to the most convincing data collection method.

Using existing data

• Provide benchmark data — in some cases, executives will agree that a program will likely provide the level of expected benefits based on external research data. The data might come from consulting firms or industry associations. However, the most convincing research data generally comes from either direct competitors or from firms that your executives admire. The goal is to convince executives that if, for example, using social networks at IBM reduced time to fill by 38%, a similar result could be expected at your firm.
• Look for existing internal efforts — on occasion, especially in large firms, you will find that some group, facility, or region has already tried your new approach without corporate approval or knowledge. In the case of social networks, you would attempt to identify and then use the results produced by any “rogue” group as an indication of the benefits or results that a company-wide effort might obtain. Because the data is internal, it is more likely to be accepted than external benchmarking data.

Limited data collection required

• Use your own employees as a baseline — assume you are trying to prove that social networks provide the capability of identifying “hidden candidates” who could be found in other sources. Start with a list of your own top performers in a particular job and then search traditional sources like job boards, attendees at professional conferences, and Google searchers to see what percentage can be located. You then do a search of their names on social network sites. By comparing the two results, you can find out whether your best employees who are “hidden” or not available on traditional sources can in fact be found on social network sites. You can use a similar approach to identify whether social networks contain more diverse candidates. You can use a third-party to see if messages to your own employees have a better response rate if they are sent via social network channels (compared to traditional voice or email).

Providing new data

• Run a small pilot sample — in order to gather performance data to prove that a program produces certain benefits or results, it’s sometimes necessary to run a small pilot project. Pilot projects are widely used in other business areas and they have a high rate of credibility. In the case of social networks, you could suddenly allow a single recruiter to begin using social network tools and you would then attempt to identify any improvement in their performance (comparing their baseline performance to their performance after using social networking tools). You can also run a pilot on a single job to see if the baseline performance on key metrics improves. If you have the resources, you can run a pilot in a complete business unit or facility and then compare the before and after results. Unfortunately running pilot projects may require some level of approval and it will cost some money (but much less than a full-scale rollout).
• Use a split sample — the most convincing form of proof that doesn’t require a companywide implementation is to use a split sample. It’s the same approach that is used by drug companies to convince regulators that their product is effective. For example, say you wanted to prove that social network recruiting produced higher-performing hires than traditional recruiting methods. You could start by identifying a team of recruiters who recruited exclusively for a single job family. You would randomly separate this small team of recruiters into two groups. Nothing would change for the control group, while the second group from the team would be trained how to use social network recruiting tools. They would be required to use social network recruiting as a major segment of their recruiting for all of their jobs over a six-month period. The initial on-the-job performance of their new hires after three and six months would be compared to the performance of the new hires from the recruiters in the control group. If the performance of the social network recruiter group was significantly better, you could say with a high level of credibility that using social networks improves the quality of hire. Continuing to measure the performance differential over time would provide additional data to support the program’s ability to improve the quality of hire.

Final Thoughts

Managers of recruiting functions seem to struggle continuously to obtain more budget and resources.

Most, unfortunately, rely too heavily on building relationships in order to maintain or increase their funding levels. If you’re tired of the up-and-down funding cycle, maybe it’s time to master the science of building an effective business case. It’s sad that recruiting is still struggling to prove what we already intuitively know (i.e., that recruiting top talent into key jobs has a huge dollar impact).

We have one of the largest impacts and ROIs of any function in the corporation, but we fail miserably at presenting it in such a way that a CFO would find it believable.

But Sidewiki’s potential for deconstructing a brand is enormous. Unlike all the networking sites, Twitter posts, and job board forums where the disaffected go to vent their anger, Sidewiki makes it possible to post these comments directly to your site.

Just imagine the mischief a disgruntled job seeker or employee can wreak by posting their story directly to your site. Side by side with your video of happy employees talking about the fun and interesting work they do is a post — or multiple posts — from current and former workers denouncing your message as bogus.

If Sidewiki were to catch on and gain even a percentage of the users that Twitter has, the impact is easy enough to see.

Says Mark Hornung, senior vice president, strategy, at Bernard Hodes, “What that means for corporate employment sites is that they need to be monitored much more aggressively.”

But what you do about negative posts is much more difficult. As Sullivan observed in his article, “The new owners (of your brand) are a complicated mix of individuals who use a variety of communication channels to influence your brand without your knowledge, consent, or guidance.”

It should be needless to say that Sidewiki also offers significant benefits. Users can post helpful suggestions for others consulting, say, a how-to page of a site. Or offer additional places to look for information. Employers can even benefit from positive comments and helpful feedback.

So even though this article addresses the negative side of Sidewiki, there are plenty of pluses and lots of potential value for users in the application.

Before we go further, let’s talk about what Sidewiki is. It is a type of message posting system that attaches to web addresses and can be seen by users accessing the address who also have the Sidewiki app installed on their browser.

There’s nothing really new about Sidewiki. Similar tools — Purple Bunny, iComment for instance — have been around for years. None of them have gained broad enough acceptance to have a significant impact.

Google, however, has a big advantage over the other commenting tools. It’s packaging Sidewiki with its popular Google Toolbar that has been installed by millions of users. The Internet Explorer version alone from CNET has almost 4 million downloads.

“It’s difficult, if not impossible, to predict if Sidewiki will get traction or how large it will grow,” says Hornung, who leads Hodes’ employer branding practice.

“Practically speaking the growth of Sidewiki will be dampened by several factors,” he adds, citing the relative lack of anonymity to the postings, the need to download and install the toolbar, and the likelihood that corporate IT will fence off downloads of Google Toolbar.

Still, there are plenty of ways around the issues and with Google simplifying the installation of its toolbar, even novices can manage the feat.

“Sidewiki may become interesting only to those who have it, mostly the tech ‘in crowd’ who bother to download and use it,” says Hornung. “Employers should be concerned about it today, especially if they are in a technical field.

“The techie crowd will (by definition) be the early adopters and a negative buzz from Sidewiki —- especially if it appears that the employer is unaware of what is going on (kind of like goofing off in high school while the teacher was writing on the board) —- could be trouble.”

Already comments have begun to appear here and there on websites. Monster, for instance, has two comments posted on its main page. One is a pitch for another job board and the other is a political polemic that has almost nothing to do with Monster.

Google has thrown site owners a bene in that they get to post their own message, which will always appear at the top of the wiki, even as other posts slide down when more relevant posts rise up the list. In spot checking several job boards and corporate career sites, I didn’t find any employer posts. Hornung did, providing the Raytheon screenshot accompanying this article.

Curiously, though, he doesn’t recommend that employers make a peremptory post.

“I would take a ‘wait and see’ approach,” he counsels. “If there is no activity, why provoke it?…

“As some observers have pointed out, Sidewiki really creates a ‘bifurcated’ Web experience: those with and those without Sidewiki will see Web sites differently. To those who are unaware of, or don’t care about Sidewiki, why create a commotion when there isn’t any?”

He says his clients are just now beginning to get their arms around the notion that an old tool may be getting some new life breathed into it. “I think the hardest part is to grasp the concept that people may comment on your Web site whether you want them to or not. Some view it as online vandalism,” Hornung says.

While many corporate communications departments already subscribe to monitoring programs or otherwise track what Internet users say or write about the company, Hornung recommends that the HR department install Sidewiki to monitor the corporate career site. ” Sidewiki can go on individual pages such as benefits descriptions or diversity programs, and it is unlikely that (marketing or communications department monitors) will drill down too deeply on an HR site when they’re trying to keep up with the hobgoblins elsewhere.

“I believe HR must be more proactive in monitoring and policing it,” he says, especially since some posts may involve employment law issues that aren’t readily spotted by others. Hodes, among others, provides a brand monitoring service for employers and has added Sidewiki posts to its scrutiny.

And when a negative comment is spotted? “If you feel you have to respond, respect the opinion. Don’t be defensive,” warns Hornung, who likens online discourse to a conversation. “If something is really just venting, you can ignore it.

“The essential lesson is you have to be thick skinned. You have to accept it.”

Rethinking how we source is not easy. But the unrefined tools such as search engines, job boards, advertisements, and even referrals are slowly giving way to far more powerful social networks of candidates. These networks can be shaped for specific types of candidates and for specific skills and competencies. They can be the only source of candidates you have so that your focus can be on your brand and building awareness of your organization and the kinds of work you offer.

Does this sound a little pie-in-the-sky? Maybe given today’s level of understand and technology, it is a stretch to give up all other forms of sourcing, but I predict these networks will replace 90% of other sourcing techniques with in decade.

What Is a Social Network?

For those of us in recruiting, a social network may be better thought of as a pool of potential candidates or as a community of talent. This is not the same as a static database of candidates. It is an ever-changing, expanding network of people who have chosen to associate with one another virtually. I often make an analogy to a network being like a series of circles rippling out from a center. Those people at the center of the circles are your most valuable and most likely candidates. Each successive ring of candidates gets further from you, is less known, and therefore less valuable. LinkedIn denotes this by giving priority to those people you know and who know you and then giving lower priority to people who you know through others.

Why Create Your Own Social Network?

Most of us rely on the established networks for sourcing candidates. These include LinkedIn, Facebook, MySpace, and many others depending on your geography and specialty. These will always have some place in recruiting, but by creating your own network you can have much more impact and get better results.

The purpose of creating a social network is to bring the best people into your innermost circle. By building a relationship through frequent communication via whatever means make sense (telephone, email, Twitter, SMS, or IM), you get to know more about each other. Potential candidates can make decisions about whether they like you, the organization you represent, and the positions that are available. You get to screen candidates and select people who closely match your needs.

Creating the infrastructure for a social network can be demanding, but free ones such as Ning are available and provide some level of customization. Others are built from scratch or by using open source tools and modules. ERE.net’s community of users (you and me) is a good example of a social network of practitioners. We have common interests and any of us can find other recruiters who we might like to recruit or help to find a new position. This is an example of an open network, but it could just as easily be available only to people who answer some questions or pass through a filter of some sort qualifying them for membership.

With your own network, you can build in tests, require certain information, or in many ways decide if someone is the right person for your organization. By doing this you eliminate hundreds of unqualified people and reduce the time your recruiters spend screening out the unwanted.

A social network, or talent community, is always growing and changing. People can become a member of a talent community in several ways, but each requires them to learn more about the organization and provides the recruiter with more information about them. For example, if someone comes to the recruiting website and indicates an interest in a particular job, software can quickly assess a variety of things including aptitude for the job, interest, and skill level. People who answer questions in a certain way or who achieve certain scores can be referred to the most suitable positions, turned away completely, or forwarded directly to a recruiter for immediate followup. No one is asked to just “dump” their unevaluated resume into a hopper and wait for a follow up call — which usually never comes.

What Do Candidates Think?

Given these economic times, candidates are stressed and unhappy, as I have written in past articles. They are keen to find organizations that are responsive, friendly, and where they can showcase their own unique qualities. A social network allows this, and the candidates I speak with respond very positively to the immediate knowledge of how well they meet requirements. They are pleased to be invited to be part of a community they have an interest in and they are also glad to know right away that they are not a good fit and won’t be considered. No news is not good news to a candidate who is trying hard to refine his or her knowledge of different organizations and different positions, and who wants to maximize her time.

I am surprised that the hype about social networks revolves almost entirely around the public networks rather than on building your own. If you are in the planning stages for next year, set aside some of your budget to explore creating your own branded social network. You might be surprised at how well it works and at how it creates a far more efficient and candidate friendly environment than you probably have today.

Despite many successes, it’s time to admit that a major employer branding principle is no longer true: that corporations can own or control their employer brand image.

The premise was that corporations could proactively put together a plan to win awards as excellent places to work, secure mention in news pieces and editorials, participate in case studies, and be talked about at industry events. Because corporations were coordinating nearly all of the information that made them visible, it was possible to heavily influence how they were perceived.

It was a practice that made firms like Google, Starbucks, GE, IBM, Microsoft, and HP famous as great places to work. However, that was then and this is now.

While it is still possible to heavily influence perception with well-managed efforts, significant growth in social media, peer-to-peer content publishing, and online rating services have shifted a majority of the power away from the corporate employer brand manager to the masses. The shift in power renders all but the most strategic and well-executed efforts virtually ineffective.

To those who actively engage and publish their story, their perception is reality, even if the experiences that led them to their perception are not common. Their points of view are often emotionally charged, personal, and therefore, significantly more trusted as fact by those you need to influence than corporate, generic dribble.

Odds are, the people most influencing your employer brand are people you have never met.

Other People Now Own Your Employer Brand Image

Control provides comfort to senior talent management executives, and for years, they have been comfortable. No matter how much the employee experience differed from the overly positive perspective they sold to candidates and organizational stakeholders, they could get away with pushing out their message.

While many product brand marketers learned long ago that if the experience with the product didn’t match the brand positioning, consumers would revolt, few in HR were paying attention. Many HR leaders may ignore or discount the facts, but the truth is that a fundamental shift has occurred, and like it or not, the years of putting forward a brand identity not tied to reality are over. Some organizations have been successful in silencing organizational critics through threat of legal action, but the majority of attempts backfire, ultimately making the criticisms even more visible.

The New Owners of Employer Brands

The new owners are a complicated mix of individuals who use a variety of communication channels to influence your brand without your knowledge, consent, or guidance. The array of contributors grows more complex daily, and the most prominent groups of brand influencers include:

• Bloggers – blogs have been around for quite some time, and while it used to hold true that only 1:100 people active online were contributing original content, a vast array of new online services has significantly reduced that ratio. Today, thousands of independent-minded individuals are posting comments about their day at work, their boss from hell, the idiot that just got hired, the stupidity of HR actions, the lunacy of senior leadership, and all those little liability secrets corporate security would like to keep buried. They communicate without fear and without purpose. Psychological studies have shown that we are nearly three times more likely to consume negative information than positive information (there is a reason the nightly news focuses on the negative), which means that we are significantly more likely to share the bad stories versus the good ones. We are also prone to exaggeration and sensationalizing, but rarely does that fact get considered when folks are reading peer-produced commentary about life at XYZ Corp.
• Social media users – Social media isn’t a regional thing, it isn’t an economic thing, and it isn’t a political thing. It is, however, a technology concept that is enabling a fundamental shift in how people learn and communicate. From sites like Facebook and MySpace in the United States to QZone in China or Hyves in the Netherlands, millions of people are sharing the details of their daily lives with friends, family, coworkers, and virtual strangers. In minutes, users can spread facts, rumors, pictures, or innuendos to thousands and thousands of individuals around the world. Negative videos like “Comcast sucks” that would have in the past been seen by only a handful of close friends are now seen by millions. Social media users can exert phenomenal pressure by using the grapevine to highlight stories many organizations would rather people not hear about.
• People active on Twitter – Twitter deserves special attention among the social media outlets because it is so instantaneous. Just as political events in Iran were instantly Tweeted about, so are the negative experiences of your employees, and even your customers. Individuals being laid off can now provide a “blow-by-blow” account of the badly handled termination process and share their pain instantly with thousands.
• Texters on mobile phones – these individuals utilize this omnipresent 24/7 channel to both receive and send news about your firm, its employees, and your practices.
• Commercial websites – there are numerous “what your employees are saying” sites like Vault, the forums at Indeed, or glassdoor.com, that specialize in sharing messages about what it’s like to work at a firm with individuals considering employment. While most make some attempt to validate that the comment contributors have worked or currently work for the organizations in questions, not all do. Prominent firms like Coca Cola, Best Buy, and Starbucks have been targeted by unfriendly “anti-firm” websites that exist merely to spread a combination of real, half-truths, and untruths about the firms.
• Industry and profession-specific forums – current employees, former employees, investors, and individuals who have merely read about your firm can post questions about what it’s like to work at your firm (or answer them) on numerous and quite active professional association website forums or independent listservers.
• Internet groups – Google, Yahoo!, Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn allow individuals with similar interests to form groups that can help to connect individuals who share common interests and likes/dislikes about your firm.
• Internet show hosts – there are numerous Internet voice and video casts (some associated with traditional media outlets and others that are just independent). These shows frequently include interviews with individuals who, without your knowledge or permission, say both good and bad things about what it’s like to work at your firm. Videoblogger and avid social network user Philip DeFranco demonstrated the power of the approach to take on even the most powerful litigation-bound employer, Wal-Mart, in response to fine print in Wal-Mart’s self-funded insurance plan that allows the employer to cease damage awards received by plan participants.
• Social bookmarking service users – individuals who tag a story with a “Digg” or related online bookmark can proactively increase the visibility of any negative story, whether you like it or not.
• Search engine managers – these individuals differ in that they probably don’t have a particular bias toward or against business or any particular firm; however, the design of search algorithms influence what type of messages about your firm that others can readily see.

Individuals who are likely to be the most active in shaping your employer brand on these communications channels include:

• Current employees – hundreds or even thousands of your employees who sometimes innocently and sometimes purposely post Tweets or wall postings provide insight into what it’s like to work at your firm. Even something as innocuous as a LinkedIn profile might lead some to make assumptions about your firm as an employer.
• Former employees – you may have thought they liked you, but what they say after they leave is more likely the reality. From disgruntled alumni to employees recently laid off, the information collective is alive with former employees recounting their experience.
• Vendors – those current and former vendors who have had both a positive and negative business relationship with your firm can now easily spread their perceptions and experiences over the Internet to anyone that will listen.
• Anti-business types – individuals who are looking for opportunities to blame corporations for a variety of economic and environmental problems are quite active on the Internet. Some are actually quite effective in not just spreading Internet messages but also in creating mass letter-writing campaigns and even actual face-to-face meetings or protests.

Peer-Produced Content Is More Credible

If you were to fact-check most blogs, Tweets, or YouTube videos, most would be considered fallacious. Yet survey after survey shows that most individuals in general (and net-generation individuals in particular) believe peer-produced content over traditional news or print media content.

You can bemoan this fact all you want, but statements on your corporate website, in your employment ads, or in press releases will almost always be viewed as less credible than a comment from a blogger who is passing along an innuendo that might have no basis in fact.

Messages from Others Are Extremely Hard to Counter

As Internet users become more prolific, the ability of corporations to monitor and respond to every channel is significantly diminished. If several hundred people outside the organization are producing content, like it or not, there is little your small team can do to match that scale (short of building a brand army of employees inside the organization to push positive commentary).

Responding to negative commentary online isn’t a good idea, as your response makes the original content both more visible and more charged.

Final Thoughts

Given the bleak picture and the almost daily erosion of control over your brand image, you might consider just giving up, but I urge you not to make that mistake.

While you no longer control your employer brand, you can become more aware of your actual brand — especially the negative comments being posted about your firm. Learn to use tools like search engine alerts, blog search sites, and Twitter archive searches. Use search engine optimization techniques to ensure the content you want to be most visible becomes most visible, and work to hide negative comments.

Smart brand managers can use employees who are active on the Internet to increase the number of positive brand messengers. Develop plans to influence key opinion leaders by making more authentic and candid (read: less perfect) stories and examples available to them. I’ll cover the approaches you can use to proactively influence your brand in coming articles.

If you have corporate experience operating an employment branding function, I solicit your additions on this loss of brand control topic. Also, if you have questions you would like answered on corporate employer branding, you are encouraged to post them in response to this article.

The 1,800 word article begins, “Email has had a good run as king of communications. But its reign is over.” It goes on to argue that alternatives like Twitter, social media, texting, and other communications forms are eating into email’s dominance.

The most telling point in the article comes from Jeff Teper, a Microsoft VP, who says that email was overused in the past. “Now, people can use the right tool for the right task,” he says.

To put it another way, when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

Recruiters, however, should be wary of too quickly abandoning email. No less an authority than Nielsen, the user analytics company, says social media usage appears to actually increase email usage. Hitwise, another analytics and business intelligence firm, says Twitter’s usage may have hit a wall. Though it can’t count the number of Tweets being sent, indicators such as accesses to Twitter profile pages and on-site searches suggest the site “Twitter appears to have hit a resistance point as of April 2009.”

The Nielsen review, a quick study to test the common belief that social media usage decreases email use, demonstrated the opposite. Blogged John Gibs, VP media analytics at Neilsen, “It actually appears that social media use makes people consume email more, not less, as we had originally assumed -– particularly for the highest social media users.”

That said, there are some generational differences in email usage. The Pew Internet and American Life Project found that teenagers have decreased their usage of email. Comparing usage in 2004 with that in 2008, the Pew survey discovered 73 percent of the teens using email at the end of last year versus 89 percent in 2004. One reason, of course, is the rise in texting during that period.

Contrast that with usage by Americans at the other end of the demographic scale. Says the report, “Fully 74 percent of Internet users age 64 and older send and receive email, making email the most popular online activity for this age group.”

Even so, the Pew report observes, “Instant messaging, social networking, and blogging have gained ground as communications tools, but email remains the most popular online activity.”

It is worth noting that while  social media usage, generically, continues to grow, it is no guarantee that individual sites will. A year ago MySpace.com had two-thirds of the U.S. social media traffic. Today, it has less than a third, while Facebook’s share of the traffic tripled from 19.9 percent to 58.6 percent.

Meanwhile, time spent on MySpace declined 12 percent. On Facebook, it rose 23 percent.

I caught up with her on the phone to go over a few of those questions. Mary Kay Mauren, senior attorney advisor, was also on the call.

Peter Zollman, for example, wrote in his informative Classified Intelligence Report that he understood from Miaskoff’s presentation that:

If you find a job-seeker’s blog that shows him to be a racist, you cannot consider that information as you consider him for the position.

Zollman, I told Miaskoff, must have misunderstood. I asked her: “Since racists aren’t a protected class, you’re plenty able to reject them just for being racists, aren’t you?”

She agreed.

Video OK but Slippery

I’ve also been talking both on the phone and via email with Joyce Lain Kennedy, the careers columnist. Following the Miaskoff talk, Kennedy wanted to know if the EEOC expects “more official EEOC discrimination complaints in the future that are based on the growth of visual media showing ‘old, fat, ugly’ in the initial stages of the recruitment process?”

“Not necessarily at all,” says Miaskoff. “We see nothing to indicate that there will be a spike in complaints … (but) it also strikes us — a personal observation on my part — the video nature of it, the fact that you can sort of watch someone when you don’t have the social controls face-to-face where you have to keep your opinions to yourself, is sort of a slippery slope for people doing screening.”

In other words, she says, face to face, you’re more likely to keep your reactions and opinions (verbal or non-verbal) to yourself out of politeness or other social norms. With a video, Miaskoff says it’s a lot like watching TV, where you feel more detached.

Again, she says, the EEOC is not “battening down the hatches” for an increase in complaints about video resumes. But “if video resumes are part of the electronic trail in a case, we’ll follow it. It’s part of the record.”

Kennedy is concerned that bias will creep into companies that lack the budgets and staff to add in the checks and balances necessary to prevent discrimination that occurs after seeing a video. She gives the example of Stephen Hawking. What would happen if he had been screened via video?

Miaskoff says two things. One, there “needn’t be the Cadillac of controls.” Just some sort of policy or practice in place for personnel procedures, whether its hiring, promotion, demotion, and so on.

“You’re certainly better off if you have a policy and you give it to people and you train people and make sure they read it (and sign indicating they have), and repeat that process a few times a year — you’re certainly in a better place than if you don’t.”

The second thing Miaskoff says about video resumes is that it’s not like having a big staff and budget with HR pros and attorneys has ended discrimination anyhow. “People are not infallible,” she says.

Blogs, Assessments

My coworker Elaine Rigoli says: “One question that was posed to me after her presentation focused more on legal issues surrounding existing staff (not those you want to hire off the street). For example, what to do when you discover that an otherwise great employee has a blog of some type that bashes the company/product/colleagues. Probation? Fire? Allow it?”

“That’s not an EEO issue,” Miaskoff says. “Unless the employer (for example) only discriminates against women who have nasty blogs about the employer, and doesn’t discriminate against men.”

John Zappe asks how the New Haven firefighters decision affected the determination of when something had an adverse impact on a protected class that rises to the level of a possible Title VII violation. What advice is the EEOC now offering to employers about determining adverse impact?

“We obviously have to comply with the Supreme Court,” Miaskoff says. “That’s the bottom line.”

I got the sense from that answer, and from Miaskoff’s tone, that the ruling made life more confusing for the EEOC.

Miaskoff says employers “need to go through the validation process for all of their tests. They need to do it carefully. They need to have their documents in place (showing) that they’ve done it. Once they move forward if a test is validated which it means it’s predictive of success in a particular job they’re hiring for, even if it has a disparate impact on minorities, it will be legal. People assume that if it has a disparate impact it will be illegal.”

If the test has a negative impact on minorities, she says, “the employer is in the spotlight and has to prove it’s truly predictive of success. Qualifications trump race.”

She says the general wisdom as she understands it, from talking to I/O psychologists, is that “written tests almost always have an impact on minorities, so you have to be careful. You have to make sure you’re using the least discriminatory alternative.” Some really big corporations, she says, are moving away from written tests and toward more functional tests.

Here’s the video of Miaskoff speaking at the ERE conference last month in Hollywood, Florida.

Let’s talk about the very interesting phenomena of communicating with potential candidates in ways that have not been there before. For years, we have been discussing whether to call first or email first. Some gurus suggest that you first send a detailed email, then leave a phone message, and then send a short email mentioning that you had called. Fine, but here are your other options today:

• Join a group on LinkedIn where the person is a member and send a message (which is free, by the way)
• Invite them to join a group on LinkedIn dedicated to their technical skills or their industry
• Look the person up on Twitter and follow him/her
• Re-tweet or reply to their tweets
• Share an article with them using the “share” button available on Ning and on many blogs
• Invite them to an interesting event posted on LinkedIn, or Ning, or elsewhere

(Note that when you invite somebody to an event or share content, you do not need to worry about the person not wanting to hear from you. All those systems have their built-in means of managing the person’s subscriptions.)

The above methods would let you reach more people, especially passive candidates. Your direct email may land in their junk folder. Your call may interrupt their day. (I can definitely say that as a former software engineer.) However, following them on Twitter or sharing news about their industry is a gentle, non-invasive way to get in touch with them. It also gives them a chance to take a look at your profile and figure out a bit about you before they respond. So, if you venture out on a particular network, make sure that your profile on whatever network that is, is professional, filled out, has your picture, and reflects your own or your company background.

Further on, built-in tools and tools built on top of social networks allow us to interact with lists of potential candidates with a touch of a button. It goes without saying that we need to figure things out about those people first, and avoid spam. But there’s nothing wrong in, say, following a list of people on Twitter whose profiles are promising, or sharing interesting content with a list of people who work in a particular industry. The “share” buttons available in many places, such as Ning networks, allow you to share an article with a list of email addresses. The (slightly buggy) tool twitterator.org allows us to bulk-follow a number of people on Twitter. You shouldn’t overdo this, of course; plus, Twitter has its (very reasonable) limitations and wouldn’t let you go too far in this direction. But these tools do increase our productivity.

Today most recruiters are on LinkedIn, many are on Facebook, and about 25% are on Twitter. This is based on some statistics that I have seen online, and is also true about my sourcing webinar attendees. There are endless online discussions on which network is the best, and whether some, such as Twitter, are “a waste of time.” Well, for one thing, Twitter and LinkedIn can hardly be compared. The functionality, the pace of communicating, the length and the nature of relationships are all very different, so your expectations also need to be different. And then, it makes most sense to me to use both LinkedIn and Twitter in conjunction, plus use other networks as well. If you have a targeted list of candidates, you can interact with them in different places simultaneously. You can look up information about them; they may be more present in one online place than the other. Perhaps they have a blog and would welcome your comments. You can invite the same person to a group on LinkedIn and follow them on Twitter, and so on.

There are ways to find the same people across networks. It’s, of course, easier if the person has a unique name and distinct keywords, such as technology skills, in the profile. However, if you get hold of an email address or a Twitter ID, this can sometimes get you pretty far in the sourcing process. In the recent SourceCon challenge I used the site pipl.com to look up people based on their username across networks. Pipl.com also allows you to look up people based on an email address.

An amazing, not explored by many, part of this communication with prospects is that the person may have very little info in their profile on one site vs. another, but based on what you have learned about them you might try to connect on either or both. Searching for candidates on one network and contacting them on another expands our sourcing capabilities.

Successful recruiting using social media requires new personal qualities. To conquer the social media world, we need to be fearless and open-minded. We also need either to be somewhat technical or to have coworkers who are. It’s not terribly hard to navigate different sites, but working with someone who is used to browsing and searching on the web helps. Then, there’s less structure out there now, so if you are creative, this is a useful quality; compare the well-defined ways of using a job board with the open-ended interactions on social networks. We need to get used to questioning our assumptions as we go. Facebook does not work like LinkedIn, so expect to see something different there. Assumptions do not work at all if you are used to searching in one or two places. Search syntax is different on Google, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Monster; though all these sites support Boolean logic, you can’t reuse the same searches around the social media.

Measuring our success is tricky. Since we still want to hire the best candidates and there are still traditional interviews and offer negotiation processes, perhaps checking how your social media activities affect your submission, interviewing, and hiring statistics makes a lot of sense. That said, we need to be spending a few hours here and there checking out what others do and what new tools show up.

It’s pretty exciting to be here, right?

Entice Labs

Earlier this year, John Sumser described the company as a “game changer.” In June, Susan Burns, president of Talent Synchronicity, said the company’s TalentSeekr product is “a sleek and effective approach to targeted employment brand positioning.”

Now, TechCrunch has said of the company, “it still beats hiring a headhunter.” OK, so that’s not as scintillating an endorsement as either Sumser’s or Burns’, but then TechCrunch is a site for geeks, not recruiters. But you gotta figure that a product that wows both techies and recruiters is worth taking a look at.

So let’s start with the elevator description: TalentSeekr is a recruitment advertising program that creates interactive ads out of standard job postings, targets them by the criteria you specify, places them on sites in its ad network, then monitors the results, adding exposures here, reducing them there and deleting ads entirely from sites that provide too few or too poor results.

The ads can be of all types, including video, Flash, banners, and text ads, for example. Formats and placements are tested and refined in real time. Recruiters can monitor the performance of individual ad types and placements and make changes. But the automated adjustments are the real selling point. As candidates click in and are qualified, TalentSeekr learns what performs best, and provides more of the same. The longer the campaign, the better the performance and the lower the cost of each applicant.

This heuristic capability sets TalentSeekr apart from mere monitoring systems that provide lots of information but don’t act on it. With the potential of having an ad appear on hundreds, thousands, and even more websites, being able to make changes on the fly can save money on PPC postings and improve the quality of the candidates overall.

The other, and equally important capability, is the potential for capturing passive job seekers. Ads can be placed on all sorts of sites and places. Adidas managed to snare a candidate who saw an ad when checking their  Gmail.

Targeting can be contextual, behavioral, geographic, or by social media type or all of these. There’s a video on the TechCrunch site that says Entice Labs can target as broadly as a nation or as narrowly as an individual building.

On her Talent Synchronicity Burns describes the process:

“EnticeLabs begins by collecting information from the recruiter about a job or a job category to develop a highly relevant positioning strategy. They’ll work with you to understand key markets (talent and geography) and create text, image, picture, video, or flash ads that will appeal to passive and active seekers.

Then, TalentSeekr automatically generates an engagement page that serves as a “storyboard” type concept to enhance the prospect’s experience with your company’s brand. Through the engagement page, TalentSeekr weaves together video, photos, referral capability, and links to your career site, job posting, community interface, or any other digital real estate to which you want to drive traffic that results in a valuable employment experience.”

In the interest of complete transparency I should point out that Burns and Sumser are members of the Entice Labs Expert Panel. But having seen some of what TalentSeekr can do, the descriptions are apt, if understated.

The heuristic nature of the system sets it apart from other advertising networks, most recently SnapTalent, which closed up shop in August.

TalentSeekr, as its VP of strategy and alliances, Joshua Westover, says, makes the most sense for continuous recruiting. Small companies with only the occasional need to advertise positions or those that care little for branding are not Entice Labs’ best prospects.

But, as Stephen Fogarty of adidas explains in a video Burns did with him and Westover, TalentSeekr can help fill even challenging positions, the kind that adidas used to turn over to headhunters. In her blog posting, Fogarty reports that in a test campaign to fill a difficult job, TalentSeekr produced several qualified candidates in two weeks.

Writes Burns, “The prospect adidas hired had seen the ad on their Gmail page and was so taken by the experience and highly relevant content they were blown away.”

Effective Matching

The first is QuietAgent. It has developed a new approach to matching candidates and jobs. Matching technology is nothing new. Other products have been available for at least a decade. But most matching products are a black box. Using them requires having total faith in the methodology and algorithms developed by the vendors. They do work, but frequently it’s not all clear why candidates get ranked in a particular way. There’s also no way for a recruiter to influence the matching. The vendors are not inclined to let anyone do so because the technology is the result of a big investment in research. Recruiters find this “father-knows-best” approach frustrating when the matching doesn’t produce the kind of results they expect.

QuietAgent has moved beyond these limitations. The technology uses the ONet database as the basis for classifying and matching jobs with resumes. ONet is the largest occupational classification system in the world, and it’s in the public domain, making the basis for matches better understood. More importantly, QuietAgent’s technology can be adapted. Users can adjust how the matching works. A user can specify different combinations of criteria on which to match candidates with jobs. For example, five years of experience and certain skills, or three years and a different set. This is a big deal, as all recruiters know. Hiring criteria are rarely rigid, and search tools, such as the ones on job boards and ATS, allow for little flexibility.

QuietAgent is the technology behind AllianceQ and UnitedWeWork. The former is an association of larger employers that are willing to share resumes of candidates with others. The latter is a free job board. QuietAgent’s association with AllianceQ makes for a powerful combination, because it also provides a supply of candidates. This may not seem like much today, when candidates are in abundance, but the day will come when candidates are again in short supply; then, this makes for a great combination in one package.

Reliable Resumes

I recently heard an interview with a NASA veteran who was hired at the start of the Apollo program. What was most interesting was that he and most other engineers were hired at NASA purely on the basis of their resumes. They sent in a resume and subsequently received an offer letter. This wasn’t unusual, up until the 1960s. Bringing candidates in from out of town was rarely done because of the expense. And no one did phone interviews; long distance calls cost a lot, and the sound quality wasn’t all that great. If a candidate looked good on paper then they were often hired.

How things change. A resume isn’t worth a whole lot today. We use it as the starting point of a long process. That is the way it needs to be. By some estimates a third or more contain significant exaggerations or outright lies.

One company solving this problem is Resumefit. Candidates who complete the company’s assessments get a “certified resume” locked with a digital key. The value here is that any recruiter receiving the resume can be assured that the claimed skills are true. Other vendors have attempted to create equivalent products before, but they’ve focused more on verifying employment, references, and criminal history. That has limited value before a hiring decision is made. Knowing that the skills and abilities described meet a certain level is much more useful to employers using skills-based hiring. This makes the recruiting process much more efficient because recruiters don’t have to waste time trying to read between the lines and can be reasonably assured that decisions they make are based on reliable information.

QuietAgent and Resumefit may not generate the buzz created by Twitter but they are solutions to well-known problems and serve very fundamental needs in recruiting. These needs will still be around when the ardor for social networking cools, as it will. Recruiters use of social media will balance out once its usefulness is better understood, settling into a niche supporting referrals and talent communities. But we’ll still be looking for effective and efficient ways to match candidates with jobs and find resumes with reliable information.

Twitter has value for recruiting, no question. Tweeting jobs raises their visibility because search engines rank them higher, though this works in an indirect way. Twitter adds a “nofollow” attribute to links submitted by its users. The “nofollow” attribute advises Google, and a few other search engines, to ignore the link. Some of these follow the links but exclude them from their ranking calculations (Yahoo, Google); some ignore the links completely (MSN, Bing). The only known search engine that doesn’t comply with “nofollow” at all is Ask.com. What Twitter does is to affect positively a website’s Alexa rankings by sending visitors to those pages. Usage data is a sign of quality for Google and all the other search engines and raises their rankings in search results. But search engines don’t index Tweets in real-time today so there’s a lag. However, that can be compensated for by using the “bio” line on Twitter to include some text on your jobs, because that is being constantly indexed.

Pointless Babble

Broadcasting openings via Twitter can help fill jobs, as described here. But Twitter is a particularly weak tool when it comes to engaging with others or building community. First lets examine the available evidence. Analysis of Twitter usage patterns show that there’s not much in the way of two-way communication happening via Tweets. A study by Pear Analytics found that some 40% of Tweets qualify as “pointless babble” and about the same amount as “conversational updates.” It should be no surprise that while Tweets are great for broadcasting anything, they’re not a channel on which to have a serious conversation. Twitter is much too public a forum to engage with a community. Communities on Facebook and other sites are restricted: you have to be accepted as a friend to get in. Anybody can follow someone on Twitter or find their tweets. That’s not how communities form.

Further proof of this comes from a study at the Social Computing Lab at HP which found that Twitter users have a very, very small number of real friends compared to the number of followers they claim. A link between any two people does not necessarily imply any interaction between them. In the case of Twitter, most of the links between users are meaningless from an interaction point of view. Put that together with other data, such as that half are not active, and the only conclusion that can be drawn is that as a social networking tool Twitter has limited value.

Social Networking 101

Social networking works by engaging with people and communities. Communities share something — an idea, an interest, theme, or topic. That happens more on sites like Facebook, MySpace, or Cachinko, where access is limited and one has to request to join a community. HP’s Social Computing Lab has also found that inside close-knit communities, information flows faster and to more people because an item relevant to one person is more likely to be of interest to individuals in the same social circle than those outside of it. Engage with the right communities and you can amplify your message and expand your networking efforts exponentially. But the key word here is “engage” — having something to share that the community cares about — so that its members will interact and reciprocate. That is more likely on sites like Facebook than through Twitter. Just how many meaningful conversations does anyone have that they’d like the world to be able to learn about?

Using Twitter is not a waste of time, but its value is limited as a way to expand your social networking efforts. For the average recruiter interested in social networking, their time would be better spent engaging with communities on Facebook and other sites. Twitter can raise the visibility of your jobs, but it’s not the most powerful tool in the social media toolset.

The last time I wrote about this subject some people interpreted it to mean that I was critiquing everything to do with social networking. Far be it for me to do so — I like social networking and it has been a huge benefit to me professionally. I just returned from a six-month project in Switzerland that came about because of social networking.

Some readers pointed out that many find it hard to accept any kind of criticism that challenges their cherished beliefs. If you haven’t got something nice to say then don’t say anything. If you’re not with us you’re against us. Seems like narrow-mindedness isn’t limited to healthcare reform. That’s understandable — nobody wants to be told that the prophet they’ve been listening to doesn’t have the answer to their prayers and probably doesn’t know a whole lot more than them. One of the many lessons my parents taught me was that just because someone may not like what you say is no reason not to say it, unless you’re running for election. And I’m not.

In a moment of frustration (or epiphany) I quipped that candidates were seeking relationships and our recruiting technology offers them the equivalent of a one-night stand (or more accurately a chance to complete an application). Looking past the potential off-color nature of the comment, the truth is there is a gap between what people in this world of Web 2.0 desire and what a typical recruiting operation allows. That gap is the williness on the part of recruiting to have a conversation with you unless you are part of the chosen few that meets with requirements of a specific job.

Jeff Jarvis writes in his book–What Would Google Do?—about the first law he learned on the Internet:

“Give the people control and they will use it. Don’t and you will lose us.”

Think: It Is Not About Us!

Giving up control is scary, but the alternative is downright frightening. If you would like to see that picture, just read Jarvis’s famous blog post about “Dell Hell.”(Use keywords “dell hell” in Bing.) It is the story of Jarvis in a moment of frustration with Dell that caused a groundswell of public opinion and caused Dell an amazing amount of pain (i.e. lost sales, bad PR, etc). Dell eventually got the message, but at what cost? To say that this event has caused a sea change is an understatement.

Think Distributed, Not Destination

Jeff Jarvis (What Would Google Do) suggests that companies (like Google) that act as a distribution system have been more successful in the Web 2.0 world than organizations (like Yahoo) that have focused on building portals and destination points. When you build a destination site, it is as if you are taking the prospect where you want them to go, as opposed to using the site as a method that they can go where they want to go. The Microsoft Talent Engagement Model (see graphic below) is more of a marketing distribution system for our jobs and jobs-related content than to a single talent community site. In fact, as you dig into the model, you will notice that activities and information flow in a myriad of directions as opposed to a single web site.

Not Creating New Communities!

We joined existing communities (LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook) and used their platforms to engage the appropriate segments of their membership. Not only do these social networking sites have a large number of active participants, the very audience we are trying to reach contained in their ranks. Forrester’s Technographics research indicates that a Groundswell has occurred and the majority of adults in our society (especially the best educated, highest-paid professions as well as the new entrants to the job market) have joined social networking sites. It is very apparent that our target audience is online and in these existing communities or social networking sites.

We are creating community, but not necessarily creating new communities (if that makes sense). Perhaps a way to good way to think about it is that we are organizing a community in way that can make the community function better to better meet the interests of our target audience. For active job seekers, we can provide a higher quality experience and help them navigate Microsoft. For the more passive individuals, we can provide the “inside scoop” on technologies; what it is like to work at Microsoft; and engage current employees in conversation.

An Alternative to Goodbye!

At Microsoft, we are pipelining talent in communities as an alternative to saying goodbye. These communities are located on social networking sites (LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook) as well as our vendor’s (Jobs2Web) platform. We use communities to

1. Offer an alternative to prospects who are not ready to apply
2. Offer an alternative to prospects who are screened out
3. Offer an alternative to prospects who do not complete the application process.

The Microsoft Talent Engagement Model (see graphic) illustrates that there is a lot going on in our approach to pipeline and creating community.

The pie chart in the upper-left hand corner is a reminder that the talent supply is comprised of active, casual, passive, and non-job seeking talent. And it points out the active job seeker is only about 14% of our potential audience. That leaves approximately 86% of the potential audience—causal, passive, or non-job seekers that could be part of the talent engagement equation.

The center of the funnel illustrates that we feed our SEO results; our SEM activities; our TalentStream (A CRM-based pipelines/community engaging approach that maps a target audience’s behaviors, attitudes, and interests to our outreach) campaigns; and the prospects generated from live and virtual events. Previously, I argued that SEO Is Not Enough: that tactic alone does not reach a large percentage of the potential talent supply. So we add TalentStream campaigns, events, and other outreach strategies to reach deeper into the potential talent supply toward where the more passive prospects are. We use a variety of approaches that are based on an understanding of our target audience’s behaviors, attitudes, and common interests.

The left-hand side of the Microsoft Talent Engagement Model depicts how we use a number of different opportunities to distribute information to active, as well as some casual and active prospects. In this way, we allow the prospect to decide how they want to engage or hear from us. For example, the passive job seeker might want to subscribe to a job agent that will alert them when a certain type of opportunity becomes available. The casual job seeker might have been referred by an employee to a specific job and we want to move them forward in our process. The prospect that is not looking might show up at a virtual event that has a Microsoft leader discussing an important new technology.

Not ready to apply? Not the right fit? Came in second? Regardless of the reason, the right-hand side of the Microsoft Talent Engagement Model graphic illustrates the ability to offer the prospects the opportunity to remain engaged. If they join a community, we will listen, answer questions, and converse with prospects. If they are “non-applicants” at the present time, we offer a variety of ways a prospect can decide how to receive information. For the person who is screened out of an interview process, we can offer them the opportunity to stay engaged while they wait for a better job fit. For the candidate who came in second in an interview panel, we can actively assist them in considering other opportunities within Microsoft. And for the person who has left Microsoft for other opportunities, we can keep in touch. In many instances Microsoft Alumni wish to return after a short length of time in their new venture.

This behavior of not allowing for conversations with prospects is going to catch up with the recruiting profession—and it is not going to be pretty for some of us. But we still have a chance to get in front of this. Apply or Goodbye is no longer the only option.

The THX commercial tickles our ears in the movie theater, loudly proclaiming the “Audience Is Listening.” The lesson of the Web 2.0 is the “Audience Desires a Conversation” and recruiters had best join in the dialogue.

One purpose of this article is a preview of a presentation for the Fall 2009 ERE event, where our talent community pilot will be discussed in the broader context of Web 2.0 Beyond the Social Recruiting Hype: Microsoft’s Approach to Building Talent Pipelines and Communities. While the presentation will be much broader than a discussion of “apply or goodbye”—one of our core beliefs is that Web 2.0 demands that we have conversations with prospective employees at all phases of the job search cycle. Failure to do so will result in our recruiting the best talent for Microsoft, and that significantly impacts our business.

It’s an innovative program which kills two Nestle birds with one stone: using social media (online user-generated videos) to market candy, and providing job experience that potential employees may not get elsewhere.

Nestle’s Daniel Jhung, who manages the Butterfinger brand, launched the program in June after he had been hearing and reading about how cynical young people were about jobs and employment — Gen Y’s feeling that the job market was rotten, and that many big-corporation jobs were pretty dreary anyhow. Plus, Jhung figured Nestle could stand to learn a thing or two about social media from the Gen Y-ers.

He did a pretty wide sweep for candidates. It included the HotJobs job board (Nestle and Yahoo are tight); colleges; casting-call agencies in New York and LA; film schools; the Improv chain of comedy clubs, and more. After getting about 450 applicants in three or four days, that was enough to shut down the search.

Nestle narrowed down the field to a top-10 list in each city, and had each produce a video. From there, it interviewed two per city, and made its final selection.

A.J. Mayers is a FUNtern in Los Angeles. He heard on the radio that Nestle was having an in-person event to talk about the opportunity. He couldn’t make that, but did follow-up when he saw a posting for the internship on Craigslist, which pointed to HotJobs.

The University of Texas-Austin grad got the internship right before he got brought on at MTV. Because the Butterfinger gig is flexible, and can be done during off hours, from home, or at the beach (where he has passed out candy bars), he opted to take both the internship and the MTV job. There’d be no need to commute from his West Hollywood home to Santa Monica for MTV and then back to Nestle’s building, which could’ve been hellacious. Plus, Mayers was looking for experience in the entertainment industry and wants to be a TV producer, and for Nestle, he gets to make videos as part of an online user-generated video contest. The contest is part of Nestle’s re-introduction of its “Nobody’s gonna lay a finger on my Butterfinger” tagline.

Mayers, whose Butterfinger stint ends at the end of August, is making a last video that will be a “very fun, dancing, High School Musical-esque production,” he says, “with the Butterfinger man dancing around. It’s funny, silly. It’s my way to go out with a bang.”

Other FUNterns are in Chicago, Atlanta, and New York. They’re doing different kinds of work revolving around promoting the candy bar and the video contest. The Chicago FUNtern is headed to BYU when the internship is over; the New York intern, who is also working for a wireless company, is also headed back to school. The Atlanta intern is doing the internship as part of some time off she’s taking to explore freelance projects.

Jhung didn’t say who might at some point be offered jobs from the group, but did mention that Nestle is considering one or two of them, pending among other things, the remaining videos they make. My guess is that AJ is one of them (if so, it’ll be interesting to see whether he picks MTV or Nestle; he mentioned to me that MTV is part of his TV-industry career path, and doesn’t sound eager to leave). Anyhow, below is one of his videos. Perhaps I should warn you that I’d give it a PG-13 rating.

Koda.us is a new networking site that describes itself as “the first platform dedicated to social recruiting, which brings the relationship-oriented process of social networking to job recruiting.” Think of KODA as Facebook without the embarrassing pictures and without the comments from friends you never want mom — or a recruiter — to see.

““KODA is more professional than Facebook but more personal than LinkedIn, letting both sides of the hiring equation get to know each other,” says Jeff Berger, co-founder (with Tony York) and CEO of KODA, in a press release issued by the site Monday.

The target is Gen Y, a group with academic chops but little business experience. For them a traditional resume isn’t going to land them a look, let alone a job, considering all the recession-fueled layoffs that are hitting the entry-level workforce hard. So KODA has structured, yet personal profiles that give you a feel for the person behind the words. There’s a place for those oh so old-school resumes, but the heart of the experience are the “Me in Three” bullet points and “A Deeper Look.” Together, these two categories, and a third for “Life Experiences,” offer a refreshing and candid self-description of the people on the site.

For instance, one of the KODA members got a master’s in landscape architecture after earning undergrad and graduate degrees in theater design and stagecraft and working for several years (not one of the Gen Y’ers) with opera and dance companies. Why is a puzzler, until you read about her decision in her “Life Experiences” section where she explains she wanted to help her adopted New Orleans rebuild after the hurricane.

These are the kinds of things a recruiter wants to know, but will never find out from a resume.

On the other side of the equation are the companies with jobs. Although KODA reports having relationships with some 350 companies and non-profits, the majority on the site say they aren’t hiring and have no listed jobs. All, though, complete a profile of their own. The expectation is that these profiles will give job seekers a feel for the company and its culture. In time, perhaps they will.

KODA’s features are still on the raw side, not unexpected for a site in beta. The promise, however, is that once built-out, KODA will present its members with jobs that match their interests and background and help them connect with those companies. Right now, completing the “compatibility criteria” — such things as company size, type of job, attire, corporate environment, and so on — produces about the same result as a keyword search, but with fewer jobs.

KODA’s business development lead, Katie Del Guercio, says the site is not just for job seekers. It’s for “having an online professional identity,” she explains, going on to say that college freshmen and sophomores are encouraged to create a profile and use it to manage their professional persona as they grow themselves.

KODA isn’t the first site to launch with similar goals. Jobster, after completing one of its frequent transitions a couple years ago, offered both candidate and company profiles. The difference, though, was that Jobster made it possible for candidates to contact company employees to get an insider’s view that might — or might not — be more honest than what the recruiter’s said. But at least it was available.

KODA doesn’t connect individuals. As its FAQs say, “While KODA is inspired by social networking sites, it simply isn’t one.”

EE = (1-N) X (R/P)

Where:

EE = Effectiveness of Engagement, expressed as a percentage

Engagement, in this context, means getting ready access to employees’ networks, regardless of the mechanism for doing so. Virtually 100% of employees have social networks and connect to them using different means (networking sites are not the only way to do so), but only a certain proportion of employees may be willing to give an employer access, by either making the contacts available or agreeing to forward job postings to them.

N = The proportion (%) of employee networks that an employer or recruiter has engaged with.
R = The average number of qualified referrals received per month per employee
P = The average number of postings accepted by employees to their networks per month

So if an employer is engaged with 10% (N) of employees’ social networks, and on average each employee accepts 3 (P) postings per month, and produces 2 (R) qualified referrals:

EE = (1-10%) X (2/3) = 60%

If the same results are achieved by engaging with 50% of employee networks, EE = 33%

Engagement is more effective the larger the number of qualified referrals received for the same proportion of employee networks an employer is engaged with. However, this is not a bottomless pit. Research shows that beyond a certain threshold of postings, the volume of qualified referrals starts to flatten out and even reduce.

Reality Meets Hype

All that’s being claimed about the potential of social networks as sourcing tools hinges on being able to increase N. But engagement takes time and effort and there are no shortcuts, which is why many of the claims being made about how social networks can revolutionize recruiting border on the ludicrous.

Take the buzz around Twitter as an example. Originally conceived as an answer to the prayers of narcissists and stalkers — okay, “to support the idea that people should enjoy an ‘always on virtual omnipresence’” — it’s now being touted as a critical tool for recruiters interested in social networking. The conventional wisdom is contradicted by a recent study from Harvard that shows it to be just a broadcast mechanism. Ninety-percent of tweets are generated by 10% of users. Across all Twitter, users the median number of lifetime tweets is one!

Social networking is about communities, where there’s sharing of information, give and take, etc. for the members to stay connected with each other. Twitter is a one-way street — there’s no evidence to show that it supports social networking. A recent interview with Twitter cofounder Biz Stone has him talking about companies using Twitter to sell pies, warm cookies, and respond to customer service requests. There’s no social networking going on here, unless the pie eaters are sitting around the same table.

Some would claim that having a broadcast mechanism is precisely the point. A recruiter can broadcast jobs. That requires candidates to follow them or the employer. In which case, just how is this different than an e-mail alert? Job postings don’t have the same shelf life as warm cookies, and a quick response usually doesn’t alter the outcome.

Increasing N

Research on communities by the Pew Foundation and others shows that engagement requires starting in and participating in conversations. The main reasons people share are:

• To help someone who would benefit (81%)
• To give back, after benefiting from sharing (42%)
• To show enthusiasm (39%)
• To show dissatisfaction (19%)

Interestingly, only 5% of people share to be seen as experts.

However, to state the obvious, starting and participating in a conversation requires having something interesting to say that the community cares about. An excellent example of this is Elevenmoms on Wal-Mart’s website. They have 20 moms blogging here. The blog is focused on a specific demographic with a very clear mandate of the type of community it supports. Try engaging with that one if you’re not a mom. The point being, in case it still isn’t clear, is that increasing N takes a lot of focused effort. As a recruiter involved in social networking, you need to figure out the engagement profile of your audience:

1. Where do they interact (or not interact)?
2. What topics get them excited?
3. What do they share?

Technology is the least useful thing here. Using Twitter is not going to help much, as the usage patterns show. There isn’t a person on the face of the planet who has enough interesting things to say on a regular basis that they deserve to be followed. Any pronouncements people make, including what they have to say about their place of work or jobs, can always be searched for the few nuggets of useful information buried in the mountains of drivel. To increase N focus on a few communities you can engage with and forget toys like Twitter. Face it, unless your last name is Spacey or Kutcher you’re not likely to have much of a following. And even if you get some, they won’t stay: Nielsen Media estimates that 60% of Twitter users stop using it after a month.

The analogy doesn’t hold up perfectly because friend collecting is a Facebook pastime, and if you ask around you can almost always find someone to let you into any network. But it’s still not recruiter friendly. Unlike LinkedIn, where the search tools were designed with recruiters in mind, Facebook’s tools seem intended to discourage sourcing.

Yet those millions of Facebook members are too tempting a target to resist. Since the beginning of the year Appirio and Jobvite have both come up with applications that connect HR tech systems of their own or their partners with Facebook. Both however, are intended for corporate recruiters using either Salesforce or Jobvite’s recruitment system. Both focus on referrals.

InSide Job is different. It’s a Facebook application that individual users choose to deploy, making them searchable and findable to other InSide Job users.

The idea came to Lorne Epstein, a career recruiter, as he tried to get contacts out of LinkedIn for free.

Says Epstein, “They charge $10 for an email (there are corporate accounts, but he’s talking about an individual search) and there’s 40 million profiles. Facebook has 250 million and it’s only getting bigger.”

So Epstein, author of You’re Hired! Interview Skills to Get the Job, came up with a simple way to connect recruiters with Facebook users, and job seekers with the people who might be able to help them get a job.

It’s called InSide Job and it’s an application that allows its users to search other InSide Job users.

The process is straightforward enough. You must choose to use InSide Job and allow it to import resume information from your Facebook page or enter it manually. Then sit back and wait for a recruiter to contact you or search for people in the InSide Job network who might be helpful in your job search.

Coincidentally, Epstein pulled together the people to develop InSide Job from his own personal network.

Epstein freely acknowledges that the challenge for Inside Job is adoption. In order for it to be a moneymaker for Arlington Soho, the company he set up to manage and market the application, he figures the user volume would have to be around 100,000 or more. Considering there are hundreds of available applications, growing the 5,000 current users is no mean feat.

Musical Chairs – InSide Job from Lorne Epstein on Vimeo.

Flashmob marketing with musical chairs in Washington’s Dupont Circle can’t hurt, but the competition for attention is keen, and Jobvite and Appirio have a head start.

Still, InSide Job is further evidence that recession or not, there’s intense interest in leveraging the social media.

To suggest that recruiters are control freaks is not an epiphany or an “ah-ha moment,” as being controlling is one of the traits that make recruiters good at our jobs.  We are managers of a set of projects called search assignments or requisitions and are required to direct a volume that easily reaches the double digits. And we need to control as much as possible to be successful.

Recruiters like the idea of community and having a relationship with prospects and/or candidates. But when recruiters take a deeper dive, they begin to understand that some of the conversations that transpire in community are outside of their control, they lose some enthusiasm. So why advocate community if one cannot control the outcome?

In my upcoming Fall 2009 ERE presentation, I am weaving five topics/questions/discussion points into the storyline. One discussion point is “Web 2.0 solutions proclaim that this is the new way to pipeline candidates into a private talent community. What is a talent community and how do I build one? In this article, I will deal with the “why” of talent communities.  And if you are in Florida in September, I will discuss the “how to” at length.

So why advocate community if one cannot control the outcome? There are several reasons why community and the relationships that are formed and built are essential in the 21st century Web 2.0 model of recruiting; they include:

Communities Can Be Influenced

Most community experts indicate that while a community is not controllable, it can be influenced. On a brand level, thought leaders argue that conversations about your brand are going to take place with or without you. The question becomes: Do you want to participate in the conversation? Participating in the conversation allows you to have some influence over the opinion of a given community’s members.

Communicate With Your Audience Where They Are

The growth of social networking sites is staggering. Sometimes the size of a social networking site is larger than smaller companies. How long do you think it will take Facebook (225 million members) to eclipse the population of the United States? If our target audiences are joining Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, MySpace, and communities on Ning, shouldn’t we want to join them? 

Your Target Audience Has Moved Online

If you target audience has not formed a online community or affinity group, they will do so in the very near future. The growth in social networking sites has been accompanied by a growth in all sorts of online groups and communities. Most of us have a segment of the labor market that includes the talent we’re interested in and has migrated online. These affinity-driven communities segment themselves naturally into ideal groups in which to build relationship and share your organization’s story.

Transparency Is a Byproduct of Community

One of the biggest results of Web 2.0 and social networking sites is a move toward transparency with respect to process and conversation. With everyone watching, it is better to be a truth teller. With everyone watching, it requires us to engage in the conversation. With everyone watching, it makes us better citizens of a group.  And above all, it enhances the experience of the prospective employees who engage in our recruitment process.

The question on everyone’s lips can often be answered by having just one person comment.

Leverage is an important aspect of community. It allows us to communicate one thought and have it seen by many. In a previous article, I discussed the aspect that most members are in the crowd and do not engage in conversation. But they are listening. That is why it is important to engage the members who are asking questions or making comments.

Community Makes Navigation of Enterprise-size Companies is Easier

In a company the size of Microsoft, the inner workings are somewhat of a mystery to a job seeker (and to some employees as well). The transparency of the connections that are seen in a LinkedIn Group make it easy to reach out and engage. Questions can be answered; issues clarified; and relationships built.

Community Is Counterintuitive

Community isn’t intuitive. Previously, I compared the counterintuitive nature of community to learning how to snow ski. It took a while for me to get my head around “leaning away from the mountain.” Talk about counterintuitive. If I lost balance while turning, my instructor said to lean away from the mountain; away from apparent safety; away from the natural pull of gravity. Every instinct told me leaning away was wrong. Yet, I could not move off the bunny slope until I stopped trusting my instincts and listened to my instructor. I had to change my mindset. In the same way, we must move from a transactional recruiting process, to get closer to community, regardless of what our recruiting instincts suggest.

Community Is Guanxi (and that is a good thing)

Guanxi [guan-shee] is the basic dynamic in personalized networks of influence in Chinese society and seems to be most fitting when we think about community.  Guanxi suggests that the relationship is more important that the transaction itself.  So when one considers Guanxi in recruiting, it opens the door to the following possibilities:

• Exploring ways to begin and capture a relationship with desired prospects even if they aren’t currently looking for a job
• Developing a longer-term relationship with prospects during their entire careers
• Discovering ways to bring value to your prospect community even if they do not take your job
• Becoming more transparent to target talent and enhance prospect experiences
• Moving away from transactional recruiting and into relationship recruiting

So why is community so important in recruiting? At an elementary level, the move of our target audience online mandates that we meet them where they are. And the rule of the road in Web 2.0 is that people online must have the capability to have a conversation. Gone are the days of Web 1.0 and static content and organizations just creating content. At its heart, Web 2.0 is user-generated content and creating conversation. Conversation is expected by our target audiences who have moved to these online communities. And for the most part, we in corporate recruiting have disappointed our target talent (by necessity third party recruiters engage in relationships to a greater degree than corporate counterparts). And if we don’t change, we will not be successful.

Why community? If we are going to attract the best talent in the world, we must connect with them where they are visible — online social networks and affinity groups. How do we build community? That is a discussion for September.

But the big questions for many are simple: What are social networks, what do they replace, and what makes them useful?

What Are Social Networks?
Very simply, social networks are Internet-based applications that allow you to expand and grow the number of people you know who have the skills, interests, or abilities that you are looking for. They also give you the opportunity to market your organizations to a targeted group of people.

For most of us the challenge is how to find enough of the right candidates to meet the needs we have and how to find people in markets and geographies that are new and strange. When your boss says that there are positions open in China, and you are in Minneapolis with only a local network, what do you do? This is where social networks can be magical.

Social networks as an idea are neither new nor unusual. We all have our own networks of candidates, friends, college mates, sports mates, relatives, and so forth. The only difference is that our networks are physical, and most likely interactions only occur face-to-face or over the telephone. We also often have very limited information about the people we meet everyday, and really aren’t certain if they could fit an open position we have or not. The Internet-based social networks provide a much broader ability to screen and communicate with potential candidates.

The social networks we all know best are LinkedIn and Facebook — both of which connect you to millions of potential candidates. They have been around for several years and through their own marketing and promotion have assembled a huge number of people. Other well-known social networks include MySpace, Bebo, Orkut, Hi5, Ning, and others. There are also many smaller networks, some more focused on a particular type of candidate or candidates of a certain age group, but still very valuable.

By offering the ability for you to connect to people through other people, you can build a global network of potential candidates. By using your own branding and marketing efforts, you can create a large and robust sub-network of people who know you and your organization and who you can communicate with as frequently as you wish. Some organizations use LinkedIn and Facebook to find people and then invite them to join a private social network that you may create by using a tool such as Ning, for example. By creating your own network, you can tailor the messages to your potential candidates and you can use the members to find more people.

What Do They Replace?
Instead of posting jobs to job boards, you can instead list your job on your career site and invite your network members to refer it to anyone they think is appropriate. If you have a large enough network, you may find enough candidates using only this method. But, for many recruiters you may still have to post to a job board or use some other outreach method to gather enough candidates. But, given a large enough network, it could replace job boards.

And, rather than hire people to do Internet search, you can simply ask your network members to refer someone who has the skills, abilities, or experience you need. The potential of a social network is huge and is only limited by how many people you have in the network. That is why many recruiting functions are taking budget dollars from traditional sourcing and investing them in marketing and promotion to build their social network.

What Are the Benefits of a Social Network?
Social networks also let you reach out to targeted groups of candidates to let them know about new opportunities or to just provide them with background information about your organization. By doing this on a regular basis, you can slowly inform candidates about many aspects of your business, the culture of your organization, and the kinds of opportunities you generally have. This helps candidates to self-select out of organizations they are not comfortable with, and prevents many bad hires. It also creates excitement in potential candidates who feel they are a good fit.

By using Candidate Relationship Management tools, you can build excitement and create a relationship with candidates. CRM allows you to:

• Send messages on birthdays or other special occasions
• Offer the opportunity to come to events and/or job fairs you might hold
• Send information about internships or special assignments
• Share facts and corporate news with them
• Comment on their background or ask for additional information

Social networks allow you to increase the level of trust that candidates have in you and your organization, especially if you offer regular communication through a blog or some other media. Some organizations create regular videocasts or podcast about their business, offer videos of the CEO or other leader, and provide potential candidates with a broad perspective on the organization, its leadership, strategy, and culture.

What Role Does Twitter Play, for Example?
Tools such as Twitter are really micro-blogs and allow you to send messages to a group of followers to build or maintain interest in your organization. Twitter also serves as a type of CRM tool by letting you send job listings or specific messages to those same people on a regular basis. But Twitter is just one of a growing number of applications that either help drive more people to a social network or that keep them interested in your organization or build a relationship with them over time.

As you can see, using social networking well is challenging and time-consuming. It requires you to develop a social media strategy, decide which of these many tools are best for your organization, learn about new technologies, and practice a more proactive type of recruiting.

At the ERE Expo in Florida, there will be several sessions and a panel devoted to how to better use social networking. If you are still uncertain about how to make social networking payoff for you, this would be the event to attend.

While at first it may seem overwhelming to embrace social networking, candidates are getting accustomed to being treated in this more personal way, and the results are a higher quality candidate. Social media will become the primary sourcing tool and will provide the best forum for communicating with prospective candidates.