…HR ideas from Jeffery Giesener – CEO – SourceMob.com
In his recent book The Network Is Your Customer, David Rodgers shares fives steps any business can use to create value (Social Value) and reach its consumer. In our case, think about your candidate.
Access: Be faster, be easier, be everywhere, be always on. Be where your candidate is.
Engage: Be a source of valued content.
Customize: Make your job offer adaptable to your candidate’s needs.
Connect: Become a part of your candidate’s conversations.
Collaborate: Involve your candidate in every stage of your hiring process.
Before we look at your Talent Acquisition process and its Social Value, let me take a moment to first look at you.
I suspect you have a laptop or desktop at both your home and office. If you are like 75 percent of the U.S. population, by the end of 2014 you had a smartphone and were on the device more than your significant other wanted you to be. Now that you have a smartphone or tablet, I doubt you would ever give it up. Having a iPhone myself, I know I use it to send and receive both personal and professional searches, email, text, navigate, video voice messaging, along with photo sharing.
Whether you use your desktop, laptop or mobile device to search or surf, that puts you within reach of over a trillion interconnected web pages by using any one of the major web browsers. Last year, you also probably bought from the iTunes Store, as we are one of the 800 million accounts open on iTunes in 2014. You are also probably Twittering, Skyping, watching streaming video, or viewing on-demand movies using Comcast/Hulu or Netflix. Are you one of the consumers who spent more than $13.13 billion online on Black Friday, a 1.6 percent increase over 2013? (Source: Market research firm IBISWorld)
And maybe, just maybe, last holiday season you treated yourself and family to a new TV Internet appliance like Apple/Google TV so you could bring the whole web experience to your new 42-inch or greater 3D Flat Screen TV.
Last and certainly not least, hopefully you are on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Google+, YouTube, Instagram and Pinterest where you’re sharing your personal and professional lives with your interconnections, family and friends. I would hope you are also using these social channels for your recruiting efforts.
The point here is that you personally are already vested in a large Network and the Network is US.
But unfortunately along the way, something happened. Something truly strange… something odd, which is completely opposite of what you are doing in and around how you use your personal electronic network everyday, both in the car and at home. What is it?
Well, you walked into your office and for the most part your office unplugged you and your candidate recruiting to the outside-networked world, which includes your social and mobile candidates and employees.
Worse, have you attended a senior meeting and wondered why most of the entire cool consumer and candidate networking platforms that you have been using personally are not in use by your business to engage, converse, view, connect and collaborate with your candidates? And from an outsider’s view of your HR business, it looks like you have hit the “UnNetworking Wall.” A wall which may by default have been installed to prevent engagement and conversations with your employees, consumers and candidates in the social, community and mobile spaces.
So how do you expect your candidates to engage, converse, connect and collaborate with you if you make them continually jump your UnNetworked Wall?
First: Is your business using Social networking tools to reach your candidates outside of LinkedIn?
Do you have a Facebook, Twitter and Google+ Career channels (not just marketing social pages)?
Are you enabling your candidates to access your content and have conversation about your jobs on their mobile devices?
A mobile plan should be in place, since 75% percent of the consumers/candidates in the U.S. will be surfing the web on a smartphone by the end of 2015. How is your candidate mobile apply process? Have you recently tested the mobile apply process for yourself?
The answer to any of these questions is to have your business simply take a hard look at itself in the social and mobile mirror and determine whether you are appropriately engaging with your candidates.
It’s all about the Mirror Test…
So ask yourself and your Talent Acquisition team this question: If we personally use all of these Network tools in our daily lives, why are we not aggressively going after the opportunity to add Social Value by engaging, conversing, connecting and collaborating with our candidates in our daily work efforts? If you aren’t doing this now,then why? Then when? If we can’t do it then who in the organization is preventing this from happening? If it’s not you who will be the heretic to tear down the UnNetworked Wall, If not you then who?
The HERETIC or the SHEEPWALKER…?
At SourceMob we help innovative organizations hurdle this Mirror Test. Yes, we have heard all the excuses as to why a Talent Organization shouldn’t do social or mobile now…
Here are just a few:
- We haven’t seen the return on Social or Mobile to date, so it is just not a priority.
- Everyone else is still doing recruiting the traditional way,so we are just staying put or copying them.
- We do not have the resources or budget 2015 to add another initiative to our HR marketing mix.
- We are looking to build these social and mobile systems in house, but our IT and marketing departments have a significant queue of other projects ahead of these actions.
- Other marketing initiatives are of a higher priority.
- We do not have buy in from senior leaders since they are not really using Facebook or using a smartphone for business purposes.
- Our business is B2B not B2C.
- Social and Mobile isn’t my responsibility.
But do any of these points make sense when you personally are so engaged in the social and mobile worlds? Since you personally utilize all of these digital network tools, why would you think your candidates are any different?
Bottom line: With SourceMob your Talent Acquisition team will have a new social, web, community and mobile program that will be up and running in 60 to 90 days without any IT resources or HR heavy lifting. So if you want to simply plug into the SourceMob platform send me an email at jeff@sourcemob.com or ring me up at 952-417-6955 and we will share how easy it is to get started with social and mobile recruiting.
Also don’t miss our upcoming July and August Talent Acquisition Webinars check them out in the SourceMob.com Events Area. Our July 1st event is 50 Recruiting Tips in 50 minutes.
ABOUT SOURCEMOB: SourceMob integrates Internet, social, talent community and mobile recruiting solutions to help talent acquisition professionals recruit the very best candidates for tough-to-fill positions. SourceMob’s IT, Analytics and HR Media Services distributes job content and conversations providing a job posting springboard to over 3.5 million candidate profiles on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Google+ and all of the major search engines. We help you engage with your candidates and capture niche Passive candidates. Our solutions also enable Mobile Quick Apply and candidate application management services to create efficiencies and lower recruiting costs.
Looking forward to hearing from you,
Jeffery
Jeffery Giesener
CEO/Founder
SourceMob.com
jeff@sourcemob.com
952-417-6955