I was recently asked for my view on social media policy in the work place by an HR professional.
ie should organisations seek to control their employees activities on platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Blogs etc. Or should they ignore it?
Here is my reply:
3 Random thoughts relating to social media
Regardless of which industry you operate within, your external environment has changed radically in the last 12-18 months.
The dark clouds initially sparked off by the credit crunch have now turned into an economic storm and in some parts of the world, a full blown hurricane. The recession driven by falling consumer and business confidence is having an impact on most of the industrialised world and beyond.
Whilst many businesses are cost-cutting and reducing headcount, the forward-thinking ones are still maintaining a strong focus on retaining talent.
In a downturn, retaining the best people is crucial for helping you ride the economic storm, while also ensuring that you have the team to power ahead and take advantage of the opportunities when the economy and market turn around.
But retaining the right people during a down-turn isn’t always easy – here are 7 tips:
• Should the person who runs the customer service operations at a ski school also be required to love skiing?
• Can the CFO of a large church be an atheist?
• Does the head of marketing at Kodak have to have a passion for chemicals?
These are some of the questions posed by Seth Godin in a recent blog post about whether you should hire people who are passionate about the products your business offers or simply focus on hiring an expert in their functional area (i.e customer service, financial control, sales, production etc).
He concludes that it’s more important that organisations hire people who are passionate and effective at what they do in their functional field as opposed to only hiring people who care deeply about the product – with the notable exception of marketing people who need to have a passion for marketing and a passion for the product being marketed.
On the whole, I agree with Seth.
When recruiting, many businesses get obsessed with finding people with the exact skills and experience. They spend months with an open vacancy whilst they search for people with just the right background. Whilst this may have been logical and sensible 10-15 years ago, it’s no longer the best way to resource your business.
I strongly advise businesses of all size not to focus on looking for people with the full complement of skills and experiences, but instead focus on hiring those with the right values, attitude and personality (or VAP). We live in a world of intense competition, ever-changing products, services and technology, so your team are going to have to change and learn new ways of doing things anyway.
They can always improve specific skills and gain more experience, but if they haven’t the right attitude, values or personality for the role and your business then they won’t fit in to your team. By being more flexible on the skills and experiences you are looking for, you open up a larger pool of potential candidates. But by ensuring they have the core traits that are right for your business, you ensure they are the Right People for the future of your business.
Those character and personality traits come with a person. Which is precisely why you should be laser focussed on hiring people with those traits. The experience and skills should be secondary.
So go ahead and define precisely what traits are required to be successful in your business - and then focus your recruitment campaign, interview and selection process around hiring people that exhibit those very traits.
On a busy day, there is nothing worse than a cold call from a recruiter when you have no intention of recruiting. Except, of course, an unsolicited email from an unknown recruiter that’s been sent out to a whole bunch of people as a blind copy.
I received one such email today with the headline “Recruitment - 9% Fee.”
I won’t quote the company in question, but rest assured I was not impressed for 3 reasons:
1. Because I have little respect for firms that cold call or email and ask for business without doing any research
Research into what I and my business do and what my potential needs might be. It’s even worse being spammed with a blanket email. If they were chasing a lead which they had picked up from their market intelligence and attached a sample CV / resume (with names blanked out) that potentially met my needs, then I’d respect the fact that they had done their homework and were market aware. But doing a simple Google search on my name or company would tell them immediately that I was not a likely client for their services.
Finding the right people on a consistent basis is not a question of luck - it’s about implementing some specific strategies into your business:
1. Construct a powerful vision - Talented people are drawn to businesses that know where they are going and have a plan for success. Craft an exciting vision for the future and communicate it to potential hires all the way through your recruitment process.
2. Make finding and keeping talent a priority - Make recruitment and retention a priority now and you will save time and money well into the future. Not exactly rocket science? Yet firms still complain about the challenges of recruiting people when they dont make it a priority. In the same way that you should never stop sales activities in a business, you should never stop recruitment activities either.
You may not have open vacancies or you may have a hiring freeze due to cost constraints which means you may not actually hire people. But you drastically reduce the time and cost of recruitment when you do have a requirement by ensuring that recruitment is always be a priority.
Treating potential hires like you would potential clients is the route to successful recruitment and a strong employee brand.
Whilst this is not always easy due to the pressures of business or an overly bureaucratic recruitment process, you should be challenging these at every turn. In the same way that it is unacceptable for your customers to receive a slow, unprofessional service - so to is it not acceptable for potential employees to face poor service from you - after all they may well be a customer, or know someone who is.
We live today in a world with too businesses with too many products competing for the attention of time starved, information overloaded buyers who have more knowledge at their disposal than any other group of buyers in history.
Which is why competing for 1) their attention and 2) their business is a huge challenge in any market. But it’s not just buyers of products - but anyone that is marketed to - including the very people you seek to recruit and retain.
In such a world, it is stories (and not necessarily the product) that sell. Real stories and authentic communication which connect with buyers as people at an emotional level.
Seth Godin, the Marketing author and commentator has an interesting post on his blog about the selection process he went through to hire summer interns.
He was able to use Face Book as a way of simulating the same approach many firms go through during the screeing and assesment centre process with interns. It was completely free and, from what i can see, involved little work on his part other than just observing the behaviours of the individuals in the online groups before making some quick assesments.
He could quickly see which individuals took on leadership roles, which one were the followers and which ones he describes as the ‘game show’ contestants.
I’m not much of a follower of American politics and so haven’t really been keeping a close tab on this years election campaign. Also, if I’m honest, I find the lengthy US election process a little confusing and so haven’t followed the election press much at all.
But regardless of this, one of the aspects of the current election which I have been following is the Barock Obama campaign. Not because I’m a supporter or anything – but because it seems to be a very ‘different’ election campaign to the ones i have witnessed in the past – either in the US or in the UK.
Regardless of where you sit politically, his campaign team have created a unique brand around Obama which has no doubt contributed to their success to date.
On this point, I have just read an excellent post on the ERE blog by Cheryl Hardy from Talent Hook titled “5 Things Barrack Obama’s Campaign Proves About Your Recruitment Brand”
She details the 5 lesson’s from Obarma’s campaign which translate directly into your own recruitment and employee brand.
Namely:
Subscribe in a reader