CareerXroads^®Update - November 2009

By Gerry Crispin, SPHR and Mark Mehler
mmc@careerxroads.com

Since 1996 our Update has been published 10-12 times each year and aims to share commentary, observations, perspectives and data we come across during our staffing adventures. We hope you continue to enjoy it and pass it on to friends. All are invited to register for the Update for free. Coupled with our Bellwether, a provocative monthly look at trends we share with CareerXroads Colloquium members, we are always willing to challenge the accepted wisdom or poke a little fun at the staffing industry and ourselves in the process.
We invite you to keep in touch and join us during the year at the various conferences where we speak or simply attend.

Deja Vu All Over Again: The 2009 Social Media Conversation is But an Echo of the Internet Past

If Social Media is keeping you up at night, relax. You've just been there before. In 1996, just 13 years ago, the Internet was at a tipping point - not so new that we couldn't see its promise but also not so accepted that we couldn't imagine its dangers.

As the debate raged on, the Bureau of National Affairs (BNA) and the Society of Human Resource Development (SHRM) conducted a broad-based survey of several thousand firms to give the hype a dose of reality with a few facts by asking how firms were developing "policy" to guide their employee's use of it.

The report, published in BNA's January 2, 1997, Bulletin to Management, concluded that "Internet access is typically confined to a small proportion of the workforce."

41% of the respondents allowed only a "few" of their employee's use of email
54% gave a "few" employees access to other applications
Only 10% allowed ALL employees full access to email and the Internet

"Many of these organizations require employees to demonstrate a legitimate business need before they [were] granted Internet access"

Formal written policies were rare with just 5% of the surveyed organizations reporting that they had developed written policies to govern employees' Internet activities.
Access to the Internet differed significantly depending on what Industry you were in. While 90% of educational institutions had established internet access, only 25% of the banks and 17% of Utilities had done so in 1996.
The recognition of the Internet as a business communication tool was not yet accepted. 60% of those with email (i.e. 24% of total respondents) used it to communicate with colleagues. Nearly half of those with email (i.e. 20% of respondents) used it for promotion and advertising.
Websites were not yet the critical window they are today. Only 24% of the respondents had a website. For firms with 1000 or more workers, the figure rose to 60%. The sites were mostly ads, jobs and profiles of the organization.)

Thirteen years later, Social Media, rather than the Internet as a whole, are now at the center of the debate. But, the questions and answers are more than vaguely familiar. (In fact, Mark dug out the report quoted above because the data we were analyzing last week seemed so much like what we had seen before.)

We conducted a quick, less formal survey of large, highly-competitive firms (5000 or more employees) in the last two weeks and were not surprised to see a huge response and interest in the results. Nearly 100% of the firms invited to respond did so -- in just a few days. We are reviewing the results with those contributing to them and then we will likely publish some of our findings in future whitepapers. However, there are a couple interesting notes (or side-notes) worth mentioning:

44% of current respondents do NOT have any policy governing Social Media usage

58.5% of those with policies first wrote or revised them in the last 6 months

Policies were most likely written by Legal (35%), violations handled by HR (43.9%) or legal (39.4%), audits are mostly performed by Legal (41.9%); employees are informed about SM by Communications (39.7) rather than HR (8.1%).

Less than half the firms surveyed (47.8%) have even attempted to put together Corporate, multi- discipline task forces to oversee Social Media policies but even those who have them aren't sure who is leading

6% have developed a "Community Manager" role to engage the firm in developing a deeper business understanding for how SM could contribute

In the end we'll work it out. As SM is shown to contribute to business solutions, and we are sure it will, the defensiveness will tail off and the challenges around who is its champion will suddenly be resolved.

November Humor: Why your Boss Should Tweet

This Dilbert cartoon represents a positive but unintended consequence of the having your boss tweet. (Thanks to Mike G for sending it around.)

It's the Attendees As Much As the Presenters Who Are Changing the Conference Game

This fall's conference season is nearly over. Kudos to the dozen or so current and former Colloquium participants who were speakers or panelists sharing their knowledge. Folks like Tara Amaral, Tony Blake, Mike Grennier, Michael Kannisto, Val Kennerson, Rodney Moses, Nury Plumley, Kim Warne, Frank Wittenauer offered their insights at ERE, Direct Employers, HR Technology, Kennedy/Onrec, RecruitFest, Qualigence "How To", etc. etc.

One of the panels, Mark's RPO and You, was recorded at ERE and is worth a look as are several other presenters. At the HR Technology conference nearly a dozen Tweeters (we prefer the term Twits) were in Gerry's session where Libby Sartain, Michael McNeil, Rodney Moses and Frank Wittenauer discussed Staffing Technology Gaps. The continuous online flow of 140 bits of conversation in real time to an audience 50 times larger than the one in the room (300) gave us pause. The long term implications of getting remote access to conference sessions should change our thinking about how we budget for training.

The real difference this year is not content or style or size of audience or vendor tchotchkes. The difference is that the quality of the questions from the audience have improved. We know this sounds trivial in some ways but in others it is not. Staffing leaders are simply asking better questions from the floor than they have in the past. They are pushing vendors and consultants harder - - as they should. Maybe it's a function of who is left but from our perspective it's a very good thing.

Owning Your Brand: Asking the Right Question is Half the Battle

John Sullivan's recent ERE article You Cannot OWN your Employer Brand looks at the problem of an unsupportable employment brand. John implies that if employers ever thought they could manipulate their EVP and somehow "own" it they should look around and smell the Twits, blogs and other social media tools that will out whatever isn't authentic. The article is good but simply doesn't go far enough. Nor is the premise he poses a recent phenomenon - it is just accelerated by real-time communication on a scale we've yet to fully appreciate.

Libby Sartain, one our favorite practitioners and author of two branding tomes succinctly captures where employers need to go in her blog while discussing John's article: "the website has to message what is really going on in the organization. The candidate experience [must] mirror what the worker will experience on the job."

In the context of staffing, a brand isn't as much an artistic creation as it is a scientific and marketing disclosure of what really makes the firm's employees engage. "Brand" unfortunately has a product flavor that suggests the employer is somehow designing their EVP rather than uncovering it. We think the real question is "Why do people actually come and stay here?" instead of "What can we sell them about us?"

We are happy for John's epiphany and suggest he is less concerned with ownership than encouraging employers to study and position WHY people come and stay at their firm's place of business because, in the end, every stakeholder will have their say -- one way or another.

Empowering job seekers to access the information to make their best decision IS something you can own. Learning how to collect, analyze and present the information to prospects and candidates is becoming a critical staffing function. Failure to do so - - well, it's your brand to lose.

What Should Staffing Leaders Be Doing Now to Plan for the Hiring of Recruiters During Recovery?

ERE's Corporate Leadership Journal for November (not yet out) will include an article about what HR leaders should be doing NOW to plan for the hiring of recruiters during the recovery.

John Zappe, the article's author, asked several members of our industry to respond to a series of questions (and then extracted contrasting points of view). Gerry was among those asked to contribute and here is one answer he provided (which will be edited and combined with others in the final article):

Q: (John) What should employers look for in recruiting and hiring recruiters? (In economic recoveries of the past, many employers simply hired entry-level HR staff and assigned them to jobs that needed doing, including recruiting. Or they reassigned generalists to the task. Is this likely to happen again? Should it? And if not, then what traits, skills, and knowledge, specifically, should HR leaders seek in their recruiter candidates?

A: (Gerry) The basic functions of recruiting: sourcing leads, finding prospects, screening candidates, selecting from a final slate and closing the chosen candidate can be taught. The challenges are time to practice, clarity of the process, discipline to repeat, feedback loops and appropriate rewards.

Recruiting leaders ramping up their hiring on the other side of the recession need to decide on the balance of "functional" expertise (knowledge, skill and experience) they'll need and then clearly describe it. The critical difference today versus 5, 10, 20 years ago is that the "design" elements of recruiting- the form that follows the function is now front and center.

It is the in-depth knowledge of how your firm's employment "brand" is embedded in every conversation, online and off that will make one recruiter so much more successful than another.

It is how today's recruiter handles each of the silver medalists to maximize their future utility or ensures that each and every candidate who applies gets a respectful response at every stage of the opening.

It is the attention to the experience of every stakeholder- the employee who made a referral, the hiring manager who is networked but stressed out, the recruiting leader who has to do more with less and that jobseeker that differentiates a mechanistic technician from an innovative professional. This shift in emphasis is essential even though we seldom spent the time and effort to dig out and assess the quality of the experience in the past.

If anyone thinks entry-level HR pros that are undecided about how they feel about the recruiting function are going to succeed and drive hiring, then I've got a bridge you'll want to buy.

CareerXroads
The Staffing Strategy Connection
By Gerry Crispin and Mark Mehler
mmc@careerxroads.com - 732-821-6652