This is the presentation I made during my webinar today
Do connect if you'd like to know more :-)
Do connect if you'd like to know more :-)
Sep 28, 2011
Sep 21, 2011
Conducting a Webinar on using Social Media for Recruitment - Social Hiring #socialrecruiting
Image via WikipediaHi, if you are a Senior Executive and have an hour available next Wednesday - would love you to join me and Ranjan Sinha on the "Social Hiring - What every Executive Needs to Stay Competitive" webinar being organized by PeopleMatters, India's leading Leadership and People related content provider.The details are here, so go register
It's for an hour
It's FREE
It's at 11 am (India time)
Audience: If you are a business leader, HR leader or Manager - This is focused on what you need to know
Only 100 people can attend the webinar, so register soon and be online next Wednesday 30 mins before the start time
While Ranjan would talk on leveraging social networks for referral hiring, I would be speaking on building Talent Communities to find job seekers relevant and interested to work for you and the focus on using external talent to build your employment brand
There will be 15 min Q&A too.. so looking forward to connecting with you at the webinar!
Sep 20, 2011
Facebook Subscribe Button and its Use for Employment Branding
Yesterday I posted about why employers should encourage transparency between who its employees are and what they do to external talent
So when I was reading about Facebook's new feature - the subscribe button - I started thinking "Why can't employers use this?"
The Facebook subscribe button enables a person to "follow" (like twitter or Google+) a person's public updates. You can subscribe to my public posts here.
This feature is a great way for external talent to get to know who are the kind of people working in your organization and what is on their minds.
This is not a brand new idea. It's something similar to how Zappos lists all the employees who tweet on their site and also their updates.
We all know that there are a lot more people on Facebook (btw, employers in India did you know that India has the 3rd most people on Facebook at 35 million) than Twitter (which is around 10% of Facebook's users)
Of course, employees would have privacy concerns - and many use Facebook only for personal networking. Therefore the choice must be made entirely by the employee whether he/she would like to be the "employment brand ambassador" on the website/career site/social networking sites for the employer.
So when I was reading about Facebook's new feature - the subscribe button - I started thinking "Why can't employers use this?"
This feature is a great way for external talent to get to know who are the kind of people working in your organization and what is on their minds.
This is not a brand new idea. It's something similar to how Zappos lists all the employees who tweet on their site and also their updates.
We all know that there are a lot more people on Facebook (btw, employers in India did you know that India has the 3rd most people on Facebook at 35 million) than Twitter (which is around 10% of Facebook's users)
Of course, employees would have privacy concerns - and many use Facebook only for personal networking. Therefore the choice must be made entirely by the employee whether he/she would like to be the "employment brand ambassador" on the website/career site/social networking sites for the employer.
Sep 19, 2011
What Recruiting Needs to Learn from Social Media Marketing
I have long believed that HR and Marketing are different sides of the same coin - which have not learned much from each other :)
Where recruiting can learn from Social Media Marketing is to start building talent communities to engage in conversation with people interested in their firm. Take a look at the following diagram
In traditional recruiting the focus has been to chase the orange circle – and spam them. Even in the current model of “social recruiting” these remain the focus. However, in a talent community the organization actually focuses on first attracting the blue circle, and then identify the overlap in the two groups to focus on the people who are really relevant as well as pre-disposed positively towards the company. Hence the way an organization would build its Talent Community would be very similar to its Social Media Marketing efforts.
It would consist of
The prerequisites for making Talent Communities a success
Where recruiting can learn from Social Media Marketing is to start building talent communities to engage in conversation with people interested in their firm. Take a look at the following diagram
In traditional recruiting the focus has been to chase the orange circle – and spam them. Even in the current model of “social recruiting” these remain the focus. However, in a talent community the organization actually focuses on first attracting the blue circle, and then identify the overlap in the two groups to focus on the people who are really relevant as well as pre-disposed positively towards the company. Hence the way an organization would build its Talent Community would be very similar to its Social Media Marketing efforts.
It would consist of
- Identify and Attract – Organizations have two approaches to build this – firstly rely on their own databases to ask candidates to join their talent community. They can leverage email, careers website, twitter updates and Facebook page updates to do so. Then they can use campaigns on search advertising and social advertising to attract new talent to their community
- Content – Companies are publishing a lot of content, from blog posts, to Press Releases to video uploads, to tweets and job postings. On a talent community platform (that BraveNewTalent provides) it is possible to integrate all this content to present a wholistic view of the organization)
- Community Engagement and Facilitation – This would consist of building conversations between external talent and internal experts, answering questions of talent and triggering discussions.
- Development – The focus of the engagement should not be just to focus on the people in the talent community who have the skills, but to build the overall skill levels of all people in the talent community, by sharing resources with them as well as helping them learn from each other and from subject matter experts in the organization.
The prerequisites for making Talent Communities a success
- To really benefit from Talent Communities they have to be sponsored by the business leadership of the organization that is innovative and willing to be open and transparent.
- The role of recruitment needs to be focused on attraction of talent and building a relationship with them rather than being reactive and chasing candidates.
- The organization has got to be willing to lift the firewall and letting real employees connect with job-seekers without trying to control the conversation.
- A willingness to be vulnerable and deal with tough questions and not be defensive. If a company is willing to try these, they will move the conversation to things that really matter like the work, culture and nature of the job from the one large aspect that is currently the focus these days – the salary.
Sep 14, 2011
The Not-So-Secret Sauce for Social Business - People
Social Business is now cutting through most functional silos in a company. It might have started with Marketing and Communication, but is slowly being embedded and therefore reshaping business processes from CRM to Supply Chain, to BPM to HR.
Companies can spend a lot of money buying the next shiny object that will reinvent their business, make them closer to their customers, as well as involving consultants, creating new roles (social strategists, community managers, anyone?) or to outsource them, however all these efforts will count to nought if the current employees are not excited about the products they are building, the service they are delivering and the place and people they work with.
Because all said and done, social brings human relationships and conversations to the fore. Yes, there are analytical tools and automation tools that will measure and maybe also fill out activity streams, add conversations to relevant systems of records - but until we make Hal (or IBM's Watson gets more mainstream) the focus will squarely be on people.
Ray Wang keeps saying that business is not B2B or B2C anymore, it's P2P - and the launch of the Social Business Index by the Dachis Group also reiterates that the signals employees send out will have an impact on how "social" companies are seen as.
As I tweeted today, if ERP was an articulation of business processes, then social business is an articulation of business relationships (and the ability to discover new relationships and change behavior based on feedback from those relationships)
So yes invest in tools, services and technologies that will make you more "social" - but more than all that invest in culture, training, education, listen to your employees.
Technologies will not make your company more social or better products, services - your people will. Since it is all about relationships - there will be missteps, failures, even embarassment - because really, what relationships are without those?
Companies can spend a lot of money buying the next shiny object that will reinvent their business, make them closer to their customers, as well as involving consultants, creating new roles (social strategists, community managers, anyone?) or to outsource them, however all these efforts will count to nought if the current employees are not excited about the products they are building, the service they are delivering and the place and people they work with.
Because all said and done, social brings human relationships and conversations to the fore. Yes, there are analytical tools and automation tools that will measure and maybe also fill out activity streams, add conversations to relevant systems of records - but until we make Hal (or IBM's Watson gets more mainstream) the focus will squarely be on people.
Ray Wang keeps saying that business is not B2B or B2C anymore, it's P2P - and the launch of the Social Business Index by the Dachis Group also reiterates that the signals employees send out will have an impact on how "social" companies are seen as.
As I tweeted today, if ERP was an articulation of business processes, then social business is an articulation of business relationships (and the ability to discover new relationships and change behavior based on feedback from those relationships)
So yes invest in tools, services and technologies that will make you more "social" - but more than all that invest in culture, training, education, listen to your employees.
Technologies will not make your company more social or better products, services - your people will. Since it is all about relationships - there will be missteps, failures, even embarassment - because really, what relationships are without those?
Sep 6, 2011
Can you learn from the Internet
Image by surojitbasak2007 via FlickrYesterday was Teachers' Day in India. It's in honor of President S Radhakrishnan who was a teacher. I remember 5th September being the day we would wait in school as we could get to be Teachers and our normally strict teachers would smile and joke and (gasp!) actually seem human ;-)Yesterday, reminiscing about who all have taught me I thought about my parents, school teachers, teachers from college, bosses, colleagues, friends who had taught be not just knowledge but the difficult lessons too - of self reflection, introspection and the value of finding the answers by myself.
But over the last few years, my circle of teachers has expanded - to include people who are often strangers - sharing their own journeys and showing perspectives for me to learn from. Yes, you guessed it right - I have a plethora of teachers that is ever expanding thanks to the internet
So the question of whether one can learn from the internet - is yes, provided you do it with focus and dedication.
Here's what has worked for me:
- Finding out the communities where people share knowledge relevant for me. This does not usually mean Facebook - where friends share personal photos and thoughts - but specific industry content places.
- Finding out experts - these are not just folks like Tom Peters, but new emerging voices who will be the thought leaders of the future like Nilofer Merchant and Umair Haque
- Discovering peers with shared interesting (from point 1)
- Sharing one's own experience and articulating my own learning can trigger others to share their opinions and learning.
- Discover your own learning preference. Do you learn better by reading models or experiences. Do you like to listen (to podcasts) or to see (diagrams, animation and video) or by playing (simulation, games, quizzes) ?
Sep 5, 2011
CEO going undercover - can it be more than just good TV?
Image via WikipediaOne day flipping channels I managed to stumble across BBC Entertainment's show "Undercover Boss - USA" - It showed the CEO of Lucky Strike doing himself up in a disguise and working in four aspects of his business with frontline employees who had no idea they were working along with their CEO.Doing this he learned about the professional and personal challenges faced by those employees and the systems and processes that need to be fixed. Working alongside employees who are told that they are filmed for a show about entry level jobs, the show allows the CEO to secretly interact with blue collar unions of their organisation before the big announcement.
At the end of the week, the CEO revealed his identity and rewarded the four employees. The show works on the dual premise of showing the top cadre of management what their junior-most employees go through on a daily basis. The genuine astonishment of the employees themselves when finally confronted with the reality is both touching and somewhat comical, and makes for great reality television.
The show is emotionally entertaining but with its own shortcomings. While the concept of the CEO going undercover and working among his employees to gauge both employee satisfaction levels and the perception about the company among the internal stakeholders is interesting, it lacks momentum to be translated into the real world. As an HR policy, it would be very difficult for the leader of any company to be able to roam around in the lower echelons incognito.
Such a practice if ever followed can only happen at the most once or twice and then made redundant. Also while most employees are hard working and sincere, their perspective and point of view would always have biases which would not reflect the whole picture for the CEO to take back as any value add for employee practices. But then again, it is a piece of feel good television. The fun part is seeing the boss try out various odd jobs within the company. So, if you ever felt that wealthy CEO's are out of touch with reality, you might be pleasantly surprised. All in all an interesting and entertaining show.
However, what the take home for CEOs can be from the show is the concept started by Bill and Dave of "Hewlett-Packard" fame - that to really know the innards of the business you need to be focused on "Management by Walking Around" and if you are authentic you do not really need to go in disguise to find out how your employees think, feel and act.
HR and that question again
On Twitter and on email I have had a couple of students of HR write to me, asking if they have done the correct thing by choosing to do a HR course/Specialization in their post-grad program.
Their doubts are fueled by their family members, and friends who tell them that career-wise HR is a dead-end job, how all employees hate it, that you never make enough money compared to other functions, etc. etc.
There are no easy answers to such questions.
My fundamental belief is that HR is one of the most impactful functions within an organizations. If done well, and if leveraged well (by progressive leaders) it can become the real competitive differentation between organizations.
However, it is easier said than done. And there are various reasons for that - here are the reasons:
Their doubts are fueled by their family members, and friends who tell them that career-wise HR is a dead-end job, how all employees hate it, that you never make enough money compared to other functions, etc. etc.
There are no easy answers to such questions.
My fundamental belief is that HR is one of the most impactful functions within an organizations. If done well, and if leveraged well (by progressive leaders) it can become the real competitive differentation between organizations.
However, it is easier said than done. And there are various reasons for that - here are the reasons:
- There are few organizations that understand the importance of HR - and therefore the vast majority of HR jobs that are available are clerical, administrative and mind-numbing
- Due to point 1. the much better talent choose to go to external facing roles like Sales or more strategic roles like Finance
- The quality of HR faculty in B Schools - with a few exceptions - is quite dismal. The quality of curriculum is worse, if its possible.
- The number of HR openings is low - because its a support function - and students think they would have a better chance of getting a job in Sales
All these factors contribute to a vicious cycle that needs to be broken, and it can be broken by two different approaches. The growth of the HR industry and a revamp in the understanding what HR means - as well as an innovative HR leader who will act as a role model.
Earlier post:
What do you think?
Sep 2, 2011
Blog posts on my joining BraveNewTalent
Here are a couple of blog posts on my joining BraveNewTalent
The first one is by Dheeraj Prasad, MD of BraveNewTalent India who writes:
The other is a post on AlooTechie which says:
The first one is by Dheeraj Prasad, MD of BraveNewTalent India who writes:
Gautam is very passionate about Talent Communities. Very evident in some of his blog posts here , here , here and here. Gautam would be leveraging his strengths to Head the User Marketing and Product Evangelism at BraveNewTalent India. Here is why Gautam joined us!
Look for Gautam’s blog on BraveNewTalent going forward to help connect and have a dialog with the User Community as we build value for businesses in the area of Talent Leadership.
The other is a post on AlooTechie which says:
UK-based BraveNewTalent.com, a career social network that allows talents and employers to connect, has appointed Gautam Ghosh as Head, User Marketing and Product Evangelism in India. Gautam is the company’s second key hire in India after Dheeraj Prasad, ex-director and head, Education Business, Microsoft, joined the company as India Managing Director in March 2011. The company is building its operations in India. At the start of 2011, BraveNewTalent secured venture capital funding from Northzone Ventures and two angels – Pierce Casey and Mike Bourne, and has used this capital to fund its entry into the US and Indian marketplaces.
BraveNewTalent is a professional networking site that lets members follow employers, including Google, Tesco and Allen & Overy, with the option to receive alerts of their news on Facebook, without the employer becoming a Facebook contact. BraveNewTalent enables visitors to see employers' professional and social networking profiles and Twitter feeds.
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