Employer Connections Blog

Others have written excellent summaries of the second Social Recruiting Conference held on the 30th June so I will restrict myself to five, hopefully unusual, thoughts that it provoked for me.

1. Trust can be built online
Quezia Soares from Accenture gave an excellent talk on a social marketing strategy but the thing that struck me was almost an aside – she had got tickets to Glastonbury through a contact on Twitter that she had never met. She trusted this contact enough to given them her bank details, which caused a few intakes of breath. It’s an extreme example but it does go to show how concepts of trust are rapidly evolving with the spread of social media.

2. Mobile access changes your audience
Katie McNab of PepsiCo showed off their mobile applications (iOS and Android) amongst much talk of the rapid rise of mobile and its growing importance. What I took away from the recruitment results was that they had broadened access and this looked like a promising channel for field-based jobs and other audiences that wouldn’t normally engage with an organisation.

3. You need engagement to drive referrals
Doug Fraley of The Challenge talked about their incredibly challenging (no pun intended) recruitment plans and how a social strategy ran through the whole business. In order to make the best use of their employee and alumni networks they had a lot of focus on engagement activities, both on and offline, as well as providing the tools to make referrals work. The results speak for themselves, a network of 100 delivering 40 referrals and 38 hires, at a cost per hire of just over £200.

4. Who owns the data, who owns the relationship?
At the time of the presentation of Beknown, Monster’s professional networking application, I was surprised that they had built it on the Facebook platform and so were tied into the whims of another business. A day later the perils were demonstrated by LinkedIn cutting access to their data. Anybody building or planning in this space needs to think long and hard about who owns the data and relationships and, therefore, who can take it away.

5. Social can be part of the core strategy for a business
Many people remarked on the parallels between Marketing and Recruitment and how common communities develop and can influence each other, both positively and negatively. Companies should recognise the long-term candidate-employee-alumni relationship cycle as well as the fact that people can have many affinities to an organisation beyond pure recruitment. Managing engagement seamlessly over time, as the nature of the relationship evolves, is the true social challenge and opportunity.

In a previous post I outlined the differences between, and applications of, private and public social networks. Here I will look at the two broad types of social platform, online communities and social networks, and how they can be combined to maximum effect.

Circles represent communities, dots are people and lines are their personal networks - which can span communities

Type 1:Online Communities

Online communities are built around a common interest (business, social, geographical etc). The members do not necessarily know each other but they do know they share at least one interest. Communities often overlap and larger communities may contain several sub-communities. Online forums are the classic type of community but so are websites that use people’s recommendations, either directly (e.g. TripAdvisor) or statistically (e.g. Amazon). Relationships between users tend to be abstract or one-to-many.

Type 2:Social Networks

Social networks, by contrast, are built around relationships between people. These existed before any sort of technology – online social networks simply made people’s pre-existing interpersonal relationships visible and maintainable. Of course managing social networks online makes expanding these networks easier but in the end it all comes down to people connecting to each other, one by one.

Uses for Recruiting

Recruiting is about relationships and social platforms allow those relationships to be expressed and developed. Online communities develop a relationship with the organisation, social networks build and leverage relationships between individuals.

An online community offers a place for potential recruits to engage with an organisation, discover more information, participate in discussions, events etc. When managed well they can be a very effective talent engagement and marketing tool.

What a social network adds is the trust derived from a personal relationship and this trust allows high-quality (rather than high-volume) engagement. The personal relationships help to identify potential talent and also make it more likely that a candidate will consider an approach from an employer.

Employee Referrals

The clearest demonstration of the value of social networks is through employee referrals. The starting point for a referral is a pre-existing relationship – someone knows someone who might be of interest to the organisation. As well as identifying good candidates, the knowledge and trust between the two people makes it more likely that even passive candidates may respond to an approach.

Of course, employee referrals existed before online social networks and have been the number one source of hire in the United States for many years. What an online social network delivers are tools to promote, facilitate and manage referrals – thus increasing activity. The online social network also allows recruiters to easily develop and maintain relationships with key candidates over time, whether the initial contact was via an introduction or through the online community.

Conclusion

Social networks and online communities can both be used to enhance recruiting in different ways. Online communities are a great way to broadly engage with your talent pool and promote your employer brand. Social networks allow you to leverage the value in the networks that already exist in your organisation to identify and deliver top-quality talent.

Now imagine combining the two, on your own platform where you have complete control over the user experience. Imagine talent being identified through referral, engaged within an online community and then developed by networking with the recruiter. That is the vision of social recruiting.

This week Alan Whitford and Vic Okezie hosted their first Social Recruiting Conference in London. This was an exceptionally informative event, principally because at last companies were presenting metrics on the returns they were seeing from using social platforms for recruitment marketing.

The primary focus was on developing presence on public networks (Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter) because, as Sedef Buyukataman from Cisco said, “you fish where the fish are”. Companies are beginning to demonstrate some truly significant returns from investment in this space and public social media should obviously now be considered a key part of the recruitment marketing-mix.

The picture became slightly more patchy when the process shifted from broad attraction to engagement with potential candidates. When asked what happened at this stage the response was invariably “we take it offline”. So once the relationship needed to be personalised, confidential and high-touch it was conducted using email, phone and face-to-face meetings.

Colin Minto at G4S presented a different vision. He started with the point that companies should maintain relationships with potential candidates on their own property, in an environment managed by them and where they controlled the experience. Colin has also stated “The candidate experience you provide on your corporate career centre must live up to the experience you provide on your social channels”. To this end the G4S career site combines jobs and candidate data with an engaging community experience (Jon Ingham has written an excellent summary). This is genuinely innovative and exciting and the early results are encouraging.

Our vision is that social recruiting need not stop at the point where you have found someone on a public network. We believe that social technologies and concepts can be applied to the entire recruitment process, from marketing to hire, resulting in a holistic social recruiting process:

The Social Recruiting Process

Social Attraction – Use public social media as part of the recruitment marketing-mix to reach and inform potential candidates

Social Engagement – Bring selected candidates into a network where you can develop and maintain relationships with them in a distinct, secure and engaging environment

Social Selection – Network your recruiters (and other employees, even trusted communities like alumni) so they can leverage personal networks to source, filter and refer talent

These are very exciting times and it is fantastic that the benefits of social recruiting are starting to be demonstrated. All we would add is that with the right tools you can continue to realise those benefits throughout the entire recruitment process and avoid the need to “take it offline”.

We are pleased to announce the release of version 3 of the Employer Connections trusted social network platform. This release is focused on sharing and referral, particularly in the recruitment context.

Referral Management

Content can be shared both inside and outside the platform providing reach to new talent pools. Members of personal networks can be referred to each other, both generally and in response to specific opportunities. Comprehensive event-based audit trails allow easy tracking and incentive management.

We are really excited to be launching a trusted social network for The Challenge Network. As well as helping to meet their ambitious growth targets by allowing them to find and engage with new talent, there is a real potential for the network to become a key part of their overall community building vision.

Login page for The Challenge trusted network

The Challenge Network runs civic service programmes for young people, using teamwork and leadership challenges to inspire those from diverse backgrounds to come together and serve their community. They have already grown significantly (500 young people completed The Challenge this year) but they now expect to be a provider of the Government’s National Citizenship Service programme. This could lead to them delivering programmes to 50,000 people a year by 2015, a huge expansion.

The plan is for the trusted social network to help in three areas; talent acquisition, flexible talent engagement and community engagement.

The talent acquisition requirement is simply to source the necessary people (hereafter referred to as mentors) to run the programmes in upcoming years. This is a rapid and large expansion relying on the ‘network effect’ of the Internet to grow the community in the cost effective manner expected of a forward thinking ‘not for profit ‘ organisation. The solution is to leverage The Challenge’s existing network of personal relationships to generate referrals and direct hires within a trusted social network environment.

Once The Challenge has sourced mentors the next requirement is to keep them engaged and aware of the opportunities coming up. This is a flexible and geographically-disparate cohort that will help with one or more “Waves” (internships) over the summer months. The trusted social network will be used to communicate with the mentors and also to allow them to connect with and support each other. Groups will form around role, location and speciality to facilitate organisation and knowledge sharing.

The final goal for the trusted social network is the most ambitious of all. This is to create communities for the young people themselves, to engage and support them throughout The Challenge and beyond. The vision has always been that The Challenge is the start of a lifetime of involvement with the community. The trusted social network will support the young people in preparing for The Challenge, participating in their Wave and then making the most of further opportunities as alumni of the programme.

This is truly an inspiring programme and we are honoured to be able to support it in such a comprehensive way. It will be an exciting journey for ourselves and the technology but we are confident of our ability to rise to The Challenge!

The story so far (February to August 2010) >>

Our latest updated website reflects our experiences since our market launch of Employer Connections in February 2010.

So far, we have met and shared our ideas and thoughts with more than 25 large enterprises and multinationals in a variety sectors. These include professional services, technology, media, electronics, energy, business services and consumer products.

Our trusted social networks for business innovation has been warmly received in the market and has generated a lot of enthusiasm from the many potential customers who ‘get it.’ People have been generous with their input and time, and we thank them all for their help and interest in the development of our venture.

The solutions we now offer are those suggested by these companies, and how they envisage using our business networking tools.

Tell us what you think of the latest website. Your feedback is welcome and will help us continue to learn and improve.

Tips
The demos give a good insight as to how the product works, and we can easily change the look and feel to match your corporate branding requirements. Book a demo meeting to find out more.

The Find Connections page under “concept” is a useful insight as to how community members may want to use the system

Find out more
Why not join the leaders in trusted social networks and get connected to the relationships that matter to you. You can register online or you can call or email me for a product demo meeting tailored to the needs of your brand.

Yours sincerely

Peter Ward
Chief Executive Officer
T: +44 (0) 1727 811132
M: +44 (0) 7907 817126
E: peter.ward@employerconnections.com

Version 2 of our trusted social networking platform has now been released. Following successful deployment and testing of the core functionality in version 1, this new version adds the Jobs, News and Groups modules.

The Employer Connections platform allows organisations to realise the value of their unique relationships by connecting internal and external networks and promoting networking and referral. The solid underlying architecture allows unprecedented levels of customisation, security and control for the most demanding enterprise clients.

If you would like to experience a live demonstration of this innovative concept and product please don’t hesitate to contact Peter Ward at peter.ward@employerconnections.com or on 01727 811132.

Motivating people, especially when doing non-mechanical, non-repetitive tasks, is a subject that has been studied at length for many years.  The video below is a fun way of presenting the ideas of Dan Pink, based on some pretty interesting and authoritative research.

To summarise, when motivating people to do tasks that require anything more than rudimentary cognitive skills, purely financial rewards can actually lead to drops in motivation and performance.

According to Mr Pink, the three factors that do lead to better performance are:

• Autonomy – the desire to be self-directed
• Mastery – the urge to get better at things
• Purpose – a more comprehensive sense of why something is worth doing beyond pure financial gain

At Employer Connections we are looking at motivation in two ways; motivating users to participate in a community and using a trusted social network to deliver motivation and performance to an organisation.

If we consider the factors identified in the video some of the examples we have identified are:

• Autonomy – allowing users to organise and contribute as individuals in a way that best suits their needs
• Mastery – learning and demonstrating mastery through connecting to a wider knowledge network in a highly visible way
• Purpose – clear communication of vision and goals at all levels from individuals up to the entire organisation

These concepts are built into the value propositions we are developing both for organisations and for members which will deliver enhanced results.

Purpose is a consistent theme that has emerged from our discussions with organisations interested in the trusted social network concept.

In essence it is no good to have a network (or any other technology) just for the sake of it. The network needs to have a clear purpose that is aligned to that of the organisation. The network needs to be embedded into business processes that deliver real value. It should allow people to do what they are already doing better, not just be another thing for them to do.

This has been a key part of the concept from day one and we have been careful to focus efforts on enhancing existing business processes through the application of networking technologies into an enterprise environment.  What the research suggests is that this will not only deliver measurable value but also drive engagement and motivation at the same time, a double return on investment.

We are pleased to announce the release of the first production version of our trusted social networking platform. This has now been deployed for an intense period of load, integration and penetration testing before implementation for launch customers in August.

This represents a significant step along the product development roadmap which has already benefited from excellent feedback from the marketplace. In particular the solid underlying architecture allows unprecedented levels of customisation, security and control for the most demanding enterprise clients.

If you would like to experience a live demonstration of this innovative concept and product please don’t hesitate to contact Peter Ward at peter.ward@employerconnections.com or on 01727 811132.

Mark Benioff, CEO of Salesforce.com, caused a stir by asking the question “Why isn’t all enterprise software like Facebook?”. The context was the launch of Salesforce Chatter which is intended to be a collaboration platform built into the Salesforce.com product/service. His overall conclusion is that enterprise software should be more like Facebook and whether one agrees or not the post has certainly raised the profile of the debate on the place of social tools within the enterprise.

Before one can discuss whether software “like Facebook” is appropriate for the enterprise we first need to understand what “like Facebook” means. Mr Benioff focuses on two key themes, ease of use and immediacy. With ease of use he makes the very valid point that most enterprise systems are dauntingly difficult to use, often requiring lengthy training, which reduces uptake and activity. This contrasts poorly with Facebook which, by necessity, has had to be usable by anyone without training.

There is surely no argument with a vision of making any software easy to use, especially where the goal is to have non-expert users actively participating and contributing. The Facebook model is certainly a good starting point here although adding in the flexibility,integrations and security that an enterprise requires means the model needs to be adapted significantly. Once you delve into the deeper functionality of Facebook (for example the infamous privacy controls) it is clear that even they are struggling with the balance between usability and flexibility. Ease-of-use, nevertheless, should be a goal in all systems design.

The second theme, immediacy, is very interesting and offers benefits but also risks to the enterprise. One of the key innovations introduced by Facebook was the News Feed – a continually updated stream of information about the thoughts and activities of other network members. From Facebook’s perspective this was the hook that got users logging back in. There was a great review of social networks as part of the BBC Virtual Revolution series and what was interesting is the way in which the networks, and in particular the news feeds, have changed (or perhaps matched) the ways in which people interract and consume information.

Given that Facebook is essentially built around the News Feed it is not surprising that most systems offering social networking capabilities to the enterprise also incorporate some form of  News Feed. Certainly this is a key part of Salesforce Chatter (and a feed exists in the Employer Connections platform). The vision is that this allows serendipitous and immediate discovery of key information (sales won, projects completed etc). The Salesforce vision extends to integrating information from other systems into the Feed, for example if someone updates a document.

On the positive side it can be argued that this way of delivering information better suits the way the human brain works, grazing for information and switching from task to task. It certainly benefits an advertising-driven business model, compelling users to frequently access the site to get their “fix” of information. In the enterprise context, however, there are disadvantages; either the distraction of people from their core activities or, for infrequent users, the risk of key information being missed altogether.

At Employer Connections our opinion is that an enterprise social network needs to use public social networking concepts whilst augmenting these to deliver enhanced business processes and performance across many different types of community. For example, tying social functionality into defined business processes provides compelling reasons to use the system without a “just-in-case” mindset. Prioritised activity summaries enable users to see at a glance the important issues they need to address without feeling the need to log in every half hour.

The public social networks demonstrate the potential value of communities and engagement and this value can be realised within the enterprise to exciting effect. The challenge is to deliver these benefits with a clear business-driven focus, in a nutshell to be efficient with social. Yes, enterprise software should be like Facebook but only where this delivers clear-sighted business value to the enterprise.