Why and How of external talent communities

Kevin Wheeler has a great post on Talent Pools vs. Communities. You should go read it here.

As I am meeting prospective clients I am facing similar statements

• Why should I build a talent community?
• Our company already has a Facebook page, Twitter account - why manage another platform?
• We are using Linkedin to recruit - our internal recruiters have more than 15,000 Linkedin connections - so we're already doing social recruiting.

If you have the same questions/ doubts - here are the reasons:

• Companies that engage with prospective candidates and build a relationship with them- sharing their culture and details. As Tony Hsieh says "Your culture is your brand"
• On Facebook and Twitter all your updates go out to all the people following your liking your account. And yet engagement is notoriously difficult on Facebook and ephemeral on Twitter. The other fact is that  the focus of these accounts is not talent/jobs/careers but customers/communication/marketing. As Shiv Singh says - you are competing for attention (on Facebook) with 30 billion other things !!
• The focus of platforms like BraveNewTalent is the ability to segment and communicate with specific groups of your followers - you cannot do that on generic social networking platforms like Twitter and Facebook where brands focus on "broadcasting" and chasing non-useful metrics like number of fans/followers
• Platforms like BraveNewTalent become "social media hubs" pulling in tweets, YouTube videos and Job openings on to one platform. People who follow you see all your content in one place
• Great that you have social media rockstars on your recruiting team and are leveraging their networks. However, ever thought what would happen when they are poached by the competition? They take their network with them. Does the organization really have the time and resources necessary to pursue lawsuits?
• Talent communities are not job-boards. Organizations have to attract and engage the workforce they want to hire. And they have to also develop the ones who are following them. Unless a talent engages with them, they cannot "spam" a job seeker.
• Yes it takes time and effort to create and engage a community. It's a network of relationships. Relationships take time and effort. But the benefits can be immense. You decide if you want a job-seeker (in the normal way of business) or an advocate (by building a community). Read this post by my blogging-buddy Luis Suarez on what is a community.

So are you ready to be an innovator in the Talent industry? Reach out to me - mail me at gautam @ bravenewtalent dot com or call me at +91-97422-39954

It would be my honor to enable you for success.

Steve Jobs on Work and Love #RIPSteveJobs

Image by marcopako  via FlickrFrom the Standford university address:

Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don't lose faith. I'm convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You've got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don't settle.

And here are some memorable quotes:

• “Sometimes when you innovate, you make mistakes. It is best to admit them quickly, and get on with improving your other innovations.”
• “Be a yardstick of quality. Some people aren’t used to an environment where excellence is expected.” “My job is to not be easy on people. My job is to make them better.”
• “When you’re a carpenter making a beautiful chest of drawers, you’re not going to use a piece of plywood on the back, even though it faces the wall and nobody will ever see it. You’ll know it’s there, so you’re going to use a beautiful piece of wood on the back. For you to sleep well at night, the aesthetic, the quality, has to be carried all the way through.” 
• “People think focus means saying yes to the thing you’ve got to focus on. But that’s not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully.” 
• “Design is a funny word. Some people think design means how it looks. But of course, if you dig deeper, it’s really how it works. The design of the Mac wasn’t what it looked like, although that was part of it. Primarily, it was how it worked. To design something really well, you have to get it. You have to really grok what it’s all about.” 
• “Simple can be harder than complex: You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple. But it’s worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move mountains.”
• “Being the richest man in the cemetery doesn’t matter to me. Going to bed at night saying we’ve done something wonderful, that’s what matters to me.” 
• “Innovation has nothing to do with how many R&D dollars you have. When Apple came up with the Mac, IBM was spending at least 100 times more on R&D. It’s not about money. It’s about the people you have, how you’re led, and how much you get it.” 
• “Innovation … comes from saying no to 1,000 things to make sure we don’t get on the wrong track or try to do too much. We’re always thinking about new markets we could enter, but it’s only by saying no that you can concentrate on the things that are really important.” 

Skills The Social Recruiter Needs to Build

Recruiting has traditionally been of three types.

One is typified by the Old Boys Club persona. These are typically the ones working on retained searches, placing CEOs, COOs and whatever are the other CXOs. I met one of them a couple of years ago and when he heard that I was working in the intersection of HR and Social raised a distasteful eyebrow and said "I don't need social media. I am exclusive. Most of the leaders of India Inc. would give an arm to reach me." They command usually high fees (to the tune of 33% of candidate's salary - and take usually 11% before the search is commissioned, 11% when the shortlist is given and the remaining when the candidate is selected)

Then there are the third party recruiters working on contingent searches - trying to be the first one to push that CV that they have sourced, talked to the candidate (and sometimes not even that!) to the corporate recruiter before a rival does. Always yearning to reach the standard of the earlier described Recruiters on a retainer. They typically get lower commissions (8.33% in lean times to 12.5-20% in better times) and only when the search is complete.

And then there is the corporate recruiter. Some focusing on middle and top level recruiting. Others on entry level and campus recruiting. They juggle the third party recruiters and headhunters on one hand and the hiring manager within the company on the other. They also have to manage their own performance measures like being under-budget, tracking metrics (time to hire being the easiest) and chasing line managers (for things like job description, to taking interviews)

Insert into this ecosystem something as disruptive as "Talent Communities & Social Recruiting" - moving from transactions to relationship, from secrecy to transparency - and then one realises the skills that need to be built by the Social Recruiter:

1. Community Building and Facilitation: This is critical and encompasses a whole lot of skills that focus on putting the needs of the community paramount and recognizing the various social roles in the community and supporting each of them appropriately
2. Content Creation and encouraging others to do the same: Recognizing which kind of content is most compelling for the community and adds most value to the members. And encouraging such content from them by ask questions.
3. Storytelling: Had posted about it earlier - and now its the turn of stories to be "trans-media" from videos to text to mobile to real world.

What other skills would you add?

On the 10,000 social media jobs in India

Yesterday there was a small storm in the Twitter teacup when Economic Times published this article : 10,000+ social media experts required as UB Group, LG Electronics, Canon, Future Group and others plan aggressive hiring

On digging into the article I noticed two things. One, they have got the numbers wrong at least when it comes to Dell. The article reports "Computer maker Dell made headlines last December when it launched the Social Media Listening Command Center in the US where it monitors more than 22,000 Dell-related topic posts in social media sites. The Centre has a dedicated team of more than 5,000 social media specialists who track the company, engage with consumers and even undertake customer service. And now, Dell plans to expand such centres."

I don't think that's right. Dell certifies its own employees on using social media for responding to social web issues. So in all probability these 5000 people (even if true) are not social media specialists - but specialists in tech support, customer service, marketing and communication. Take a look at this article that says the Asia listening center would have a full time strength of 10 and then you realise how mistaken is the TOI report.

Now to focus on the 10,000 number by 2012 - its given by the head of Ma Foi - and I urge people to take it with a pinch of salt. The big number that is stated there is by 24/7 Customer who have social media executives who update social profiles of clients. Even then a growth of 1000 to 5000 such profiles in one year sounds improbable. Even if there is going to be that kind of growth - I think that will not be pure "social media" profiles but lots of BPO, SEO and analytics profiles who will be augmenting social into their work

Compare this to the LA times article which quotes Monster.com's Kathy O'Reilly saying the openings in US are about 155 a month.