Employer Branding, Recruiting in India and Social Media

A couple of days ago it was my pleasure to moderate a roundtable organized by LinkedIn India and People Matters on "Employer Branding" and how social media is impacting it.

There were about 20 HR and Recruiting leaders from Mumbai at the event, and my co-moderator was Irfan Abdulla, LinkedIn India's Director of Talent Solutions.

Irfan started off the event by showcasing the first India Recruiting Trends survey they had done, along with their annual global survey. Some interesting facts that emerged were:

• 53% of respondents said they would hire more
• 50% of respondents said they would have a budgetary growth in recruiting.
• The biggest obstacles to attracting top talent is (a) Competition (b) Compensation (c) Location (d) Lack of awareness/interest in employment brand
• Recruiting leaders are concerned that their competitors will (a) Invest in employer branding (b) Improve their referral program (c) Invest in new recruiting tools
• Top last landing trends were (a) Utilising social and professional networks (b) Boosting referral programs (c) Upgrading employer branding
• 81% agreed that employer brand has significant impact on ability to hire great talent and 90% companies are increasing or maintaining investment in their employer brand.
• India is ahead of the rest of the world when it comes to regularly measuring employer brand.

So there was a healthy discussion on how the HR professionals present see these trends and what they are doing on the employer branding front. My insights were:

1. Most organizations have defined an Employee Value Proposition, however very few measure their external brand.
2. Most companies seem to be focusing on branding when it comes to B-School and Tech-Schools but very few seem to focus (or know) on employer branding for middle and senior levels
3. Understanding of how sites like Glassdoor and discussions on Twitter are shaping employer brand was very low.
4. About a quarter of the organizations in the room had some kind of social media policy.

Need help to leverage social media to understand what the perception of an organization's employer brand is? Contact me :)

If you want to go through the LinkedIn report here it is

India Corporate Recruiting Trends from LinkedIn Talent Solutions

Related articles

• LinkedIn attempts to quantify the Employment Brand

Interview on Social Media, Human Resources and emerging HR Technology

I gave some talks as part of the Oracle HCM Executive Briefing seminars some months ago, and the communication folks at Oracle took the opportunity to interview me on the latest trends in HR and Technology.
You can watch the interview here :)

LinkedIn attempts to quantify the Employment Brand

Image via CrunchBase

Last week LinkedIn introduced a metric it calls the Talent Brand Index which it says is a measure of how desirable as an employer a company is.

The Index is calculated by the number of people who have actively engaged with an employer (comprised of who have researched the company, applied to jobs and who have followed a company on LinkedIn) divided by the number of people who are aware of the company (defined as people who have viewed the employees' profiles and who are connected to the employees) Multiplied by 100 this number gives the Talent Brand Index.

With this index LinkedIn is telling companies that their brand is shaped by employees, and if they actively engage on social media they can push up that numerator.

Recognizing that an Employment Brand is not useful without a context, LinkedIn can offer the TBI based on geography and compared to peer companies as well as by function. If you're a recruiter for an investment bank based in Mumbai you'd want to compare your TBI to other financial companies based in Mumbai and amongst Finance professionals.

LinkedIn has about 17 million Indian members and as more and more join the site, the TBI can become the way a HR leader can track the so far subjective measure of Employment Brand. I am sure that the formula of the TBI would evolve over time as LinkedIn adds more data points - hopefully from other third parties to determine how truly in demand an employer is. It is a great start anyway.

Here's more detail (pdf document) and LinkedIn's site for the TBI

Related articles

• Talent Brand Index Makes the LinkedIn Recruiting Platform Indispensable
• LinkedIn's Newest Crusade: Fix That Employer Brand!
• Ranking the 100 Most InDemand Employers Using LinkedIn Data [INFOGRAPHIC]

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.

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.

Am Joining BraveNewTalent.com

Image via CrunchBaseIt's an exciting time for me as I get ready to take on a new assignment, joining BraveNewTalent.com in India - focusing on marketing and user growth. BraveNewTalent.com is a startup focused on building Talent, Skill and Learning Communities for clients. Here's a video of Lucian Tarnowski, the visionary CEO of BraveNewTalent (pictured on the right) being interviewed by Robert Scoble. In India I would be working with Dheeraj Prasad, the India Managing Director (you can read his blog posts here and here)

Personally what excites me about BraveNewTalent.com is the overall mission of thinking beyond "social recruitment" and focusing on helping organizations create and nurture Talent Communities. (see my previous posts on Talent Communities here, here, here, here) We know the challenges that people face when they hire in India (abundance of people, but a shortage of skilled, trained people) and this is where I see BraveNewTalent.com having the maximum impact. On a personal level, the experience of starting up an organization in a country and grow it is what is most exciting! Do check out the BraveNewTalent blog

The other reason for me is that I would be a colleague with a blogging buddy, Maren Hogan (whom I had interviewed in Jan 2009 for my other blog!). Maren heads the Marketing for BraveNewTalent.com in the US and I look forward to collaborating with her and sharing our learning. 

You can sign up for BraveNewTalent.com using your Facebook id here

Change Management is Changing the Stories People Tell

Abhishek Mittal in his blog poston employment branding asks What Is Your Company’s Story? and urges people to think about stories when they think about change.

I believe that the internal conversations about the company is what guides this image – the dialogue employees have with one another – the vocabulary people use when discussing internal issues.

Focus on the stories people tell internally about your company. Think what needs to be done to “change” the stories to your company’s advantage.

I think Abhishek hits the nail on the head. Stories are pointers to the values and norms that are at play in organizational culture - and if one wants to change these values and norms - one has to focus not on changing the stories (because that's not possible) but in creating compelling new stories and enabling employees to share these new stories.

When your employee brand ambassadors leave

Shiv Singh, one of the leading social media experts of the world recently left his firm Razorfish to join PepsiCo as head of Digital Marketing.

As one of Razorfish's most visible faces people wondered how Razorfish would be affected - and whether cultivating an employee's brand in the social web is worth the trouble if he/she leaves.

Here's a great post by Razorfish's VP of Marketing on why they believe that is not the case:

To wit: should Razorfish encourage employees to create strong brands for themselves when we know they can take their brands with them if they leave the company? My answer is an emphatic “yes.” Here’s why:

Employees are not indentured servants. The days when employees sustained lifetime employment at one company ended a long time ago. Rather than fear the inevitability of losing talent at some point, employers should embrace the reality of the employee as free agent. Employers should maximize the value of an employee’s brand while the opportunity exists. With an active social voice, a strong thought leaders can generate business leads and goodwill for your company brand. If you fail to empower a thought leader, you’re just going to leave brand-building opportunities on the table.

We live in an era when employees can build their personal brands easily — with or without the help of the employer. Employers should get with the program by empowering employees with useful guidelines such as how to Tweet effectively or guidelines for blogging. I would argue that the employer has a responsibility to help the employee use social media the right way and avoid mistakes that can hurt the employee and the company brand.
Encouraging your employees to have active social voices builds goodwill and trust. It comes down to doing the right thing and exercising some common sense at the same time: employees who feel like their employer wants to collaborate with them (instead of hamper their social voices) are going to become even stronger ambassadors. And remember, today’s employee could be your client tomorrow and most certainly will talk about you to potential hires. If and when your employee seeks a career elsewhere, he or she will pay that goodwill back to you.

Rather than fret over losing social media superstars, employers are better off building a network of them. In the case of Razorfish, we are fortunate in that we have strong talent uniformly, in my opinion.

Yes, I totally agree with that point of view

Analyzing the conversations on the Social Web

Image of 2020 Social

Often people wonder - sure there are people discussing our firm and brand on various social networking platforms like Twitter, Blogs and discussion forums, but how can we quantify it? How are we perceived overall? What are the themes people talk about? And is it mostly positive or negative?

So we at 2020 Social decided to do a little experiment.

We took a look at all the India based conversations on the social web which mentioned 5 Indian IT companies - Infosys, TCS, Wipro, Cognizant and Patni Computers over a period of one month (March 2010) and then analysed them.

The findings were quite interesting.

We found that the themes that these conversations could be classified in the following areas: Relating to HR, Culture, Leadership and News items.

Most of these mentions (86%) were overwhelmingly in microblogs followed by discussion forums and then by blogs.

Most mentions were around news items, followed by Culture and HR

Take Aways from the report:

1. There is a lot of discussion about IT firms related to work and HR related subjects .
2. There is little or no engagement that the organizations are taking to connect with influencers and to drive the conversations
3. Whatever the representation these firms have on the social web , is primarily driven by corporate communications
4. We believe that HR and Recruitment groups who own the perception of the Employment Brand must engage with the conversations
5. These conversations should be linked to an online platform where people can connect with subject matter experts and recruiters and to get to know first hand information about the firm.

If you'd like to blog about the report, , we can send it to you. Send me an email at gautam@2020social.com with "IT Brands Report" in the subject line

Is a personal brand really "personal" on Social Media?

The genesis of this blog post was also a tweet reply asking "how do regular social media 'veterans' working in a digital firm reconcile their personal and employee entities?"

I responded that whichever social media outpost I frequent be it Facebook, Twitter or my Ning community - I essentially keep it related to work and the things that interest me - people within the context of organizations, and emergent ways of working, managing and leading.

Then I thought about it - most people I know who are "personal brands" on social media are really "professional brands" with elements of their personal life that are woven into it. It's just that the degree of sharing differs - someone like Scoble does it to one extent and Penelope Trunk to a different extent.


However the picture muddies when a person has built up a brand - and it clashes with his/her employee responsibilities. Some employers benefit from the presence such people bring. Specially PR firms which have hired social media rockstars like Steve Rubel, David Armano. And yet for other kinds of employers having an employee speak out is not easy - so that's why we've seen HR bloggers like Lance Haun go through anonymity to openness. Whereas there are still others like Evil HR Lady who choose to be anonymous.

My hypothesis is that there is no real "personal" brand in the sense of talking only about "personal details" - except a few - but what is called a "personal brand" is actually an "Individual's brand" and which is about a passion/interest area he/she has.

This is critical.

The "building of the individual's brand" should not be the objective alone. If that is the objective, social media is not the solution.

Think of it in this way:
Unless you like gardening you won't have the patience to grow a tree over 3-4 years and then get its fruit.

Recruit for a Cause Not a Role

This conversation unfolded over Twitter, where I tweeted that most commonly people got disengaged between the time of getting their offer letter and actually joining. And that is because they are most "orphaned" then. Some HR people recognise this - but the vast majority don't.

Then Kirti tweeted back, what about the people who get an offer and then "shop around"? How does one deal with them?

My first response was to reply that if HR kept them engaged in this crucial time - maybe they wouldn't have gone shopping.

My second thought was - If people are shopping maybe the firm is not paying the market rate

My third response was - thank goodness you were spared a mercenary.

That got me thinking.. most people are not mercenaries - and yet during the recruiting time most turn into one. Why does that happen?

There are various reasons... but here's my hypothesis:

1. Most HR people are too busy trying to match skills and competencies - that they fail to connect the purpose of a role and the candidate's desire to be meaningful

If you work in organizations I can picture you shaking your head and saying:

"Dude, Gautam, you finally have gone senile. Higher purpose? In today's organizations? Heck I don't even know if I'm going to keep my job day after tomorrow and you want me to connect the cause or purpose of a role? Wake up and smell the coffee, you naive fool. I'm not sure my organization has a cause beyond making money"

And I'd say you're right.

The vast majority of organizations don't think about the desire of an individual to make a difference and meaning to others. And unless you can connect with that innately human desire - you will continue to judge a person by their current and future salary levels and they in turn will treat you as a mercenary would.

A friend of mine who was recruited by Google said that during his recruiting process he and other prospective recruits were given a presentation - and he remembered just one bullet point from that - it said something on the lines of "Whatever the job you do, remember you are going to play a part in changing the world"

Similarly and more famously when Steve Jobs recruited John Sculley from Pepsi he asked him:

Do you want to spend the rest of your life selling sugared water or do you want a chance to change the world?

So are you trying to recruit people into a cause or trying to recruit mercenaries?

Company culture most important factor for Job Seekers in Auto industry, finds survey

Got an interesting information shared by my friend AK Menon whose firm Options did a survey focused on the Auto sector.

 attraction to company culture plays the most dominant part in a job seeker’s preference of a future employer. While the job seekers were divided about their most preferred future employer, irrespective of the company they voted for, the company culture was a major decision making factor.

We also found Toyota with 21% preference to be the most preferred future employer for these professionals, followed by three Indian companies viz., Tata Motors (15%), Maruti (14%) and Mahindra & Mahindra (8%). However, in the aggregated top 3 employer preferences, Tata Motors (15.6%) found more mentions than Toyota (14.3%). Interestingly, apart from culture, the top 4 companies stood for different things in the minds of the job seekers who responded to the survey. (The numbers given are in that order of preference for the respective company)

Check the full report here.

Which merits the question - if your employment brand is inextricably to your organizational culture - how do you get the message out to job seekers?

Any thoughts?

My thought is that OD and Recruiting groups need to work a lot together to translate a real and transparent approach to organizational culture.

The Rock Stars of the Talent Age

'Tis the age of talent, and in this age of talent your employees become your rock stars and marketers too.

So it's fitting that Intel chose an employee to be its superstar in the ad.

What do you think?

Tech and Consulting most preferred by MBAs

According to this Hindu article Fortune says that Google followed by McKinsey & Co. are the top two most preferred by MBAs.

Incidentally the article makes a mistake when it says in the first part of article "Google has emerged as the world's top employer for MBA graduates for the third year in row, according to the Fortune magazine." 

More from the article

The search giant is followed by consulting firm McKinsey & Company (2nd), Bain & Co (third), financial services major Goldman Sachs Group (fourth), and tech giant Apple (fifth).

About McKinsey & Co, it said: "The management consulting firm has produced more chief executives than any other company worldwide and that's partly why it's ranked No. 1 or No. 2 among MBAs' most desirable employers every year since 1996."

Other companies in the top 10 are - The Boston Consulting Group (sixth), Walt Disney (7th), Nike (8th), JP Morgan (9th) and Johnson & Johnson (10th).

Further, tech giant Microsoft as been ranked at 12th place and it is even hiring amid the downturn with has positions for MBAs in marketing, finance, corporate strategy, development, sales and supply chain.

Soft drinks majors Coca-Cola and PepsiCo have been placed at the 19th and 20th spots in the list of 100 top employers for MBAs.

No Talent Community Managers... yet!

Joshua blogs why recruiting doesn't see people whose job is to manage talent communities . He makes some interesting points, the key in my view being the following:

The use of the terms “community” and “network” attached to “talent” by and large aren’t really networks or communities in the proper sense of the word.  They’re really just lists of people, with a certain background or common interest.  Thing is, they don’t interact with each other or even know who else is in the “community” as such.  Even on LinkedIN, when you see these “Talent Networks”, they’re often filled with recruiters trying to recruit the talent they thought would be in that network

That may be true, but I hope one day this role becomes an overlap between marketing and HR, becoming the real custodian of the employment brand . They'll typically not be recruiter or sourcers (unless you are a Recruiting firm and recruiting recruiters) but rather people who are experts or aspirational figures for your talent community. Think Jeremy Zawodny at Yahoo or Matt Cutts at Google. They might not be identifying themselves as talent community managers, but that's what they can be.

Brilliantly.

Deloitte's microsite to brand consulting

Deloitte Consulting in the US has come up with a fairly simple video based microsite Born 2 Consult to increase their attractiveness and to catch them young

Take a look.

What do you think? You think that such initiatives would attract today's youth to a career in consulting?

Considering the fact that investment banking as a career no longer exists - guess quant jocks can head towards consulting and Private Equity now.

HR people mess the employment brand

Let me confess, I get a lot of calls for HR consulting roles, from some of the biggest firms in the business. Usually I say a "no" to them. That's because these HR Consultants have messed up their own employment brand in my eyes.

Yeah, dear readers, employment branding is too important a think to be left to HR professionals (or consultants!). Even the HR Wench discovers this now:

I see a lot of articles, blog posts and comments from non-HR job seekers out there that complain about never hearing back from recruiters and hiring managers. Even those that are flown across the country for interviews, put up in hotels and given gift baskets (for crap's sake!) are sometimes left hanging with no offer and no "thanks but no thanks" communication.

Well guess what? It happens when HR recruiters and hiring managers are hiring HR pros too.

The good news about this is, the HR job seeker knows right away that they would not have wanted to work at the communication-challenged company anyways. I mean, if they can't even send a 3 sentence decline letter or email after an interview what else is going on there? Then again, the HR job seeker may lament, "See? This is why they need ME - to improve their employment brand!"

So if you are a HR professional, what are you doing to rescue your employment brand?

Power of the Personal Brand

Rohit Jain, HR Consultant blogs about the two ways to create a strong organization brand:

One approach is to promote and ‘Create a brand for Organization’ which in turn will grow the business and people; the other is to promote and ‘Create a brand for an Individual’ which in turn will promote the organization and business. For different set of groups, organizations both work very well.

Several small to mid political parties are good examples of the second approach. They often create their media plan, campaign around the head of the party because that’s what is likely to get them most mileage. Once they are able to create a strong brand for that person, the organization tends to ride on their brand. They find it easier to differentiate and strong play the characteristics of an individual in most of the cases as against that of the organizations. A strong individual brand is something that has seen to be in many walks of life.

So if you are an emerging organization struggling to create an employment brand, can you turn your CEO and other top management into stars of the industry? It's easier for people to relate to people, so how can you tell stories about your people that'll make others want to be like them?

Great Places to Work in India 2008

From the Economic Times

Noida-based IT services company, RMSI, has won the best workplaces 2008 awards. The awards are the outcome of a survey conducted by the Great Place to Work Institute (GPTW) India, in partnership with The Economic Times.

Marriott Hotels India and Google India were the first and second runners-up, respectively. The announcements were made on Friday in Mumbai.

Speaking at the event, GPTW CEO, Prasenjit Bhattacharya said: “Trust in management, pride in one’s job and camaraderie are the three things that makes an organisation a great place to work.” The study, that gave two-third weightage to employee feedback and a third to a structured questionnaire, surveyed more than 36,000 employees across 250 companies. Of these, the top 50 companies were recognised at the event.

Emphasising the role of people, Tarun Das, chief mentor, confederation of Indian Industries (CII), said: “We need to adopt a PPPP approach i.e. public private and people partnership to make this country a great place to work. Also, women need to come to the centrestage. This does not mean I support reservation bug, they need to be given due recognition.”

This year, manufacturing companies made a comeback as they were the second most-represented sector (24%) after the IT (26%). Of the top 50 companies, while 11 belonged to the IT space, 10 were from the manufacturing sector. Cadbury’s, Agilent Technologies and American Express were some other companies that featured in the top 10 list.

Ah well, another year another ranking. How do these rankings actually affect people's choice of a workplace? Would you join say an RMSI over any other IT services company all other things (role, location, salary) remaining same? And if Trust in management, pride in one’s job and camaraderie are the three things that makes an organisation a great place to work then how can organizations consciously build "pride in one's job"? Isn't than an intrinsic attitude to the employee? Does the organization need to select people on the basis of attitude, then?

Marketing and HR have to talk

On CNBC-Tv18 one of my favourite programs is Storyboard. A week ago they ran a special episode anchored by Nokia India's head honcho Shivakumar.

The theme for the episode was advertising and branding of pure services businesses. They did a feature on airlines and showcased Kingfisher Airlines as a case study and also looked at a pure consulting business and talked to a Partner at Bain & Co, in India.

The learning was that services businesses are people related. Their behavior and skills is the actual product that the client/buyer is paying for. And then reporter said one thing "Marketing has to get off its ivory tower and talk to HR to actually build the brand in reality"

That's so true.

If your brand promise is something else and your recruiters and HR generalist select and measure people against other standards, you're setting up your services organization for a failure in front of your customers.

Is your a services organization? How much does Marketing and Branding work along with HR?