Social networks and recruitment 2.0 : does it work well ?

September 1, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Summary : Mixed results make people wonder on the relevance of social networks as recruitment tools. It all depends on what one mean by recruiment, because if it’s easy to measure the transactional side, recruitment processes are much broader and are made of diverse elements that can use social networks as catalysts. For reasons due to the job profile, the volume of people to hire or the scalability of the system, social networks won’t always be the right tool to recruit in the strict sense of the the word. But if we take all non-transactional activities into account (such as HR marketing), these tools can act like a process booster and also impact the quality of the final result. But businesses need to consider a broader range of activities and not focus on the number of people hired depending on the media.

A couple of weeks ago, french HR blogger Jean-Noël Chaintreuil wrote on the poorly kepts promise of social networks as a recruitment tool.  Did we get it all wrong ? Not a all. First, we need to know what we’re talking about.

Recruitment. If, for many people that are not involved in HR activities, recruitment means placing an advertisement, having interviews and chosing the right person, it’s in fact, a much more complex process. It’s about defining the job, sourcing candidates, choosing the right ones. We can also all what has to do with employer branding that reinforce the attractiveness of the enterprise and the quality of applications (because people know more things about the enterprise, its culture and values..). And even if considered as another process, onboarding programs that will help new hires to be at their best and make their first steps easier are very close to recruitment. As a matter of fact, if we consider that the goal is not to recruit someone but someone who’ll stay and find his/her place in the organization, onboarding programs are an essential part of the recruitment process.

Recruitment 2.0. There’s nothing really new on the nature of recruitment but on execution. As usual, when something turns 2.0, it’s about a better (qualitative and quantitative) use of the knowledge and relational capital of all the stakeholders (including the candidate) to improve the bandwidth of the process and the quality of the result. It comes in many forms. First, finding the means to have a better knowledge of the other and let the other know who you are (employer and personal branding). It also implies a move from mass communication to conversation. Then, it’s about using networks to have “better” applications that fit both the need and the corporate culture as well as a better sourcing. Here, it’s about trust/reputation and the power of weak ties. At the selection level, there are also ways to make the person be chosen not only by his future manager but also the people he’ll work with. To end, new onboarding and immersion programs will complete the traditional mentoring by peers networks.

Obviously, lots of businesses did not wait for the 2.0 era to put some of these things at work. What has changed is that, to make things work on a wide scale, new tools were needed. As a matter of fact, talking about networks to use the available human capital and knowledge is nice but when one can access to few people and is limited to strong ties, the promise is hard to keep. What leads to the next point.

Social Networks. When talking about networks, knowledge and weak ties in 2011, things often come to social networks. But, if we look at the past, social networks are not the only tool that have been (and still are) used to meet recruitment and HR goals. When we started to work on recruitment 2.0 with a couple of french professionals in 2004/2005, the trending topic was blogging. At this moment, media paid a lot of attention to “these bloggers who foun a job because they were active on the web”. To be more precise, most of these people already had a job, bloggint only helped them to meet the people and networks that offered them more appealing jobs in enterprises that were really wanting them for what they were. Then came enterprise HR blogs and, only then, social networks like LinkedIn became mainstream. Today, people talk about Facebook or Twitter even if the latter is not even seen as a network by its founders and is rather about a branding and influence strategy as blogs were before. But, in the end, that’s the same because it all melts in a global strategy.

Now, what do we mean by “recruitment on social networks” ?

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Organizations between sense of belonging and need to own

January 6, 2011 By 1 Comment

Summary : strengthening employees’ sense of belonging as a major matter for most organizations. That’s a concept that’s understood by everyone but hard to put into action : belonging (…is a a relevant word ?) is the result of a shared support of a big picture while organizations, trying to leave as few room as possible for chance, often try to own their employees. What have consequences that are the opposite of those were pursued. Should we use the words belonging, engagement or anything else, any HR 2.0 policy should focus on reconciliation rather that on isolation, lock-up and ownership. Not obvious.

It’s said that many employees have lost their marks in both their professional and personal lifes…and in how to articulate both as well. They’re looking for things that make sense, things to grab hold of. It’s often “sense of belonging”. Belonging to a group, to a project, to a group involved in a project. For any organization, strengthening their employees’ sense of belonging is a very complex issue.

Talking about belonging is one thing. Knowing to what it applies is another one.

Belonging to the enterprise ? Why not, but is some cultures where mistrust toward employers is the rule, it won’t work.

Belonging to a group ? May be a good thing but it must not mean that one’s private life will be swallowed by professional life, that the difference between a colleague and a friend will blur…even if they have to achieve things together.

Is Mintzberg’s community-ship the answer . Why not because it takes care of each one’s expectations and attitude toward engagement. What makes people get involved into a dynamic is their support of a project, of a corporate vision and that’s what makes employees engage with both the organization that carries the vision and the people who make it a reality. So, what is the base of anything is a project and the related values and not a direct link between people and organizations or other people.

As for them, enterprises have to find new levers for motivation and employees engagement. Improving sense of belonging ? Yes, at least tom some extent. Beyond fashion and buzzwords, all the 2.0 paradigm that aims at considering employees (and even customers) as stakeholders for more co-creation, exchanges and new relationships between the “corporte entity” and each of its members belongs to this logic.

But there will always be a limit : it’s not an exact science but a proposition. Organizations propose, ideally after a listening phase, and employees accept (or not) and choose how this acceptation will be turned into action and its intensity. Organizations don’t create either communty-ship or communities : they capitalize on existing values, desires and expectations.

That’s were a bias appears. Organizations respond to need for belonging with a desire to own. At first sight both are complementary…but in fact they aren’t. According to the above lines, the word “belonging” may even be unfortunate to describe what employees need. Since organizations aren’t sure 100% of their employees will buy their offer, they try to catch and lock in.

  • Employees have to give all their time to their employer because the latter own it. Hence the temptation of eliminating everything that may divert people from giving everything to their work or make them think of a non work-related thing while at work.
  • Employees don’t exist outside of the organization. They are not allowed to mention hobbies or even past experiences on their rich profile on the enterprise’s intranet. People are born the day they sign and will die the day they resign. Meanwhile, they’re not supposed neither to have lived before they sign nor to have a non-professional existence during the time they work for the company.
  • Employees don’t have the right to exist, even personally, on any media or social network. Having employees who are fans of fishing or of the old cartoon they loved when they were teenagers is not good for the company that does not even care of the impact of their own actions on employee’s reputation morale.

What has exactly the opposite result as what was pursued.

By the way…what’s the purpose of all these thoughts ?

I was recently asked some questions on HR 2.0, most of all from a values point of view. Don’t get ourselves wrong : I’m very far away the “care bears” sympathies : employees are here because they are needed to contribute to production activities and not because it’s nice to gather people in the workplace. What means that many things depend on the cost/added value ratio of anyone. Once that said, organizations have to find how to make everyone give their best while blooming, what is the best way to make sure they’ll all contribute to what is the goal of any business : making money today and tomorrow (in fact too many people forget the “tomorrow”). In this approach, anything that looks like an attemps to lock people in is counter productive.

Since I’m not always comfortable with words like engagement that are often used wildly, I’d rather say that the core values of HR 2.0 are rather about reconciliating (vision, people, project) than locking in. And, most of all, organizations should keep in mind that ownership is not the response to “belonging needs”.

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Your manager is not “2.0 minded” ? No reason to blame him !

June 24, 2010 By 2 Comments

Some weeks ago Oscar Berg raised an interesting question on twitter. I can’t exactly remind his words but it was something like “what to think of a manager that fears social media, transparency, who’s afraid of seing his staff exchanging more easily without refering to him ?”.

One of my fellow-countrymen immediately answers : “it must be a french manager”.

In all seriousness I thought about it again and again and come to this conclusion : “Nothing. And there’s not reason to blame him”.

Let me elaborate.

People are what they are and we can’t blame them if they reach a management position for the reason that, most of times, they have nothing to do with it. They can neither be blamed for working for an organization that does not help them to embrace this new dimension of their job.

On the other hand we can wonder what at the HR methods for evaluation, promotion, training that allow such situations to happen. Many organizations know they have to think about new ways to create values and implement them in day-to-day operations but if the internal mechanics is not aligned the risk of wasting a lot of energy going nowhere is obvious. Managers are often blamed for internat dysfunctionning but they are seldom responsible for the system that set them there and that they must obey.

But things are not that simple. While many people were agreeing with me, Oscar told me that he this very “automated and unpersonal way” of promoting people was not what he was used to in Sweden (but that he experienced it with some French companies in the past). This was an undisputable evidence of the difference between scandinavian and french models, one being more consensual and the other mor mechanical, one beeing more about about and the other about systems that govern people.

Let’s even go one step further. While we’re stepping into knowledge economy (or service econonmy or even service innovation economy), where mobilising, developping and harnessing knowledge and expertises is more essentiel than ever, while HR people are aware of it, businesses are facing a dangerous paradox

- one can’t built his career on expertise : even the best expert can’t make is way in the organization without climbing the hierarchical ladder and taking management positions.

- doing so he loses his specific expertise and knowledge while improving his management skills

- the paradox of this system is that it’s designed to kill knowledge and expertise to turn it into control skills. Exactly the opposite of what organizations need today.

- last but not least : the best expert in any field won’t necessary be a good manager (and in some cases in doesn not want to reach such a position but it’s the only way to progress and be recognized). On the other hand there are people who are not the best at any operational thing but have this “little thing” that makes all the people around them do a better job. But these last ones seldom meet the requirements that would allow them to manage a team.

I don’t know if HR have to be in charge of enterprise 2.0 projects, if they have to lead the project alone or share the leadership. But what I’m sure of is that they are responsible for putting the right people are the right place, develop expertises and help managers to develop management and leadership skills that fit today’s needs and context.

Designing the best systems and procedures is one thing….but running them successfully will always depend on people.

évaluation, capital organisationnel, carrière, Entreprise 2.0, leadership, Management, management 2.0, Ressources Humaines, ressources humaines 2.0

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What’s the ROI of social media for an employer brand ?

May 31, 2010 By Leave a Comment

Last week I was invited by Weavlink to facilitate a series of workshops on the ROI of social media for employer brands. Attendees were mainly HR people with uneven maturity levels but who were deeply investigating the area. Of course it was not possible to do deep inside the issue in half an hoyr but here’s how I structured my presentation to make them think about their own model.

1°) Introduction

• It’s a concept that’s hard to get with our traditional thinking models. Do you know the “streetlight” story ? A guy is walking around a streetlight in the middle of the night. A passer-by comes and ask him what he’s looking for. “My keys”. “Wait…I’m gonna help you”. After a few minutes of unsuccessful search, he asks : “Are you sure you lost them here ?”. “Not at all but this is the only place where’s there’s enough light to search”. We need to learn to search beyond the streetlight !

• There’s no mathematical model because such systematic models don’t work for activities that are not systematic, that are about working on knowledge and information, where everything is exception and unique. We can’t equate people and interactions.

2°) What’s your goal ?

• Being on twitter, Facebook or wherever is not a goal. It it was, companies would find themselves idle in spaces where they would not know what to do because no one would know the goal that’s strived toward. They would be tossed, react insread of act and put themselves in danger. So, what matters before all is to know why they move into these media.

• Quick reminder on Norton and Kaplan’s strategy maps. Working on intangible only creates a potential that has to be used into formal activities to reach tangible goals.

• All successful social media initiatives (internal or external) share a common point : they aim at improving the delivery of a process or activity, in this case it could be recruiting, building a corporate image etc…

• Social media don’t change the nature or goals of an HR department but are one more tool they can use to fullfil their goals. Hence the need for segmentation : social tools (and each of them taken alone) has a varying importance depending on the targeted population (you won’t recruit you CEO on Facebook or a Yer with an ad in the NYT)

• That’s not because no mathematical formula exists that what is done can’t be measured as well as the impact on the efficiency of a given processus.

• 3 challenges for the employer brand : sourcing, image, engagement.

• Then, what matters is not to wonder what are the impact of social media toward these challenges but how to use and include them in strategies that aims at addressing these challenges.

• If any improvement can me measured in the way any action plan is executed in termes of speed, quality, scalability or cost, then we have answers to the ROI question.

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HR and IT depts in a 2.0 world : same fate ?

June 11, 2009 By 1 Comment

The question of the role, often considered uncomfortable, of the HR departments in internal social networking projects is becoming more and more meaniningful. This is all the more strategic since it’s one of the only traditional corporate function that has nearly all the needed competences and the legitimacy to drive such projects. Still remain the question of the intention and of the leadership.

To do that, HR players must be aware of the role they can play and understand the new paradigm that is becoming theirs.

Many peope have been thinking about the case of IT departments, in order to help them to find their place in a new context but very few started the same reflexion about HR depts and that’s a real pity. As a matter of fact both IT and HR depts situation share a lot of common points.

I remember the McKinsey-Cigref report I mentioned a few months ago. To make it simple, the conclusions were that IT depts can’t create any value alone and that they have to do that jointly with business managers, that they can’t achieve their goals only by providing (imposing ?) tools but by being an internal service provider, a facilitator. And, at the end, that performance has not be measured through IT indicators but business ones.

Couldn’t we say the same for HR departements that have to learn they are not supposed to only operate by themselves in the front of employees but also have to make in order to local practices have a positive impact on HR ? Not doing things alone anymore but co-building local mechanisms run by local managers on the flow.

One of the best practices I identified is to create an internal “enterprise 2.0″ expertise team which provides local projects with a global framework (tools, methodology, follow-up, consulting….) which meets both the corporate need for rationality, governance and security and the local management need for flexibility, autonomy, quickness. My experience tells me this kind of model, that works quite well, is in most cases driven by IT departments that hire a few “human things” professionals. Is it irrelevant to think that such a team could be built by an HR team or, even better, co-built by both HR and IT teams ?

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Will HR 2.0 fulfill the distributed HR promise ?

June 4, 2009 By 3 Comments

I wrote recently about the central role of HR in an internal 2.0 approach and the fact that the specitity of such an approach was to dilute HR issues in people’s day to day job. Before tackling in a next post what including HR in day to day job means, let me share with you a reflection that recently came to me.

When I was a student, my professor of Human Resources imposed us a book as a bedside book. Its title was “Everybody is an HR officer” (in French “Tous DRH”). A that time, even if I found the discourse attractive, the limits were obvious to such an extent that it was shoking for the supporters of a highly centralized and top-down approach of HR and seems too utopic for those who liked the concept.

Maybe HR 2.0 are going to make things change, making everyone assume a part of the corporate HR responsability.

• Because it’s consistent with the scheduled come back of HR as a leading function. You can read the two above mentioned posts once again, but  companies who will confine their HR people to a foil role, making them define only what’s not to do, what’s forbidden, will face very hard times in the future.

• Because people expect that. I won’t make one more discours about generation Y and others epiphenomenons, but there’s a very strong trend underlying all these things.

• Because the tools that makes possible to do “distributed and decentralized HR on the flow” are now available.

• Because all that put together will make it easier to spread a HR strategy tomorrow than pushing it in a top-down way as it’s done today.

It will impact people’s mindset (read my thoughts on sustainable management at the end of this post) and  the way people do their day to day job because it will be the only way for HR people to fulfill their mission.

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HR 2.0 as an ongoing process

May 28, 2009 By Leave a Comment

This post is the continuation of the one I wrote on the central role HR have to be given in the change process businesses need to undertake to grow in the current economy.

Most often, identifying a need implies that a project has to be undertaken. A project is made of a number of known and planned actions. Is the need about training, a training program will be undertaken. A need about HR marketing (retaining staff members, improving employer’s brand) ? It will be a communication project. Etc..

HR 2.0 or, not to mix things, adopting social computing tools from the web 2.0 to serve an HR strategy imply a new way of doing things. I don’t say it has to replace all what’s being done now, it has rather to be seen as something complementary.

In the above mentioned post I wrote that HR people will have to learn how to deal with the fact we were mainly talking about things that have an impact n HR and that are not into their hand but in line manager’s. HR having to pilot managers, provide them with a framework but not having to be directly involved in end actions.

Here are a few examples.

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Enterprise 2.0, Management 2.0, HR 2.0 and Culture 2.0 according to Jon Husband

May 18, 2008 By Leave a Comment

As I wrote earlier, for most of Webcom audience, Jon Husband’s Keynote was the most impressive (actually it seems he enjoyed it too)

Jon had the kindness to send me his slides so I can share some of them with you.

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New jobs that are not trivial

February 10, 2008 By Leave a Comment

When talking about making people work differently, about bringing new practices within the enterprise, there’s often the same answer : “no time for that”. It can be heard from managers saying their people don’t have time to network, to share information, or from individuals themselves who are afraid of being penalized because they do something else than their very job.

Let’s note that if the question is asked, it’s because the organization identified a business need. Welcome to the world of double binds where people are asked at the same time to face new challenges and not to change anything in the way they work.

If fact, what comforts the tenants of status quo is that those new practices are not in the holy job description. Of course, adaptating practices to challenges is worth changing job descriptions if it’s the only way to make people  exchange, share informations and practices, network.

I know some companies are beginning to review their job descriptions, or at least, that some managers are doing so with their teams, findinf it’s the best way to “secure” people who want to get involved in those new dynamics. So, here and there, new emerging jobs can be seen, such as “network manager”. I wrote about the future of managers monthes ago and some made a list of jobs that will be tomorrow’s jobs. Saying that…I’d like to be “gap consultant” in the future.. Whatever, I’m sure “Social networkds catalysts” will be key in enterprise’s success tomorrow.

Those jobs don’t need really new skills, but a new mix of existing skills. Jobs that will be in relation with tools someway, but which levers will be people and organization.

Perhaps the right time to get out the old job description model. How many of us are already doing jobs that don’t exist. Or doing something new with an old label, making their goals nearly ununderstandable within the organization because ogf the gap between the “historical” past of the job and its new content.

Most of my friends have “real” jobs : lawyers, doctors, head hunters, salespeople… and it’s really hard to explain them what my job is because no “label” exists for that. Does it mean I don’t do anything valuable  ? Conceiving jobs with meaningful names also makes sens to embody a message through the organization.

A  real challenge for HR Managers who’ll have to take charge of it to adapt jobs to the challenges that will have to be faced in the next years.

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