Tag Archive for linkedin

Social Network Ownership – Tug of War?

August 18, 2010 / Justin Hillier / 13 comments

Had an interesting chat with a recruitment agency earlier this week regarding their consultants and LinkedIn. Firstly hats off to them for pushing the use of LinkedIn as hard as they are, it’s a recruiters gold mine if you engage and use all aspects of the site/network, we receive a lead on average once a week currently from our efforts.

What was an interesting topic of discussion was “Who owns the 1st level connections that each consultant builds as their efforts on LinkedIn, the Employer or Employee/Recruitment Consultant?

This particular recruiters feels that all of the work that is done to either build an online or offline professional network during business hours, representing their company to promote their services, and thus connecting to that individual/s is the property of the business. I can certainly understand where they are coming from however is it that straight forward?

What of proof of time of connection (where they at the current employer when they connected on LI), can any company really stipulate that they own every person that their employees come in to contact with, and is this just taking the rules to far with internal business information and knowledge. Considering a LinkedIn account is represented by an individual, under their name, what ownership can a company have? Quite often you connect with more then just professionals in your industry, how can we really define or argue the two?

Now I agree that a LinkedIn network is certainly an asset, and once an employee leaves that asset is lost, however that person still needs to be replaced, with, you would expect, a potential new asset to bring with them. Can you really prove or is it realistic to ask an employee to prove their network and when they connected with them?

What are your thoughts? Should companies have the ability to “own” the employees networks either on LinkedIn or Twitter and demand they are deleted or similar once their tenure has ended?

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Australian Social Media Stats – Nielsen Report

March 15, 2010 / Justin Hillier / No comments

Amazing stats this morning from Nielsen showing the growth of Social Media usage in Australia. If this doesn’t make the HR/recruitment industry realise there is a HUGE LOST OPPORTUNITY in not being in the Social Media game then I don’t know what will.

Here is a brief overview:

9 million Australians now interact via social networks
Content sharing is the most popular activity
4 in 5 Australian Internet users have shared a photo
Twitter usage grew by 400% in 2009
Nearly 3/4 of Australians read a wiki
2 in 5 Australians interact with companies via social networks

Add to this that LinkedIn reported last week to now have 1 million users in Australia and the arguments just keep stacking up for everyone to jump on board. You can download the 3 page report here

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Jobs Boards – Ditch The Resume DB Please, get SOCIAL

December 1, 2009 / Justin Hillier / 6 comments

Ah, the good old resume database. How I hate thee. Might sound a little harsh but having worked at job boards in a sales capacity for 6 years I think I have every right to say they are fundamentally floored in today’s market. You see if I had a $ for every time I had a client say “It’s a waste of money, all the candidates are old or not relevant” I’d be a millionaire.

The major problem with the Resume Database as we know it, is that it is WAY to simple for a candidate to put the resume up there and do nothing else with it. This causes many problems. Often they sit there for years and more often then not they classify themselves in the wrong way. So how can job boards take the resume database forward and socialise this aspect of their sites.

I have one word for you, “Community”. The Resume database on most job boards is a formant sleeping giant. The candidates are asleep and the Employers/Recruiters are getting lost in the maze. Where is the interaction and engagement, what’s the point of having 300,000 people on a database if talking to them is near impossible. Greater engagement would mean greater value, not only to the job board in terms of revenue but to the candidate and employer in terms of faster matches.

So rather then candidates simply uploading a word doc, here is what it perhaps should look like.

1. Candidates creates Profile similar to Visualcv.com with added fields to create competencies that show specific situations of soft skill usage ie Leadership, Organisation, Decision making etc. Provide examples.
2. All Fields are searchable and the candidate has the ability to keep any fields “Private” as to avoid current Employer finding them.
3. Employers have their Company Profiles integrated in to the Community to enable candidates to shop around, search jobs, leave messages for HR or line managers.
4. Candidates and Employers can engage via SM tools such as chat, video messages, twitter feed, Forum engagement, connecting with like skilled candidates (similar to connecting on LI or Facebook)
5. Candidates can communicate with each other about current job searching issues or experiences and Employers have the ability to see this and react.
5. Employer talks/finds candidate they like. Candidate and Employer can organise “Virtual” interview via video next time they are both on line.
6. Candidate and Employer meet face to face and candidate is hired.

And this is just a start…….

Not only will the whole process be more transparent, but the interaction and engagement will be far more beneficial for both sides. And I’m sure far easier to justify the price of the database “Community”, then it is now.

Katherine Robinson wrote a great blog this week that focused on the front end for the advertisers. I totally agree with her comments.

Perhaps we are both barking mad, but I seriously think job boards will need to adapt and move with the times in order to maintain their value. The Greg Savage “Post and Pray” methd is simply not effective, and allowing candidates to just “spray” their CV’s off also needs reviewing. Something does need to change.

Job boards may not die, but they certainly will if they don’t move with the times.

And don’t get me started on ATS platforms, grrrr, but that’s for another blog.

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Is your social media strategy, 120, 240 or 360 degrees

November 22, 2009 / Justin Hillier / One comment

So chances are you have heard of social media and you have a strategy in place to reap the benefits of the new wave of interaction that is now available to us all. You are using Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Youtube, Xing, Delicious, Digg, ah the list goes on and on.

Your strategy is sourcing you a great deal of traffic and to date you have somewhat figured out there is a benefit in doing all of this and you are starting to see some return for your efforts. Well done, this will and should occur with a defined plan in place. Whilst it is still very much early days and the approach may very well change in 5 years time, we must get the most out of it’s current structure while we can, why not, it’s an opportunity missed otherwise and what is the business value in that?

So for now you have solved what is the puzzle of social media and recruiting. But is that really it? It can really be that “relatively” easy can it?

What if I was to suggest that your strategy is only 33% complete? And there should be in fact 3, yes 3, parts of your social media strategy.

1. Attraction + Engagement + onboarding

This one is a bit of a no-brainer for the first 2 uses, but who is using social media for onboarding? Attraction and engagement is great when talking about utilsing all of the above mentioned sites to spread the word about your company, the fantastic opportunities you have, and what a great business you have become.

But what about on-boarding. Do you encourage new employees to connect with current employees prior to starting and entice them to start getting involved in the business in any way they can. Either just by following a conversation or getting up to date with current projects that they will be working on.

2. Retention + Engagement + Collaboration

Here is where your social media strategy provides you your greatest ROI. You have attracted talent, hired them, they have under-gone a great on-boarding process and they are starting to hit their straps. You’re employees are all over social media as we know, however how can you harness social media internally to improve outcomes and enhance engagement and more collaboration. We do after all enjoy the people we work with, more then the job itself most of the time.

Supplying your staff with the ability to create chat groups, pose questions to the rest of the business and move projects along with more communication is every companies dream. Imagine allowing managers the ability to have a better understanding and the “pulse” of their staff by simply getting more involved in what they want to talk about, business or otherwise.

With meetings always cancelled or shifted to a time when not everyone can attend due to sickness or holiday, the meeting itself never resolving or covering every discussion point required, and follow up more and more difficult as some people just cannot be tracked down, why not have your staff continue moving things along with the power of a community platform.

Not only is this great for speeding up discussion and greater collaboration, but if you ever have a question why not pose it to the rest of the company in a non-intrusive manner. Who knows what answers you will get and what other business enhancements may be raised from one conversation alone.

3. Exiting + Alumni

It is suffice to say that people move on at some stage, but does that mean your communication should cease entirely. Understanding why people leave is never easy or straight forward, and answering surveys, being involved in discussions and simply making them feel like their voice is still being heard is crucial.

You may not want to stay in touch as a business with every ex employees but it would be remiss not to have some connection with former employees for either future job opportunities or business deals. You never know who might be your client or vice versa moving forward.

This is just a snapshot of course, but how many of us can say, we are indeed utilizing social media and its power to its full potential. My mum always told me if I’m going to do something do it properly, I wonder if this relates to social media and its use in recruitment as well?

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