The Internet makes talent communities inevitable

In recent weeks we’ve seen a lot of outpouring of grief over the now dead SOPA legislation. The law’s critics claim that, if passed, the law would end the Internet as we know it, threaten our way of life, and confirm the Mayans were right. We periodically experience this type of mass hysteria, whenever something seems to threaten the “promise of the Internet” — the last time was over net neutrality. That so-called promise has to do with the perceived “free” flow of information: articles, stories, videos, songs, or content. What’s gotten lost in this noise is that that nothing is free. The current business model of the Internet has simply shifted dollars from content creators to content aggregators. Advertisers sponsor content so users can pretend it is “free.”

A long time ago, about the time the last ice age ended, there was something called AOL. It seems like eons have passed, but those who remember that era may recall that after we returned from foraging for food we would turn on our dial-up modems and connect to AOL, having paid a monthly fee for access to all the content that was available, the forums, the news, etc. Connection speeds were 1,200 bits per minute — you could almost count those bits coming in. Now we do the same with Facebook and Google, which we experience as free. Perceptually, we ignore the ads — targeted ads based on all the information collected by the sites — ads tailored to our habits, our behavior, and interactions. AOL charged a fee and had no ads; Facebook doesn’t charge a fee but has ads. There is no free lunch.

So now we have a business model on the Internet favoring networks that can attract members and keep them there. That requires having content that attracts users, however it may be generated. Initially, sites like YouTube and Facebook, with their user-generated content, left us wondering why they existed. But, they have been enormously successful and it is clear that communities naturally form where content gets developed and shared. The better the content a community brings to its members, the more of them it gets and the more engaged they are.

Big Brother is Watching You — and That’s OK

What we know now is that people prefer content they don’t have to pay for directly. We’re apparently willing to share substantial personal information with advertisers in exchange for “free” content. Just how much intrusiveness we’re willing to enable remains to be seen, but the boundaries are constantly being pushed — Google’s new privacy policy being only the latest example. The company will now offer a new “benefit” for users — it will track you across multiple services including Google+, YouTube, Gmail, and any other property they own, including Android phones. I wrote this on Google Docs, so what I wrote was likely being indexed as it was written. Big Brother was an amateur.

Imitation Is the Sincerest Form of Flattery

While users are opposed to paying for content (whether it is legally or illegally obtained), there’s an opportunity for employers. Any employer can create forums where content is produced targeting interests that are relevant to specific groups of people –- creating talent communities — thereby aggregating candidates they may eventually want to hire. This is the only way to create talent communities, built around a topic that candidates (or people that might become candidates) are passionate about: chemical engineering, pediatrics, Java, nursing, recruiting, etc. A place online where people congregate to share their interests and interact with each other. Anything else is not a community.

But this opportunity comes at a cost. Relying on Facebook or Google+ to create talent communities means accepting their terms of doing business. That is, giving them access to data that can be analyzed and sold to third-parties. That’s the price of “free” content. There’s really no getting away from it — the money to support Facebook has to come from somewhere. Although this model prevails today, there are other forces at work that will change the game. The exchange of personal information is at odds with our natural desire for privacy. So, as we continue to explore how much privacy we’re willing to exchange for “free” content on sites like Facebook, a desire for alternative models will grow. Other forms of sponsorship, where advertising is less apparent, will naturally appeal to those concerned with privacy, and may even serve to encourage community members to share more in a community with restricted membership.

Communities don’t have to be built entirely on Facebook’s terms. It is possible to create somewhat private communities. In fact, it is prudent to create communities on one’s own terms, rather than be at the mercy of a third party whose interests diverge from ours.

Employer-sponsored talent communities should be private domains for members that represent a group desired by the employer as employees. The basic formula for success is simple: develop or support the creation of content and make it available for free and accessible, and drive people to it. However, putting this into practice is a lot of work.

First, it requires having interesting content, which means that it needs to be material that is original, relevant to a particular group, and prompts controversy. Then there needs to be a critical mass of members in the community that gets engaged in robust discussion. That is what creates a community, it’s not just a repository of content. A community is one where people congregate to share their views and learn from each other. That’s the “social” part of social media, a fact that often gets forgotten in the zeal to build a lot of communities which are nothing more than databases.

This is what employers need to be doing today. There is no other way to create talent communities. But do it now, because who knows what’s coming that may make it difficult to create communities.

Among the players already in the ring are BranchOut, the first to build a business networking presence on Facebook, Monster’s BeKnown, and LinkedIn, the reining leader. (Facebook had its own big news Wednesday, filing for its much anticipated IPO.)

Like BranchOut and BeKnown, Glassdoor leverages a user’s Facebook data to find connections at companies in which they have an interest. These can then help provide a direct line to the recruiter or hiring manager. It works simply by using your Facebook login.

Setting Glassdoor apart is the wealth of information it has collected about tens of thousands of companies that’s hard or even impossible to find anywhere else. From its beginning as a place where workers could review their company (or former company) with sometimes no-holds-barred bluntness, Glassdoor has broadened its scope, providing just the kind of information job seekers want: job listings, salaries, interview questions, company background, those unvarnished opinions — both pro and con — and now, who among a person’s Facebook connections has an in.

Branded “Inside Connections,” the new service adds networking to the Glassdoor features, making the site, as Tim Besse, co-founder and vice president of product and marketing, said, “The most complete listing of information about jobs.”

It’s that completeness, Besse argues, that gives Glassdoor the advantage over all other careers networking sites, including, he insists, LinkedIn. “The two most trusted ways to find out about a company,” says Besse, “People you know and, two, people who worked there.”

LinkedIn has both, but if you aren’t connected to one of them, that won’t be much help. At Glassdoor you could always see what people had to say about an employer. Now, you can also see who among your connections works there.

“We have all the tools,” Besse adds.

LinkedIn’s advantage is the completeness of its user profiles. Because it is oriented toward careers and business networking, LinkedIn users tend to be thorough in posting their professional information and prompt in keeping it current.

Facebook users tend to provide only limited employment information. While data is hard to come by, Glassdoor says a survey it commissioned shows 65-70 percent of Facebook users have entered at least some employment data. However, Besse points out that Facebook’s Timeline will prompt ever larger numbers of people to complete their profiles and provide more details.

(Timeline was announced at Facebook’s f8 conference in the fall. Its rollout has been slow, but its anticipated impacts are large and have been discussed in detail by marketers, researchers, and others.)

A post on the Harvard Business Review site about the impact of Timeline on careers notes, “If you were holding onto the idea that Facebook could be your personal haven while you build your professional profile on LinkedIn, it’s time to let that fantasy go. The Timeline offers an opportunity for you to tell the story of your career in a uniquely compelling way, so you need to consciously tackle the challenge of building a propersonal profile that will position you appropriately in the eyes of employers, clients, or colleagues.”

If Facebook users do as the writer suggests, then sites like Glassdoor stand to benefit and it won’t matter that LinkedIn has locked out BeKnown, BranchOut, and others, refusing to share its data.

Besse, in that case, could realize his goal: “I am out there to build the world’s largest and most trusted” career site.

In the paperwork submitted to the Securities and Exchange Commission, Facebook said it expects to raise $5 billion from the public sale of its stock. That’s based on the registration fee it paid. The New York Times says it could end up raising much more.

Facebook reported in its S-1 filing that it earned $1 billion on revenue of $3.7 billion, most of it coming from advertising. It reported having 845 million monthly active users as of the end of the year, a 39 percent increase over the year before. In the U.S., Facebook saw a 16 percent bump over 2010, ending last year with 161 million monthly average users, or about half the country’s total population.

Its average daily user count is 483 million, meaning more than half those who visit the site in a month do so every day. The company also reported 425 million monthly mobile users, a number it expects will grow with some of it replacing PC access.

With numbers like these it’s not surprising that employers have been flocking to build Facebook profiles and encourage their workers, customers and others to “like” them.

Recruiters began embracing Facebook years ago, seeing it as a way to expand the reach of their employer branding. Many began by combing through Facebook profiles as part of candidate vetting.  Now, companies regularly see Facebook as both a branding tool and a way to develop prospect communities.

Increasingly, Facebook is becoming a sourcing tool. BranchOut, which launched on Facebook 18 months ago, enables users to create business-only networks that can be accessed by recruiters. BeKnown, launched by Monster last summer, is similar.

Both BranckOut and BeKnown also connected with LinkedIn. But not long after the BeKnown launch, LinkedIn shut off access. That hasn’t put much of a damper on either site. BranchOut has about 2.7 million monthly average users. BeKnown has 260,000.

A third site is poised to announce its own Facebook connection later tonight, Pacific time.

In a business world that is increasingly dominated by social media, it simply makes sense to hire individuals with extensive social networks and the ability to communicate with and influence others.

The major players include Klout, Kred, PeerIndex, and Empire Avenue. Klout and PeerIndex scores index to 100 while Kred scores reach 1,000. Empire Avenue is a stock-market simulation type game in which participants (stocks) earn virtual income based on social network activity and investments in others.

Using such measures as a screening tool helps identify talented people who have demonstrated skills relevant to a number of professional jobs. When you hire an individual who uses their network effectively, you have the potential to benefit from the collective knowledge and skills of the network, not just the individual.

Look Beyond the “Score” for Transferable Skills

“Buying influence” by recruiting someone based on their extensive contacts and their ability to influence others is not a new approach, but tools like those mentioned make it much easier to identify the level of influence that you are recruiting. Obviously, the use of social media analytics make the most sense when you are recruiting for jobs that are primarily focused on creating and managing a firm’s public-facing persona, but the skills involved in effective social networking extend much further into the professional landscape.

Individuals who are effective on social media become successful because they have a wide range of skills and capabilities that often lead to success in sales, customer service, communications, branding, and even analyst roles. Smart recruiters and hiring managers should look beyond the actual score that an individual has achieved and focus on identifying and assessing the skills the individual used to build or maintain their audience.

The 10 skill sets and capabilities that are generally required to effectively gain social media influence include:

1. Communications – they have shown that they are effective and frequent communicators
2. Relationship building — they are successful at attracting and building relationships with others
3. Influencing – they have the ability to influence others and to get others to read and spread their messages
4. Reputation — their reputation, credibility, recommendations, and ability to produce “Liked” content means that they will be listened to
5. Reach – their extensive contacts, friends, followers, and subscribers means that any messages they send will reach thousands
6. Branding – individuals with high social media scores have demonstrated they know how to build a personal brand and that knowledge may be transferable to product branding
7. Crowdsource solutions — their extensive network means that they will be able to quickly “crowdsource” answers to problems that they encounter
8. Writing ability — individuals who have a long blog history have demonstrated both their writing style and ability
9. Knowledge of technology — they have demonstrated that they are on the leading edge of social media technology
10. Adaptable – they are capable of continually adapting to the rapidly changing social media environment (if they have maintained their scores over a period of time)

Social Media Influence Assessment Is Not New

Although Klout/Kred scores may be new to you, using the Internet and social media to assess prospects is certainly not new. It is now quite common to find, assess, and do reference checks on candidates using Google searches, LinkedIn, and Facebook profiles, and the assessment of work samples that can be found online. In fact, a Microsoft-sponsored survey conducted by Cross-Tab found that 79% of HR and recruiting professionals responded that they currently use online reputation information as part of their hiring process.

Influence Scores Are Still in Their Infancy

Recruiters should be aware that while social media analytics are hot, the emerging “influence scores” are far from perfect. Each provider has weaknesses in their approach and all of them can be manipulated to some extent (just as search engine optimization can manipulate web page rankings). As a result, I recommend that they never be used as an elimination screen, but instead be used as one part of a multi-pronged assessment approach.

Recommended Action Steps

Before you select one to use, recruiters need to do their research so they understand the strengths and weaknesses of each provider’s approach compared to the needs of your firm. Obviously, the scores should be applied first to the jobs that require a high degree of social media savvy and where extensive contacts are essential to job success.

If the scores are to be passed along to hiring managers, the managers need to be provided with some information as to what conclusions can be fairly reached from these scores. And finally, if you have some time, identify the scores of your top- and bottom-performing current employees. Then use simple statistics to see if within your firm, there is a measurable positive correlation between social media scores and an employee’s on-the-job performance.

Final Thoughts

If you want to find your own individual score, it is easy and free to sign on to any of these services. If you are an applicant, adding your Kred or Klout score to your resume at the very least will let the recruiter know that you are aware that one’s online influence/exposure can be measured. If you are a corporate recruiter or recruiting leader, begin examining the pros and cons of these continually evolving tools. Although they still have many shortcomings and issues, some variation of them will become a standard assessment tool in the not-too-distant future.

Data out this morning from a study of Facebook’s Gen Y members (18-29) shows that, on average, each has 16 co-workers as friends. While the average is skewed by those who have many more, the study found that half have more than five workers as Facebook friends.

What’s the significance?

“When they go home,” says Gen Y branding guru Dan Schwabel, “they are still connected to the workplace… Their co-workers are their friends. And because people change jobs so often and have so many friends, their friends become co-workers.”

Ironically, Schwabel says, most Gen Yers aren’t intending for Facebook to be a business tool; 64 percent of them don’t bother to list a single employer in their profile.

That’s why, he says, Facebook is “inadvertently a part of their business life.”

His company, Millenial Branding, analyzed data from Identified.com uncovering the inadvertent consequence of friending co-workers. While BranchOut and Monster’s BeKnown are intentional business networks for Facebook users, at least for Gen Y business networking is occurring on the mainstage.

Another key discovery, says Schwabel, is how few Gen Yers work at large companies. Only 7 percent of those listing a job currently work for a Fortune 500 firm.The largest share (7.2 percent) work in the hospitality and travel industry, and 2.9 percent give their job title as “server.”

However, ranking 5th among titles is “owner,” suggesting, says Schwabel, that Gen Y workers are entrepreneurial. For recruiters looking to hire Gen Yers, the implication is clear. “Large corporations need to rethink their corporate recruiting strategy,” he says. ” Companies have to be more flexible and give Gen Y more control over schedules, and their work.”

The best way to reach a Gen Yer, he says, is through their friends or by friending them directly. Don’t message them until you are a friend, he recommends. “They don’t think of Facebook that way.” Referrals by friends are the best way to reach out. “They trust their friends. They listen to their friends.”

Schwabel also had some counsel for his Gen Y peers — advice anyone with a workplace friend should keep in mind: “Be careful what (you) say. It could be the office gossip next morning.”

The German company has about 336,000 employees, 1,640 locations, and about 60,000 people, and growing, in the U.S.

Rachel Romaszewski, who recruits for Siemens’ energy business, and I talk about the skills shortage and what’s being done about it. She tells me (out of Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn) which social media site is working well, which one works less well, and which one’s hit or miss.

“We are just growing like crazy,” she says, in the seven-minute video, below.

The leadership set aside at least half the day for the team to identify upcoming problems and opportunities and the resulting strategic moves that need to be made. This article is merely a checklist of the strategic talent management actions that I have found that the very best corporations should have on their potential to-do list.

The Top 15 Potential Strategic Actions to Consider in Talent Management

If you’ve decided to stop fighting fires and to do something major with a strategic impact, here is a list of possible programs and actions that you should consider.

1. Increase the productivity of your workforce – workforce productivity is merely comparing the output of your entire workforce (the total value of the products and services they produce) with the cost of your workforce (total labor and talent management costs). Many talent management departments measure engagement (a precursor to productivity) but they don’t measure workforce productivity. Even fewer take proactive actions to directly increase it. Increasing productivity requires talent management to identify the barriers that restrict productivity and then to proactively provide the consulting advice, best practices, and tools that have been proven to increase a team’s productivity.
2. Increase employee innovation – fierce marketplace competition requires firms to accelerate innovation in product and service areas, despite having fewer resources. Rather than targeting a few departments, talent management must increase innovation in all areas of the business. Typically, innovation can be increased tough the targeted hiring of innovators, retaining innovators, and minimizing the barriers that innovators face within the corporation. Talent management must help shape the culture so that the expectation of continuous innovation permeates every business area.
3. Reward great people management – Most managers simply don’t spend enough time on talent management activities. The primary reason is that managers are not directly measured or rewarded based on how well they manage their talent. This is true even though talent management “owns” all of the key components related to measuring and rewarding (performance management, performance appraisal, competencies, and reward systems). The key action step is to develop a “people management scorecard” for each individual manager and reward them based on their performance against those standards.
4. Identify and fix bad managers – research by Google has shown that in most cases, an employee’s or a team’s manager is the single-highest impact factor on the hiring, retention, innovation, productivity, and the development of employees. Yet most organizations have no formal program for identifying weak managers. Strategic actions would include implementing surveys and metrics to identify with managers and to provide general lists with proven tools and approaches to improve a manager’s people management performance.
5. Convert talent management metrics into their dollar impact – unfortunately, most traditional talent management metrics fail to impress executives because they are not expressed in “the language of business,” which is dollars. Saying we have a 12% turnover rate, a 54% engagement rate, or an 87-day time to fill generally won’t impress senior managers because the metrics are not expressed in their dollar impact on corporate revenue. In contrast, stating that every percentage point increase in regrettable employee turnover costs us $7.2 million gets an immediate reaction. Work with the CFO’s office to credibly calculate the impacts.
6. Calculate the risks of weak talent management — shifting from the positive business impact to the possible negative impacts requires a risk management manager. Risk management is an increasingly important function throughout the business, but unfortunately, few talent management functions have put anyone charge of risk management. Risk managers identify and quantify the risks associated with potential talent problems (its probability and likely costs). Underfunding important talent programs can create tremendous economic risks such as losing key innovators to competitors, failing to have enough developed leaders, and a weak employer brand that drives top candidates away.
7. You need to prepare for a leadership gap — the combination of increased growth and higher turnover rates will mean that most corporations will begin to suffer because of a lack of leadership bench strength. In addition, because the type of leaders who will be needed will also change, the entire leadership and succession program will have to be re-examined and new social media and project rotation tools will need to be developed and implemented.
8. Speed up internal movement through proactive internal placement – very few things increased productivity, retention, and employee development faster than periodic internal movement. Unfortunately, most corporate programs require the employee to initiate the movement and to find the “correct” placement area. A more strategic approach is a proactive one where recruiters periodically identify employees and then help to correctly place these individuals who should be moved both for their own and for the corporate good.
9. Improve internal best-practice sharing – most talent management leaders spend most of their time and resources on developing new programs and approaches. Surprisingly, the data indicates that you can have a higher impact faster and at lower cost by simply identifying and sharing “hidden” existing best practices. Rather than relying on this best-practice sharing occurring organically, a superior approach is a proactive one that seeks out these affected practices wherever they might be in the organization. And once identified, they are shared in such a manner that managers easily understand their value and implement them.
10. Update your retention approach – just like employer branding, retention programs have been allowed to atrophy because the economy has reduced most turnover to a trickle. Unfortunately, turnover is about to dramatically increase, so processes to prioritize key individuals, processes for identifying who is at risk, and retention toolkits need to be reinvigorated before it is too late.
11. Employee referral programs need to be reinvigorated — as the rate of hiring and competition for talent increases throughout the year, stagnant employee referral programs need to be re-examined. Because they produce the highest quality and volume of hires, referrals as the percentage of all hires should begin to reach over 40%. Employee referral programs must be closely integrated with the developing social media approaches.
12. Assess your external employer brand – during the economic downturn, the area of employer branding has been frequently ignored because very little hiring was going on. Unfortunately, during the same time, the reputation of many corporations has been tarnished as a result of layoffs, salary/promotion freezes and a reduction and development resources. In addition, corporate images in general and in some specific industries like banking, oil etc., have been damaged by recent events and “occupy” type movements. The growth of glassdoor.com, blogs, Twitter, and Facebook now make it much easier for negative messages to be spread. At the very least, the positive/negative aspects of your employer brand should be measured and monitored before an upturn in hiring begins.
13. Re-examine your social media approach – although many talent managers have “done something” in the area of social media recruiting, realize that the potential for social media in talent management is much greater than almost everyone anticipated. Plans should be developed to determine how social media can positively impact training, employee development, learning, retention, collaboration, problem identification, crowdsourcing of answers, and best-practice sharing. The mobile platform should be examined in a similar manner because it is rapidly becoming the dominant communications platform for employees.
14. College recruiting needs to be reengineered — communications and job seeking approaches have changed dramatically on college campuses but college recruiting programs have unfortunately been stagnant for years. Program features that need to be examined include remote college recruiting, social media approaches aimed at college students, mobile platform approaches and marketing research to better understand the needs and the actions of top grads.
15. Improve non-monetary motivation – when compensation and reward resources are limited, nonmonetary motivators need to be emphasized. Unfortunately, the compensation function focuses almost exclusively on “expensive” salary, benefits, and bonuses … even though a significant percentage of employee motivation comes from … recognition, praise, and feedback. Talent management should develop non-monetary motivation tools for managers that are easy to use and that produce measurable results. They should also target key employees and server them in order to identify “how to best manage and motivate me” plans.

Benchmark Firms to Learn From

A key competency for any talent management leader is rapid self-directed learning, so it only makes sense to benchmark the firms that are aggressively making tremendous strides in talent management. My extensive research has identified some of the best firms to learn from. Many are from the Silicon Valley, which has already returned to a “war for talent” (Google, Facebook, Zynga all approach talent management using a more scientific approach).

Firms outside of technology have also taken some amazing steps so they should not be ignored (Zappos, Sodexo, CACI, DaVita, Deloitte, KPMG, PepsiCo, and the U.S. Army have all taken bold steps).

Additional Strategic Talent Management Actions to Consider

In addition to the top 15 major actions recommended above, some other strategic actions to consider include:

• Prepare for VUCA, the new normal — talent management plans, approaches, and processes need to be improved so that they can handle the new business environment that we face (VUCA = Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, Ambiguity)
• Increasing revenues — examining how talent management actions can directly increase individual employee revenue generation
• Integration of talent management functions – an almost-universal weakness is a lack of integration. Talent management functions must more closely cooperate, coordinate, and integrate so that they work seamlessly.
• Hire right before they do — if your firm doesn’t have the strongest employer brand, location or glamorous product, you must develop a plan to quickly initiate hiring immediately before your talent competitors. A rapid “explode out-of-the-box” plan is also required.
• Corporate headcount “fat” – setting up a process that ensures that the return to hiring doesn’t result in a surplus of employees (i.e. headcount fat).
• Competitive analysis — identifying the competitive advantage that your talent management practices provide compared to your talent competitors.
• Prioritizing — prioritizing jobs, managers, and talent management programs so that your limited resources provide the highest possible impact.
• SWAT team — creating a rapid response team that can respond to sudden talent management opportunities and problems.
• Alerts — providing a process that alerts managers about upcoming problems before they get out of hand.
• Lean or agile talent management – adapting lean, CRM, and agile business approaches and tools to the area of talent management.
• Remote work opportunities — as technology, communications, and social media tools improve, talent management must develop ways that allows top talent to work from anywhere.
• Forward-looking metrics — unfortunately, almost all current talent management and recruiting metrics are backward looking, in that they tell you what happened in the past. Instead, forward-looking and predictive-metrics that allow for improved decision-making need to replace them.
• Reengineer performance appraisals – this is an almost universally disliked process that requires tremendous amount of time but produces no measurable results. A completely new approach is required.
• Transparency – throughout the business world there is an increasing emphasis on transparency and openness. The time has come for talent management leaders to reassess their entire approach to secrecy, privacy, and the degree of openness with employees and applicants.
• Cloud talent management – HR and talent management cannot be exempt from the powerful trend to move everything to the cloud.

Final Thoughts

The period immediately before the beginning of the New Year is a great time to sit back and think of your accomplishments and your legacy. Unfortunately, rather than being strategic, too many talent leaders have been simply happy to survive the last few years with their sanity intact.

Now is the time to shake loose any lethargy, to take some risks, and do something bold before you retire or move on. You may have “earned a seat at the table” but you can’t be truly respected and admired unless you produce a measurable strategic business impact.

As a college professor and someone that advises firms on the design of college recruiting programs, I have come up with a long list of the advantages of hiring recent graduates.

If you’re not seeing these attributes in your recent college hires, interns, or those you are courting, the problem is most likely a result of major weaknesses in your recruiting process and not with “this latest generation” of college students.

The Business Benefits of Hiring Recent College Grads

The benefits are split into two categories 1) benefits to individual hiring managers and 2) benefits that may accrue to the entire firm over time. Note that the possible outcomes listed here are based partially on generalizations that cover many but not all top college hires.

Shorter-term Benefits of Hiring College Students

1. Lower salary costs – most are willing to work for significantly less salary than “experienced hires.”
2. Continuous learners — because they have a recent history of learning, they are self-motivated “continuous learners.” This may actually be the most important competency.
3. Comfortable with technology — New grads expect to use technology and have no fear of it. They learn new technologies rapidly, and this, combined with their extensive knowledge of the latest hardware and software, automatically makes them a high-value hire both for current and future needs.
4. Comfortable with the Internet and social media – college students are much more likely to be familiar with and skilled in all aspects of the Internet, and in particular the emerging area of social media and mobile applications.
5. High levels of innovation – there is a great deal of academic research indicating that many great innovators do their best and most groundbreaking work in their youth. Midcareer hires may bring continuous improvement but lower levels of radical inflection-point innovation.
6. Fast change and agility — nothing more accurately describes the business world these days than intense competition and rapid change. If you’re going to be successful, you’re going to need agile individuals who are not just capable of fast change but also those who literally look forward to it. Fortunately college grads have a combination of youth and an excitement for trying new things that makes them more willing to accept and adapt to rapid change. They’re also agile and as a result they are able to shift rapidly and frequently between unrelated tasks.
7. Team players — very few major projects can be accomplished these days without teamwork. Fortunately, college hires these days are thoroughly experienced in teamwork and cross-functional teams. Rather than being forced to participate, it comes natural to them.
8. Superior communicators — college hires are accomplished communicators. They know how to communicate with teammates, vendors, regulators, and customers in many diverse and economical non-face-to-face ways. This includes the use of social networks and web 2.0 tools that experienced hires might be unfamiliar with.
9. The “why” question — a willingness to repeatedly ask the “why question” of others (Why do we do it this way? Why not that way?) helps to force you to re-examine your approaches.
10. Better performance on the job — we know from professional sports that the performance of college grads can meet and sometimes exceed that of experienced players (i.e. Kobe and LeBron). If you use a “surgical” data-driven college-hiring process, a majority of your hires will be above-average performers almost immediately. If the same process surgically targets grads with high levels of loyalty, your retention rates will also be exceptional.
11. New ideas — they bring numerous new ideas that they’ve acquired from leading-edge thinkers and professors that continually challenge them to think differently.
12. No need to unlearn — because they have little work experience or corporate cultural history, they don’t have to unlearn old ways or bad habits that experienced hires might carry with them.
13. Multitasking ability — they grew up in a multitasking world, so they look forward to being assigned to simultaneous tasks. Experienced hires might consider it overloading when you expect multiple tasks to be done simultaneously.
14. Energy and enthusiasm — their youth and relative health will likely give them what some describe as unbounded energy during the day, requiring fewer breaks and with no lapses in work quality due to fatigue.
15. Willing to take high-risk assignments — their relative youth and inexperience may lower their level of fear, making them more willing to take on risky tasks and assignments. With fewer outside-of-work commitments, many may be willing to take career risks that experienced professionals would not.
16. They understand metrics — because they’re fresh out of school, recent grads are likely to remember how to use numbers, statistics, and metrics. Although they might not have any practical knowledge, their lack of fear related to numbers and metrics is a positive factor.
17. Willingness to do grunt work — because of their eagerness to learn, even top students may be willing to do thankless assignments and even grunt work that others consider beneath them. This may speed up projects that are often delayed because no one on the team is willing to volunteer for the unglamorous tasks.
18. Willingness to travel — fewer outside-of-work commitments and a high level of excitement regarding exploring and travel means that they are more willing to take assignments that require a significant amount of travel.
19. Diverse ideas — each year, the diversity levels of graduating classes increase making them more diverse than the available experienced hire pool. If your college recruiting program has an effective diversity component, the diverse thinking of these college hires will add richness to your teams and decision-making because diverse individuals see things differently.
20. Professor contacts also — if you hire the very best graduate students, you will likely also get with them their academic contacts and access to the best research professors.
21. Access to research — once again if you hire the very best graduate students, you will also do research. You may also gain access to the research of their professors, thus aiding in product development.
22. Faster time to productivity — because they learn quickly, have high energy levels, have few family commitments and they have no professional biases to unlearn, new college hires may actually reach the minimum required level of productivity faster than experienced hires.
23. Easier to manage — although they may ask lots of questions initially, they may actually be easier to manage. This is because they seldom have the level of entitlement, professional biases, and political awareness that experienced hires usually have. Because they are new, they are less likely to argue, play politics, or complain.
24. An opportunity for a tryout — hiring experienced professionals can be a hit-or-miss proposition because you don’t get a chance to actually see them work. Fortunately, with college hires you can preview their work by hiring them as interns. If designed correctly, this internship opportunity can dramatically reduce the number of hiring errors.

Long-Term Benefits to the Firm for Hiring College Grads

Some firms have found that college hires bring many benefits that accrue to hiring managers, but in addition, also help the company over the long term. Some of the benefits that may extend to the entire company include:

1. A global perspective — many U.S.-based schools have a high percentage of international students. The curriculum in nearly every discipline these days focuses on global issues. As a result, you can be sure that new college hires will think globally, as well as feel comfortable working with internationally located individuals.
2. Essential for filling future management positions — it is difficult to hire first-level managers externally because no matter how strong their management skills, they are unfamiliar with the team and the corporate culture. Consistently hiring entry-level college hires allows you to promote the best into supervisory and management positions within five years. Without this college hire strata of employees, it will be much more difficult to fill these critical management positions.
3. Long-term assets — if you do hire college grads, they are yours to lose. So with great retention and career development, they will continue to be an asset to your firm for up to 40 years. Midcareer hires can’t possibly return value for the same number of years.
4. You might only get one shot at them — whichever firm hires a new grad, it literally has a chance to keep them forever. Meaning that if this firm treats them well, they may remain at this firm throughout their entire career. However, if you only hire experienced hires, you may have missed your one and only chance to monopolize this particular individual.
5. Competitive advantage — if your firm gets this talent, your competitors cannot.
6. Youth market benefits — if your firm happens to target many of its products and services toward younger people, having a large number on your staff will likely result in better products and increase sales to this population.
7. An opportunity to influence curriculum — even the process of college recruiting allows you to build relationships with faculty. Over time this many help you in steering the curriculum so that graduates more closely fit your future needs.
8. Now is the perfect time — in the past, a weak employer brand image or a poorly designed college recruiting program may have resulted in your firm hiring lower performing college hires. However, because almost no one is actively hiring large numbers on campuses these days, you could cherry-pick the very best if you are willing to act quickly.

Others suggest it more resembles the proverbial wolf in sheep’s clothing, a digital beast that devours our contacts and serves them up to large corporate clients willing to pay for what was once our data.

One cannot really blame LinkedIn for monetizing its business model. It does need to generate revenues to keep the lights on. But as it pursues recruiting revenues, as it encourages business professionals to use LinkedIn more as a marketing platform for “brand you,” as it prods users to pay for the privilege of networking and recruiting on LinkedIn, it is fair to wonder what value we get in return for that investment. While LinkedIn may remain a shiny object to which many recruiters feel inextricably drawn, we are in serious need of a reality check.

Earlier this year, LinkedIn reached two impressive milestones. It went public and it surpassed 100 million registered users. However, before LinkedIn went public, the social network filed a document with the SEC reporting a significant risk factor to LNKD investors: just how unreliable that 100 million figure is.

The number of our registered members is higher than the number of actual members, and a substantial majority of our page views are generated by a minority of our members. The number of registered members in our network is higher than the number of actual members because some members have multiple registrations, other members have died or become incapacitated, and others may have registered under fictitious names.

In other words, LinkedIn’s 100 million number is wildly inaccurate. However, attempting to pin down a more meaningful number is like nailing Jell-O to the the wall. That is why, dag-nab-it, LinkedIn is sticking with the 100 million member figure. Flawed though it may be, it contends it’s the only number it’s got.

Given the challenges inherent in identifying these accounts, we do not have a reliable system to accurately identify the number of actual members, and thus we rely on the number of registered members as our measure of the size of our network. Further, a substantial majority of our members do not visit our website on a monthly basis, and a substantial majority of our page views are generated by a minority of our members.

Recruiters: are you paying attention? A substantial majority of LinkedIn members rarely visit LinkedIn. That’s according to LinkedIn itself. Seriously, if that’s the case, one has to wonder how viable LinkedIn is as a social network. LinkedIn wonders as well:

If the number of our actual members does not meet our expectations or we are unable to increase the breadth and frequency of our visiting members, then our business may not grow as fast as we expect, which will harm our operating and financial results and may cause our stock price to decline.

The investor website Seeking Alpha has expressed concern about LinkedIn’s Marketing Solutions business — an advertising business unit that provides about a third of LinkedIn revenues — because “a website’s value to advertisers is directly proportionate to its number of active users.” Seeking Alpha accuses LinkedIn of being intentionally vague about its active user base and suggests we examine Quantcast reports on audience size instead. Only 1% of LinkedIn users are “addicts” who visit the site 30 or more times a month compared to Facebook’s 76%.

That disconnect may be starting to unsettle investors. The Wall Street Journal has taken note of recent drops in share price as early investors and executives unload shares in the wake of its May IPO. While many stocks weaken once employees are free to sell their shares after a company goes public, this appears to be much worse. In fact, Bloomberg contributing editor and investor Paul Kedrosky recently opined that LinkedIn’s precipitous decline is because LinkedIn has been broken from the beginning.

Kedrosky, who is also the editor of the popular financial blog Infectious Greed, notes that LinkedIn’s institutional investors make up only about 12% of its ownership, about half the percentage of stocks that enjoy strong institutional support.

Kedrosky’s article was called to my attention by Gary Stock, a longtime friend, technologist, and former code-breaking cryptanalyst with the National Security Agency. Stock participates in an invitation-only discussion group called “The TBTF Irregulars.” The group was formed by technology journalist/physicist Keith Dawson and also features the likes of David Weinberger, co-author of the seminal book on social networking The Cluetrain Manifesto and author of Small Pieces, Loosely Joined. It other words, this is a group that takes social networking theory very seriously.

Gary noted there has been growing chatter among The Irregulars about how LinkedIn may be losing its way. They observe that it is behaving more aggressively and hyperactively. Popup wizards online nag us to enhance our profiles, to give up more and more pieces of ourselves. One Irregular noted an email from LinkedIn to confirm a connection suddenly mistook him for a new user, though he’d been a member for years, and attempted to raid his address book to send out new invitations to connect on LinkedIn. When he demurred, his friends still strangely get hit with those email invites. In other words, even though he said “no,” LinkedIn’s technology apparently said “yes.”

Those hiccups may be due, in part, to the problems with iterative development, of rules and algorithms run amok as large platforms scale. However, it may be that LinkedIn is undergoing a personality change.

Stock theorizes that LinkedIn may have an “all-things-to-all-people” problem. He observes that LinkedIn once insisted we limit our networks to those whom we know and with whom we do business.

Gary being Gary, he took building quality connections in the beginning so seriously that when a college student that he knew attempted to connect with him on LinkedIn, he visited that student to explain personally why he could not make the student a connection: they had never worked together and were not even in the same industry. However, soon Gary realized that he did do business with the student. In fact, he had for several years. The student’s family sold produce at the local farmer’s market that Gary frequented. So Stock relaxed his rules, and it appears, LinkedIn has as well.

A network that first insisted that we network only with those we know has morphed into a place to network with those we want to know us.

That transformation has turned the LinkedIn data stream into a torrent of less-meaningful data. Eventually, Stock predicts, LinkedIn may need to divide itself into separate businesses or risk becoming a “melange of gray goo that nobody recognizes anymore.”

For non-nerds, “grey goo” is a phrase first coined by nanotechnologist Eric Drexler in the 1986 book Engines of Creation. Grey goo is the the result of an apocalyptic scenario in which rogue self-replicating robots consume all matter on earth while building more themselves. If it isn’t careful, LinkedIn may find itself turning into a large mass of replicating nanomachines (members) lacking large-scale structure (promiscuous networking). Yes, grey goo.

It’s always better to be prepared than surprised.

By definition, being strategic requires that you look forward — identifying trends, opportunities, and threats. With the December lull looming, now is a great time to plan for the future. I’ve listed the “top 10 talent management trends” I foresee that require your attention.

But you should certainly do your own thinking. I recommend that you start by examining this past year…

2011 Was The Year of Social Media

2011 was a tough year for many in talent management, but despite compressed budgets, organizations continued to hire and develop talent. One factor that seemed to invade nearly every high-level functional discussion was social media. It’s clear that Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter will play a dominate role in recruiting and development best practices in years to come.

Not surprisingly, 2011 saw no fewer than 40 new vendors emerge to help organizations use social media to attract referrals. We also started to see early stage tools to use social media in talent assessment (pre/post hire) as well as applicant/candidate/employee experience management. New tools brought much enhanced visibility into talent issues, but most talent-management metrics continue not to resonate with key leaders outside of the HR function.

2012 Will Be “The Year of the Mobile Platform”

By the end of next year, even the skeptics will have to admit that the mobile platform will have become the dominant communications and interaction platform by early-adopting best-practice organizations. The capabilities afforded users of smartphones and tablet devices grows immensely day by day. Long before unified inboxes existed for the desktop, smart device users could see all incoming e-mail, social messaging, text messaging, and voice and video messaging in a single place.

Tablets will become the virtual classroom, and an emerging class of tools will let employees manage almost every aspect of their professional life digitally. During the next year, talent management leaders need to invest heavily supporting execution of talent management initiatives across mobile.

The Additional Top Nine!

Intense hiring competition will return in selected areas — global economic issues will persist for years to come, but the global war for talent will continue spiking in key regions an industries. While growth has slowed somewhat in China, Australia and Southeast Asia — including India — continue to see dramatic demand for skilled talent. In the U.S. and Europe, demand is still largely limited to certain industries where skills shortages have been an issue for years.

In high tech inclusive of medical technologies, 2012 will see a significant escalation in the war for top talent. As innovators and game changers step out of established tech firms like Facebook, Apple, Google, Twitter, and Zynga, a whole new breed to tech startups will be born each vying for the best of the best. While recruiting will move forward at a breathtaking pace, so too will “rapid” leadership development.

Retention issues will increase dramatically — almost every survey shows that despite high engagement scores, more than a majority of employees are willing to quit their current job as soon as a better opportunity comes along. I am predicting that turnover rates in high-demand occupations will increase by 25% during the next year and because most corporate retention programs have been so severely degraded, retention could turn out to be the highest-economic-impact area in all of talent management.

Rather than the traditional “one-size-fits-all” retention strategy, a targeted personalized approach will be required if you expect to have a reasonable chance to retain your top talent.

Social media increases its impact by becoming more data-driven — most firms jumped on the social media bandwagon, but unfortunately the trial-and-error approach used by most has produced only mediocre results. Adapting social media tools from the business coupled with strong analytics will allow a more focused approach that harnesses and directs the effort of all employees on social media. Talent leaders will increasingly see the value of a combination of internal and external social media approaches for managing and developing talent.

Remote work changes everything in talent management — the continued growth of technology, social media, and easy communications now makes it possible for most knowledge work and team activities to occur remotely. Allowing top talent to work “wherever they want to work” improves retention and makes recruiting dramatically easier.

Unfortunately, even though it is now possible for as much as 50% of a firm’s jobs to be done remotely, manager and HR resistance has limited the trend. Fortunately, managers and talent management leaders have begun to realize that teamwork, learning, development, recruiting, and best-practice sharing can now successfully be accomplished using remote methods. Firms like IBM and Cisco have led the way in reducing and eliminating barriers to remote work.

The need for speed shifts the balance between development and recruiting — historically, best practice within corporations has been to build and develop primarily from within. However, as the speed of change in business continues to increase and the number of firms that copy the “Apple model” (where firm is continually crossing industry boundaries) increases, talent managers will need to rethink the “develop internally first” approach.

In many cases, recruiting becomes a more viable option because there simply isn’t time for current employees to develop completely new skills. As a result, the trend will be to continually shift the balance toward recruiting for immediate needs and the use of contingent labor for short-duration opportunities and problems.

Employee referrals are coupled with social media — the employee referral program in many organizations is operated in isolation as are the organizations’ social media efforts, but talent managers are beginning to realize that the real strength of social media is relationship-building by your employees.

With proper coordination, employee relationships can easily be turned into employee referrals. This realization will lead to a shift away from recruiters and toward relying on employees to build social media contacts and relationships. The net result will be that as many as 60% of all hires will come from the combined efforts. The strength of these relationships will lead to better assessment and the highest-quality hires from employee referrals.

Employer branding returns — Employer branding and building talent communities are the only long-term strategies in recruiting. True branding is rarely practiced (hint: it’s not recruitment marketing) especially in the cash-strapped function of today, but years of layoffs, cuts in compensation, and generally bad press for business in general may force firms to invest in true branding. The increased use of social media and frequent visits to employee criticism sites (like Glassdoor.com), make not managing employer brand perception a risky proposition. While corporations will never control their employer brand, they can monitor and influence in a direction that isn’t catastrophic to recruiting and retention.

The candidate experience is finally getting the attention it deserves — Organizations have never treated candidates as well as they did their customers, but the high jobless rate has allowed corporations to essentially abuse some applicants. As competition for talent increases and as more applicants visit employer criticism sites like Glassdoor.com, talent leaders will be forced to modify their approach.

At the very least, firms will more closely monitor candidate experience metrics as they realize that treating applicants poorly can not only drive away other high-quality applicants but it can also lose them sales and customers.

Forward-looking metrics begin to dominate — Almost all current talent management and recruiting metrics are backward looking, in that they tell you what happened in the past. Other business functions like supply chain, production, and finance have long championed the use of “forward-looking” or predictive metrics and the time is finally coming when talent management leaders will shift their metrics emphasis. Forward-looking metrics can not only improve decision-making but they can also help to prevent or mitigate future talent problems.

Other Things to Keep Your Eye On…

In addition to the major trends highlighted above, there are 12 additional “hot” topics to keep your eye on:

• Risk identification — almost every other business function has already adopted a risk management strategy. So the time is coming when talent management will be forced to adopt a similar strategy and set of metrics. This program will not only cover HR legal issues but also the economic “risk” associated with weak hiring, the absence of developed leaders, and the cost of turnover of key talent.
• Prioritization — continued budget and resource pressure will force talent management leaders to prioritize their services, business units, key jobs, and high-value managers/employees.
• Integration — there will be increasing pressure for talent management functions to more closely integrate and work seamlessly.
• Expedited leadership development — as more baby-boom leaders and managers actually begin to retire, there will be increased pressure for expedited leadership development — specifically solutions that develop talent remotely using social media tools and within months rather than years.
• Competitive analysis — the increasingly competitive business world has forced almost every function to be more externally focused. Although HR has a long history of being internally focused and not being “highly competitive,” there is increasing pressure to become more business-like and to adopt an “us-versus-them” perspective. That means conducting competitive analysis and making sure that every key talent management function produces superior results to those at competitors.
• Contingent workers — as continuous business volatility becomes the “new normal,” the increased use and the improved management of contingent workers will become essential for agility and flexibility.
• Unionization — there is a reasonable chance that actions by the NLRB will increase union power and make it easier for unions to gain acceptance at private employers.
• Recruiting at industry events — as industry events return to popularity, recruiting at them will again become an effective tool for recruiting top and diverse talent.
• Location software — talent managers will begin to realize that software that allows you to check-in and see who is within close geographic proximity has great value and many still unidentified uses.
• Hire before they do — most firms will restrict their hiring until the turnaround actually begins. However, your firm must have a talent pool or pipeline developed, so that you can hire immediately and capture the top talent right before your competitors realize the downturn is over.
• Assessment continues to improve — vendors, software, and tools continue to improve in this area that will become increasingly important.
• Increase your revenue impact — increased economic pressures will continue the trend of forcing all functions (including talent management) to convert their functional results into business impacts in dollars. Talent management will face increasing pressure to directly demonstrate how their hiring, retention, development, etc. is focused, so that it directly increases and maximizes corporate revenues.

Final Thoughts

A recent survey of CEOs rates talent management as the No. 1 area where CEOs expect dramatic change during the next year. Given this increased attention, it’s even more critical that talent management and recruiting leaders set aside time to conduct a SWOT assessment (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) to identify where they are and where they need to be.

The “new” talent management leader must be more strategic, more proactive, and more business-like, and that means getting your entire staff to begin thinking about and planning for the game-changing events, trends, and opportunities that will occur during the next year. It’s time to realize the “but-we-are-overwhelmed-and-too-busy” excuse for not forecasting and planning is wearing thin.

The Role of Recruiters in Social Media

Recruiters often struggle with social media because the medium does not lend itself well to traditional recruiting practices. Recruiting is typically a highly transactional process — the recruiter collects information from a candidates, decides if there is a fit, and moves on to the next step. It’s essentially a one-way street, running from the candidate to the recruiter with little or nothing going the other way. Social media requires two-way communication (the “social” part): conversations, sharing, and engagement. This is how talent communities are created, and the same makes it difficult for recruiters who are accustomed to being gatekeepers and in-control of the process.

The difference between traditional recruiting and using social media is akin to being the captain of a navy ship compared to that of a cruise ship. In the former case, the captain is king. She decides where the ship goes and who does what. The passengers have no say. On a cruise ship the captain has much more limited power and has to behave very differently.

The Cruise Director

Fans of The Love Boat will remember Gavin MacLeod in the role of Captain Stubing. But the more interesting role was that played by Lauren Tewes – the Cruise Director Julie McCoy. She was the one who had to keep everyone happy and having a good time — i.e., engaged.

This is the role the recruiter needs to play when using social media. You can’t act like the captain on a navy ship. The passengers are not going to stay with you for the voyage if you don’t keep them happy. The members of a talent community are largely there because they’re interested in what the community has to offer in terms of content, not because it’s the shortest path to a job. That may happen but it’s not the primary reason that someone joins a talent community. Talent communities are designed to attract the vast majority of people who are not active candidates. If there’s a high level of engagement they will stay there and may be persuaded to consider the jobs you have to offer.

In this situation a recruiter can’t succeed with a transactional approach. A recruiter has to be social — facilitating conversations and fostering interest in the community. It works best if the members interact with each other, since it’s physically impossible for a recruiter to meaningfully interact with all. The pace can’t be forced — it has to be allowed to develop. You can’t very well order people to have conversations and build engagement.

Again, it’s like being the cruise director, not the Captain.

The Cruise Director vs. The Captain

Watch The Love Boat and you’ll see that the job of a Captain is highly structured — the ship’s destination and path to it are predetermined and well travelled. There’s a lot to do to get the ship there, but there’s not much chance it won’t get there. It’s rare that much goes wrong and aside from the occasional iceberg there are few obstacles in the way. It’s Groundhog day most of the time. One has to be exceedingly incompetent to fail.

Compare that to the job of the Cruise Director where every day is a new day. Julie was dealing with a constantly changing collection of colorful characters. Beyond knowing that the job requires keeping the passengers entertained, there are few rules about what to do. Getting it wrong is easy — book the wrong act and you can bet that the passengers are going to be writing disparaging remarks on their Facebook pages and tweeting about it before their next turn at the buffet.

That’s how it works for recruiters trying to use social media. We know that success requires engaging with candidates but things get fuzzy after that. Despite what some claim, there aren’t any templates for success. Often you have to make it up as you go along.

It Takes Two

The Love Boat was based on a book written by a former Cruise Director — Jeraldine Saunders, who was also the main writer for the series. Her description of what makes for a successful voyage was that it required both the Captain and the Cruise Director. The same is true for recruiting with social media: to be successful means managing both the unstructured components. This is why recruiters find it challenging to use social media while also managing traditional processes. The two require fundamentally different skills. You can’t be the Cruise Director and the Captain.

Built on the Facebook platform, BeKnown is a jobs-oriented network that allows users to build career profiles and connections separate from those on Facebook itself. By adding jobs to corporate sites and including colleges, Monster is encouraging users to conduct their job hunting within BeKnown.

For employers and schools that already have a Facebook career presence — and thousands do — the BeKnown sites are largely duplicative. But for those brand sites where jobs aren’t the main focus, a BeKnown site can become the gathering place for career discussions.

That’s the point Tom Chevalier, Monster’s BeKnown product manager, was making during a demo call today. A BeKnown site is a “secondary or duplicate offering,” he said, if a company or campus career center already has a recruitment presence on Facebook.

For everyone else (and that would include all those companies who simply stream their openings onto their Facebook site) a BeKnown site is where employees, alumni, students, job seekers, and potential candidates can engage in career conversations. Chevalier observed that a company isn’t very social if  it’s not carrying on active discussions with its fans and visitors.

In that regard, colleges will have it easier than employers. Alumni are vocal supporters of their school, and they are the very ones to talk about how their degree and their college years have paid off. And to post jobs.

Employers, whether direct or agency, need to invest time to make social media work. This isn’t unique to BeKnown or any other social site. Simply streaming jobs onto your site is not a social media strategy.

Engaging with candidates requires real interaction. Chevalier says BeKnown facilitates that because of its orientation. The way the site is designed, a BeKnown user can quickly see who they may know. If the employer adds the job feature — free and easily added — current listings appear on the main page. Right now, only jobs posted to Monster automatically show up. Soon, Chevalier said, XML and RSS feeds will be added to automate the process.

Colleges have it even easier. Monster has created pages for some 3,500 colleges in the U.S., populating them with content that includes a bit of history, costs, financial aid, and alums registered with BeKnown. A school need but claim its page.

While Monster was announcing its latest enhancements, Facebook was already the center of attention over its rumored plans for a $10 billion IPO next year. In a story repeated in hundreds of posts, the Wall Street Journal said the company was expected to file papers for its initial public offering possibly even before the end of the year. Based on the shares already outstanding, a $10 billion offering would value Facebook at $100 billion, ranking it among the most valuable companies in the world.

First to college recruiting. Tavish Ledesma is one of the key players on this one. He comes from a software-engineering background, with less than a year on the human resources side. What he found when starting with HR, and going to campuses last spring, was a “laborious process for processing resumes.”

Intel receives 20,000 paper resumes per year in the U.S. “They were were shipped to a Intel shared service center where they were processed,” says Allen Stephens. “The candidate data would not be available in our system for a couple of weeks, resulting in a delay before our candidates would hear back from us.”

Ledesma put together a proposal, with some screen shots, for streamlining that process, and Intel, up to the CIO’s office and the HR VP, bought in.

Among the goals is to help recruiters collect information from candidates, and shorten the time between when a candidate and recruiter meet, and that candidate gets an email from Intel about applying for a job.

Intel’s still refining it, and still piloting it, but basically recruiters, instead of getting paper resumes and writing notes on them, are equipped with iPads. The iPad application (see graphic at left) is used at a career fair or other conference to collect information from a candidate, such as their name, email address, grades, and interests. The recruiter can mark it up with notes, such as whether the person wants a job or an internship.

The information makes it way into the Taleo applicant tracking system, and candidates can hopefully get an email back from Intel as soon as that day, the day they interacted with Intel at a career fair, and not weeks later.

Stephens says “the app allows Intel to reduce our candidate response time by 25 times, and save over 500 hours per year in manual processing.”

Development started in August, and as I mentioned, is ongoing. The biggest challenge right now, with the application having been tested at three different events, is getting a soft copy of a resume entered into the system; in other words, finding the best way way to get additional information from the job candidate added to their profile.

New Mobile App for Candidates

The college recruiting application mentioned above is generally an internal technology — to make life easier for recruiters and in the end, better for candidates. Intel’s also rolling out an application for job candidates who look for jobs with a smart phone, along the lines of ones Autodesk, Pepsi, and others have had built. It’s first being rolled out for Androids, and then to iPhones and iPads.

It took about six months from the first meeting about it to completion, and is still being tweaked as we speak, particularly with respect to the branding, images, and the security features. “We take our brand very seriously,” says Intel staffing channels manager Keith Molesworth. “Especially in the recruiting space.”

Facebook and Other Social Media

When we last off, a year ago, Intel was trying to make its social media recruiting more social, more consistent, and make sure it didn’t fall behind Silicon Valley competitors. Sejal Patel and others are continuing that work, with new wrinkles.

One of those is Google+. Patel partnered with the Social Media Center of Excellence (within the Sales and Marketing Group) to create the Intel brand page, which has multiple circles such as “technology enthusiasts,” “Newsroom,” “Trends,” and a recruiting-focused one, “Life at Intel.”

Meanwhile, as far as search engine optimization of jobs is concerned, earlier this year, Intel started using a tool from an association called DirectEmployers. The tool costs nothing additional for members of the association. Intel is now trying out Jobs2Web on some of Intel’s critical software jobs.

Intel continues to use Twitter, LinkedIn (where it has enjoyed success with a student lounge), and Facebook. When it comes to Facebook — well, that all had gotten a bit unwieldy for Intel, with multiple pages around the world, some even inactive. What it’s doing now is putting jobs tabs on different pages for different countries – UK, Germany, Poland, Malaysia, Vietnam, Israel, Germany, Russia. Those pages will have feeds from Intel’s careers blog, as well as local career-related events. A company called Vitrue helped create the tabs, modules, and feeds.

The Facebook site is pulling from the Taleo system, so people can search for jobs on Facebook, read the job description, and in the end go to the Intel careers site to apply. Work4Labs helps power the job search. “It’s a cleaner, prettier, branded way to search for jobs on Facebook,” says Patel.

It’s not yet using BeKnown or BranchOut, but was recently approached by the latter and is considering testing it, and others in that field.

Intel is also stepping up its use of virtual events in recruiting. Using a company called ON24, some of Intel’s events are mainly chats, where candidates submit resumes and talk to hiring managers and recruiters about working at Intel. Others are more of the webinar variety, on topics like CV writing — with a question-and-answer period.

Allen Stephens provided stats on a recent event: “Over 650 resumes received during two-hour event; 385 students attended; 10 hiring managers plus multiple recruiters in the chat event.”

Still Cracking the Code

Even with all this going on, even with this being Intel and all, if you talk to the Intel team, you find that it’s sourcing and social media challenges aren’t so different from everyone else’s.

You have your Tiffany Peerys (among the Intel team on video here talking about their recruiting in the spring of 2011) who are adept at the social-media recruiting thing, and you have others who aren’t as enthused. To that end, Intel recruiting leaders in the U.S., Israel, and elsewhere are brainstorming some ways to better train people on social media, with that training likely to increase toward the beginning of 2012. It’d also eventually like to have a community manager for each region of the world, rather than so much of it being either run out of the U.S, or ad hoc.

PepsiCo has for years been an early-adopter when it comes to recruiting with social media, as well as making its recruiting efforts more friendly to candidates using mobile phones.

You can check out the Google+ page here.

And for more on PepsiCo, Here’s Hoyt and colleagues Paul Marchand and Sheila Stygar talking about their talent acquisition department in a video from the last ERE Expo.

LinkedIn ran a distant second, with 46 percent of job seekers attributing their job to that business-oriented network. Twitter, the short messaging network, got a thumbs-up for its job help from 36 percent.

Those are among the findings of Jobvite’s Social Job Seeker Survey 2011 released this morning. The survey doesn’t say how the social networking helped the job-seekers. Other data suggests it may mean seekers researched the companies on social networks, reached out to their contacts for information, got a referral, or were contacted directly. Since most job seekers use more than one social network, the numbers add up to more than 100 percent.

In terms of sheer numbers, the results are not too surprising. Facebook has in excess of 800 million members, while LinkedIn has about 135 million. What is surprising, however, is that by an even larger margin recruiters in an earlier Jobvite survey reported making hires through LinkedIn.

Nevertheless, regardless of which social network they prefer, job seekers with the most contacts do more job hunting and get better results than their counterparts with fewer than 150 connections, friends, or followers. Of these “super social” job seekers as Jobvite calls them, 28 percent found a job directly through their online social networking.

As you might expect, Facebook has the largest percentage of super social job seekers — 37 percent — compared to LinkedIn’s 10 percent and Twitter’s 11 percent. Super socials, as the Jobvite survey discovered, are young and strong earners: 62% percent are under 40; 42 percent earn over $75,0;0, and 40 percent have a college degree. They divide almost evenly on gender with 49 percent female.

“Our new national survey shows that socially savvy job seekers have an advantage over their fellow job hunters and it’s paying off,” said Dan Finnigan, Jobvite president and CEO. “While referrals are still the top source of new jobs, online social networks play an increasingly important role in job hunting today.”

One curious data point is the number of workers who, Jobvite reports, say they find their job through social networking. Jobvite puts the count at more than 22 million, an increase of 7.6 million since its 2010 survey. If that’s accurate, then 15.8 percent of the 48 million jobs filled in the year ending Sept. 30 would be the result of social networks.

As a blog post announcing the new business pages says, “Not only can they recommend you with a +1, or add you to a circle to listen long-term. They can actually spend time with your team, face-to-face-to-face.”

Google is wasting no time promoting Pages. The search giant has added Pages to its search results page and is committing the + sign to simplify getting to a particular Google+ Pages site. A few businesses already have Pages up. Macy’s, for example. Get there by clicking the link or try out the + search by putting it in front of Macy’s in the Google search window.

Google is calling its use of the  + search feature Direct Connect. Besides facilitating a Pages search, it offers visitors a quick way to add a business to their Circle of connections. (Circles are Google’s answer to Facebook friends.) Owners of Pages need only add a bit of code to their World Wide Web site. Eventually, when the + is used, Google will ask the searcher if they want to add the site to their Google+ Circles.

With more than 40 million registrants, Google+ has grown quickly since its launch early in the summer. Initially, Google discouraged businesses from establishing a presence on the social network. The company promised it would offer commercial opportunities. Now that it has, the question businesses face is whether to create yet one more site that has to be maintained and nurtured. For recruiters already trying to keep up with Facebook postings, Twitter, LinkedIn Groups, and the company blog besides doing everything else, it’s not an easy decision. Yet, the potential Google+ offers is significant.

Google has clearly made a strong play versus Facebook and LinkedIn. Leveraging its search site to include + Pages and include an in-your-face connection opportunity gives Google powerful tools to not only promote its social site, but the Google+ Page site of every business, group, and what not that creates one. For that reason alone, employers ought to be considering creating at least a minimum Page site. Leave it at that though, and you miss an opportunity to experiment with the unique features Google has built into its social network.

Hangouts, the two-way video feature, has all sorts of potential for doing a lot more showing than telling about what a great place to work your company is. Circles is a natural for building multiple candidate and prospect pipelines that can be easily targeted. SearchEngineLand has an excellent primer describing in detail how to create a Google+ page and have it included in search results, and add the “Add to Circles” feature to your main site. That, at least, is a place to start.

Today, Facebook, with more than 800 million users, and LinkedIn, with more than 130 million, are the dominant social networks. But Google is making a strong play for a piece of the action. Although there’s nowhere near as much socializing or networking on Google+ as on the other two sites, that could change as users discover the unique features it offers and as businesses leverage those features in smart and innovative ways.

The experience was exceptional.

I was impressed with the high level of professionalism.

Very professional interviews that provided me an environment in which I could be myself.

It made me want to work there even more.

Let’s hope that’s what your candidates are saying about your organization. Let’s hope that’s what they’re saying about your recruiting processes. But they may be saying stuff like this:

The worst and most unprofessional experience I’ve had.

You’ve yet to follow up with me.

The interviewer had absolutely no idea of what the position called for.

The reality is that candidates are probably saying things that cover both ends of the spectrum about your organization. What’s important is whether the first set of statements is more prevalent, or the second set is – and what you are doing about it.

There’s a lot of focus in our industry on finding and engaging passive candidates, developing a strong employment brand, using social media, and building talent communities, but a poor candidate experience can derail and minimize the impact of each of those efforts. My company did something about the problem.

We’re going to be talking more about this at the Spring Expo (March 28-30 in San Diego), but first things first. I think we’ve all heard of the so called “career site black hole,” and I have talked to many a candidate who has a story about moving through a company’s interview process, moving all the way to a final stage, only to never hear from the company again one step short of the finish line. Less anecdotally, CareerXroads publishes a survey every year about how a “mystery candidate” is treated by the top 100 Companies to work for as listed by Fortune. The results are eye opening. It reports that 79% of candidates who apply to a position expect that there will be some sort of feedback, but only 19% of the top 100 companies to work for let the mystery candidate know they were not going to get the job. The apply-process itself has become a barrier between job seekers and organizations, with only 48% of the organizations in the study having a process that takes less than five minutes to complete.

Anyhow, we came out of a two-day recruiting meeting last spring with a long list of to-dos, and at the top of the list was to improve the candidate experience. The key for us was developing a “Candidate Commitment,” and then develop processes to support the commitment. Our commitment is quite simple actually, and focuses on four main areas that are part of the candidate experience: Education, Application, Screening, and Interviewing.

Education: we have used social media channels, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube and Tumblr (blogging tool) to provide candidates with a closer look into our organization. We make a point not to use these channels as another way to just promote our job postings, but rather to provide content that a candidate may not find on our corporate career site, such as recruiting team activities, corporate events, relevant business news, candidate tips, and so forth. We’ve used video to provide a more in-depth look at some of the functional areas we do a lot of hiring for, as well as to provide a look at the lighter side of our culture.

Application: we worked with our ATS partner to reconfigure our “apply now” process. Now, we only require three fields to complete our process — first name, last name, email address — the minimum it takes to create a profile. Amazingly, almost every candidate includes a resume as well, but you get the point: we went back to the bare basics, and the result is a process that takes less than two minutes to complete for a first-time candidate, less for returning candidates.

In addition to improving the candidate experience, it also improved the ROI for our job board investments. I know it is not a very hip thing to admit these days, but the boards are actually still quite useful for us and an important part of our overall recruitment strategy, resulting in about 19% of our hires. Have you compared the data you get from your job board partners regarding traffic sent to your site with what actually lands in your ATS lately? I was shocked by the drop-off rates, and when I talked to two major boards recently about things, they informed me that our numbers were actually pretty good. Both stated that anywhere from a 50%-80% drop-off rate was typical! No wonder the job boards are talked about so negatively. Our industry may only be realizing 20%-50% of their potential because of the hurdles we create to completing our process.

Screening: we committed to following up with all of our candidates in a timely manner. For us that is 1-20 days. This may be a phone conversation or a “thanks but no thanks” email template, but we do not want anyone to experience the black hole. You may be able to commit to something quicker than 20 days, or longer than 20 days, but the point is to set an expectation and then meet it. It is fairly easy to develop strong communication templates. Every commercial ATS out there has functionality that allows you to send mass messages to your candidates that feel at least semi-personalized.

Interviewing: we work closely with our hiring managers to ensure there is a solid interview plan in place, and that the interview will be conducted in a balanced manner, allowing the candidate to interview us in addition to the information we seek from them.

Three weeks ago I had the privilege to accept one of the first annual “Candidate Experience Awards” on behalf of the Sage NA Recruiting Team. In talking with many of the other winning participants, clearly everyone recognized that we all have a long way to go. I am hopeful that the industry as a whole embraces the challenge to improve, and I am particularly excited to compete for the award again next year.

Most companies are using a hodgepodge of social media ideas, trying a little of this and a little of that, in the hope something works. Rather than proceed in such a haphazard manner, I’ve decided to give some structure to the process by creating five levels of social media effectiveness based on currently available technology.

This hierarchy approach will be further refined over the next few months, but for now use these guidelines to figure out where your company stands and what you need to do to become a social media maven. (We’re hosting a webcast with Jobvite on November 3, 2011, describing the Social Media Pyramid in more depth.)

Novice: to rank at this inglorious bottom level all you need to have are Facebook and LinkedIn company pages with your boring job descriptions posted in some illogical and uninteresting order. Now all you need to do is to get people to follow you, with these followers regularly pinged via Twitter or the social media’s site internal pinging machine when a job is opened. Despite what any vendor tells you, this type of social media program is designed to stay in touch with active candidates who have excess time on their hands. If you have a big employer magnet, it might be all you need, though.

Minimalist: to move past Novice on the social media pyramid you need to have some type of CRM system driving your messaging and do at least two other things. First, be a little different. Second, be found.

At one level being different means your social media site is more robust; perhaps it has a game or something unique to keep prospects engaged, maybe the company vision/mission is presented in more compelling terms; or, best of all, the jobs themselves are a little bit more exciting. Being found, especially for the SMBs, means someone can find your company by searching on Google or one of the job aggregators with just a job title and a location without your company name. If you can’t get this part right, just think of how many prospects aren’t seeing your job postings.

Progressive: now we’re starting to get serious. Being serious starts by implementing a hub-and-spoke model for your social media efforts where prospects are driven via aggressive marketing programs to your page, microsite, group, or circle. The idea is to group all similar jobs into a master job class — for example, all hydraulic design engineers from mid- to senior-level — and then differentiate how you manage each of these master classes. From these master or landing pages you need to offer unique content and drive prospects to specific jobs as they open up via robust CRM systems (differentiated messages depending on master class and the prospect’s job-seeking phase).

In addition to the hub-and-spoke approach, true Progressives offer a means to easily connect prospects directly with employees they know both before a req is open, as well as after. At the Progressive stage social media metrics enter the picture. Tracking source of candidate opt-in and hire rates by channel allows for both the appropriate allocation of resources and as a means to improve the content and process.

Maven: aside from doing all of the above, Mavens realize that true passive candidates, especially the best, aren’t going to partake in the social media shenanigans in similar fashion to active candidates. Differentiation at the job level is critical for success at the Maven level. For one thing, just consider that the best passive candidates won’t even consider another position unless it represents a true career move. In this case a laundry list of traditional job postings won’t get much attention.

On top of the messaging, the process passive candidates use to engage, compare, and select the best of competing opportunities must also be different. From a social media perspective it means the job titles must be enticing, the job description themselves compelling, and the methods of attracting and staying in contact unique. It goes without saying that the process used to connect jobs with prospects through a company’s ERP system is automatic, robust, and professional. Very few companies are at this level, so if you’re one of them, you’re certain to become an ERE finalist.

World Leader: following are the most important components of a social media World Leader program. As you review the factors, rank yourself from bad to great to give your company some type of initial benchmark. If you rank outstanding on each of these measures, not only will you be a certain ERE Spring 2012 finalist, but probably the top dog award-winner, as well.

• Career-focused messaging: if you don’t have a big employer name, assume all you’re attracting are active candidates unless all of your emails, job postings, Twitters, chats, and voice mail clearly describe career opportunities.
• Auto Outbound PERP: a proactive ERP means your employees are formally connecting with the best people they’ve worked with in the past. This is important, since with “Auto Outbound PERP” once a req is opened your employees are notified if they have any strong first-degree matches. This auto-outbound ERP system is more effective since it drives passive candidate referrals, while an inbound auto-ERP process allows active candidates to find employees they are connected to.
• Virtual Talent Community: Whichever company has the best passive candidates directly connected to their employees will win the new war for talent. Building talent pipelines of active candidates is great for filling positions quickly, but not for raising a company’s overall talent level. A VTC by class of job requires aggressive PERPing, great recruiters, true career opportunities, fully engaged hiring managers, and a competitive compensation structure.
• Interactive CRM: Most recruiting CRM systems offer nothing more than the ability to deliver a series of timed, group-based messages. Direct marketing-based CRM systems have the ability to send a series of sequences and semi-individualized messages to prospects based on their job-hunting status and interests. In some ways this is akin to a virtual recruiter assigned to each prospect in your VTC.
• An aligned talent-centric strategy and tactics: The criteria top people (whether active or passive) use to initially engage with a company is different than what’s used to decide whether to accept an offer or not. The former is more about compensation, title/company, and location. The latter is more about growth and opportunity. On top of this, most companies use the same apply/assess/recruit/close process for both passive and active candidates. No matter what social media programs you use, this mismatch will preclude companies from attracting and hiring as many top performers as possible.

Developing a series of social media recruiting programs should be part of an overall talent acquisition strategy. Based on what I’ve seen, most companies instead assign the role to someone who’s social-media savvy, rather than a person who is charged with developing a companywide program for improving quality of hire. As Magic Johnson said at LinkedIn’s Talent Connect, strategy drives tactics, not the other way around. This seems like good advice whether you’re playing basketball, running a company, or climbing the ranks of the Social Media Pyramid.

The Medium vs the Message

There’s more going on offline than online.

A key finding of the research is that social networking is done more offline than online; the most common type of social networking is face-to-face or over the phone. This is a tough pill to swallow for those who worship the god of digital media, but the conventional wisdom is based on confusing the medium with the message. Social networking is what people are naturally driven to do; online social media is just the mechanism through which it’s done.

One size does not fit all. The research shows that social networkers have different reasons why they use their networks. These reasons are intrinsic to each individual: if you want to engage with them you need to tailor your message to them. If your social media initiatives are designed to reach the widest possible audience, then there’s a lot who will simply tune it out.

It’s About Engagement

The conventional wisdom about social media is that it’s a vehicle to reach the widest possible audience at the lowest cost — 467 first-level contacts connect you to 88,654 second-level contacts and 12,674,812 third-level contacts; Facebook has 600 million users, and so on. Getting dazzled by the numbers obscures the fact that success with social media requires engagement. And engagement means connecting with people who have shared passions and interests. Research on the effectiveness of tweets as a means to deliver a message shows that that happens most when tweets are re-tweeted — which only happens if the message resonated with the person reading it … an engaged follower. A “like” by a friend is more likely to be noticed than an ad, and even more if the friend commented on whatever it was they liked.

And engagement means that people are more likely to talk with their friends about the topic, whether it’s a product or a job, or interesting place to work. This is why talent communities can only succeed if they build engagement. The conventional wisdom about the talent communities is that they should include the largest number of possible candidates, with the idea that some will become employees. That approach doesn’t build engagement. It builds a database. The people in it are not likely to be retweeting your jobs or sharing them on Facebook.

The Gallup research shows that prospective customers are much more likely to try your product or service or advocate on your behalf if they hear good things about you from an engaged customer in their social network. They are much less likely to trust online advertising or corporate-sponsored Facebook pages or Twitter feeds. Candidates will behave the same way — if they’re engaged with you they will mention it to their friends, and those friends are more likely to be attracted to your jobs, more so than any amount of tweeting and self-promotion you may do through SEO for your jobs.

Old Habits Die Hard 

Much of recruiting has to do with advertising; the enduring popularity of job boards is testimony to that. Before that, so much of print advertising was devoted to help-wanted ads. It’s hard work to come up with leads on candidates and then reach out and try and to get them interested in your jobs. We’d all like to just post a job and wait for the resumes to roll in. When social media came along the most natural thing to do was to try and get those jobs in front of as many people as possible. That was the message peddled by ad agencies — the former middlemen in the job-posting business. Hence the obsession with click-through rates, impressions, views, etc. That may work for jobs where the requirements are a pulse and the lack of a felony (and sometimes only the first) but it usually doesn’t work for jobs requiring specialized skills. Do it too much and you’re just filling the channel with noise that no one’s paying any attention to.

Advertising doesn’t build engagement but a focused message, tailored to a narrow segment resonates. Talent communities are most effective when they include like-minded people who share a passion for their work. Do it right and you have passive candidates engage with you in ways not possible through advertising. Do it wrong and you’ve got the social media equivalent of spam.

After a Tuesday night party worthy of a last century Silicon Valley event, a bleary-eyed audience was brought to its feet by former basketball great and now-successful businessman Magic Johnson. Roaming the cavernous convention hall, he mixed photo ops with motivational lessons from his life, which took him from high school standout to Laker star and now to business success as the CEO of multi-million dollar development companies that work largely in inner city neighborhoods.

He offered up such chestnuts as  ”It’s not enough to deliver … you have to overdeliver”; “losers lose and winners win”; and others as he told his life story. It was an entertaining almost 90 minutes that went into overtime as Johnson took questions, hustling over to each person to make sure they could get a picture of themselves with the NBA legend.

A more serious and sober panel followed, talking about, of all things, data. Johnson’s razzle-dazzle was a tough act to follow, but what the session offered was a glimpse into the future for HR and, very plainly, for LinkedIn.

The crux of what the panelists had to say is that we are swimming in data, more data than has ever before existed in the history of the world, and companies are just now beginning to learn how to effectively mine it for competitive purposes.

Four very smart people shared the stage — Reid Hoffman, co-founder and chairman of LinkedIn; Tim O’Reilly founder and CEO of O’Reilly Media, Michael Chui of McKinsey, and Josh Bersin CEO of the HR consulting firm Bersin & Associates. Analyzing all the recruiting and employee data that companies gather has been a powerful trend in HR for years, but from what the panelists said, the information already in company servers and HR hard drives has barely been tapped.

Companies that learn how to use it will be able to make decisions about all sorts of business issues, not the least of which is workforce planning and recruiting. Bersin, the moderator, naturally enough opened the session with a reference to Moneyball, the movie about how the Oakland A’s mined statistical data to put together a winning team on a shoestring (as Major League Baseball goes) budget.

The session, quipped Bersin, should be called “Moneyball comes to HR.”

The sit-up-and-take-notice moment came when LinkedIn demonstrated how the company is mining the 120 million+ profiles and other data it has and making it available for recruiters. Go into LinkedIn Skills and do a search yourself and you’ll discover the rich information that results. The demo search for “android” turned up ranked lists of LinkedIn members who are professionals in the field, as well as lists of additional skills that android experts list in their profiles. Not sure what companies hire mobile experts? The Skills results page tells you. Same for where they are located and more.

A recruiter could use this data in multiple ways, including compiling skills checklists, discovering the companies that have mobile professionals on staff, the groups they join, and, of course the names of professionals whose connections they may be able to leverage.

Skills is in beta, so expect some hiccups. My own search for “editors” included a Wikipedia reference to a British rock band by that name. Still, Skills is a useful resource as it is now, and it hints at the even deeper data LinkedIn has.

As the panelists noted, every company has some of that same kind of information about its workforce. Mined and, as Chui said, integrated with data from outside the company, data such as that available free from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, then, as he maintained, “It really matters on a bottom-line basis.” Big data,” he said, “is a big deal.”