Last week I was able to attend Oracle Open World in San Francisco. One of the recurring themes that was the power of social media in HR. If you think about it, this makes a lot of sense. Both your current employees and potential employees spend a great deal of time on LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter so it is probably the best place to interact with them.
Integrating social into your HR strategies is essential for these reasons:
1:
Social Sourcing - According to Oracle this strategy provides the following benefits:
Employee Referrals - Your employees are probably one of your best resources for new recruits.
Leveraging the power of their networks can bring real tangible results.
Rapidly expands the candidate pool
Helps you fill open jobs faster due to the sheer size of the communities you are posting in
Job posts on social are mobile friendly
Improves the quality of the candidates because you can target your recruitment marketing plans
Decreases onboarding costs
Increases new hire retention
2:
Workforce Reputation Management – Social media can provide insight into worker and candidate social reputation and influence.
3: Social Media is a great platform for
Gamification and training.
4:
Building your Talent Brand. This is something new for many companies but it really shouldn’t be ignored.
According to Deloitte’s Craig Gill, Sarah Gretczko, and Grant Luckey,
“For many years, a company’s workforce comprised the employees on the payroll—full-time and part-time. But in today’s open talent economy, the potential workforce includes a global pool of “free agents” who provide needed skills without formally signing on as employees. The quest to attract both traditional and nontraditional talent has prompted companies to brand themselves as desirable places to work, much as they brand their products and services to attract customers.”
“With its billions of avid users, social media can give companies a ready-made, democratic outlet to promote their talent brand to a global audience of current and potential talent. But is it the right place to be engaging that talent?”
The debate of whether or not use social media for this according to Deloitte revolves around the following arguments:
"
We’d be foolish to ignore this huge opportunity. We can reach virtually all of our audiences (not only talent) with the messages we choose to send."
"Great. You go first. Social media is hardly a tried and true vehicle for this sort of thing. We’d rather let others make the first mistakes and then we’ll learn from their experiences."
It’s a natural extension of our HR efforts. Our corporate brand is already an active presence on social media. And HR already does a lot of recruiting to promote ourselves—this is just another method.
We’re not set up to oversee it. I don’t know about your company, but in ours, Marketing and HR are worlds apart. And if Marketing owns the corporate brand and HR owns the talent brand…I can see some real disconnects.
We have good things to say. Social media messages are like PR for our talent brand. Why not send positive messages about our company, just as we do in our corporate PR efforts?
It feels a little too calculated and forced. We’d rather concentrate our efforts internally on what we’re doing to build a great talent experience. We’re confident the news will trickle outward from there.
Let’s face it, the candidate pool is getting tighter and every company will have to compete more and more for the talent they require so building your talent brand using social media is something that at least requires careful consideration.
Click here to read Deloitte’s take on the debate
#deloitte, #HRcom, #Oracle
