Social Media and the Employee Lifecycle (part 2)

In my last blog I explained the use of the employee lifecycle as a framework for building your HR social medias strategy.  This approach helps companies move away from an exclusive focus on social recruiting and looks at the potential for larger impacts on the business that you support.   In today’s blog, I want to address the next few steps in the employee life cycle:

• Acquiring new talent (social recruiting)

• On-boarding and building engagement

Acquiring New Talent

When HR executives think about social media and how it can deliver value to their own organizations, they typically start by focusing on the recruitment process.  It is here that ROI can be most directly measured, especially if you are a company that historically has paid outside recruiters to acquire new employees.

When looking at your social recruiting landscape, you should start with the search engines and of course the big gorilla in that room is always Google.  95% of your prospects who are looking for a job will start with a search engine.  Knowing what they find when they look for your company followed by a key word such as career or job is the first step in building your strategy.

Next, you should look at the major social networking sites.  For recruiting higher level professionals, LinkedIn is a great place to start.  Your company should have a well defined site that explains your brand and contains all of the key words that someone might search for.  Another key site is Indeed which is a great place to list jobs as well as follow their forums to see what the marketplace is saying about your company.  In the same way that companies built store fronts along the new highways that were being built in the 1950s, companies today should also make sure that they have recruiting storefronts in all of the major social sites such as Facebook and mySpace.  All of these are activities that can be done in conjunction with your marketing department who may well have parallel tracks underway to use these tools for the acquisition of new customers.

One mindset that recruiters have to overcome is that recruiting is a one-way and single-link process.  Marketers understand that word of mouth advertising works so well because of a multiplier effect.  Recruiters need to create ways where the people that they touch reach out and touch an additional handful of potential targets.  A good example of this approach is Adobe who created a game targeted at students which encouraged students to recruit others to join in the fun.  Once you have made your initial investment in building a social strategy, these types of activities can build awareness at a very effective rate.

Another example of a company that has effectively used this viral approach to recruiting is UPS.  A year ago, they launched a social campaign that used a viral approach to build awareness and recruit employees all over the world.  The results of these efforts were staggering.  Their content was seen by over 1MM people which resulted in over 150,00 applications submitted.  And the process has not lost any momentum one year later—over 80,000 visitors come to the site every week.  Clearly, the use of a social media approach can deliver huge numbers at a substantial savings over traditional approaches.

Any company that begins to utilize social media for recruiting must also think about the common legal issues of bias that can result in major legal exposure.  A future blog post will include insights from an expert on this topic.  For now, suffice it to say that hiring bias issues require careful planning and execution no matter what the channel of recruiting that is being used.

On-boarding and building engagement

Up until now, this blog series has focused on employees as individuals—how to reach them and how to recruit the ones with valuable skills.   Once they turn up for work on the first day, they become part of your organization and a member of several communities that define the social environment of your company.  The challenge for HR now transitions from the individual to community—how can we engage an employee to quickly maximize their productivity and effectiveness within the organization.  While industrial psychologists have come up with ways of measuring engagement, actually effecting positive change is a challenge and an art.

Social media provides a potential tool to tackle this elusive challenge.  I emphasize the word potential because it is no more than a tool.  Successful use of social media requires several key ingredients that are often lacking in these types of efforts.  Here are some key tips:

• Be ready for the long haul—Oftentimes employee facing efforts are well planned through implementation, but lack resources and attention to be successful over time.  Using social media to build engagement over time requires an on-going investment in time and energy to provide value to your employees.

• Start with your company values—Social media provides an opportunity to communicate and demonstrate your company values.  In a social world, where your employees are front line ambassadors of your company, this is more critical than ever.

• Include everyone—Social organizations are most successful when the entire organization participates.  Getting your senior management to add their insights into the process, while difficult, will exponentially increase the chance of success.

• Keep it fun—What do all of the top YouTube videos of all time have in common?  They are funny.  You won’t see any popular videos that drone on about company policy and procedures.  Try having your employees produce a video on how their department contributes to the success of the company and you just might unleash the powerful force of employee engagement.