Recruiting the Social Media celebrity? Here are the pros and cons

Employee of the Month Reserved Parking Sign (Photo credits: myparkingsign.com)

The Wall Street Journal has a good article on hiring what Jeremiah Owyang called the Perfessional bloggers/social media celebs, and which it calls the "Co-Branded" folks:

Their activities can either complement a company's own brand image or clash with it. Companies that fail to make room for co-branded employees—or worse yet, embrace them without thinking through the implications—risk alienating or losing their best employees, or confusing or even burning their corporate brand.

increasingly, companies are recognizing that these activities have a business value. When a management consultant leads a large LinkedIn group, he builds a valuable source of referrals and recruitment prospects; when a lawyer tweets the latest legal news, she positions her firm as the go-to experts in that field. How can an employer resist? And yet, there is a downside: Co-branded employees can raise tough questions about how to contain their online activities—and how to compensate them.

 It also isn't easy for managers to balance responsibilities among the bloggers and nonbloggers within a team. And it takes an effort to make sure employees' brands align with the company's.

Related articles

• LinkedIn attempts to quantify the Employment Brand
• Your Employee Is an Online Celebrity. Now What Do You Do?

No. Social Technology or Social Media will not make your employees engaged

English: Description: Social Networking Source: own work Author: koreshky Date: 12/10/2007 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Yes. That's true. Using social technologies (like internal blogs, wikis, micro-blogging, social networking etc) will not help you to increase the employee engagement scores of your organizations.

Employee engagement is impacted by three factors, IMHO:

• The engagement between the person's skills, passion and purpose with the role he/she is working in. If you have a person in the wrong job, no matter what you do, the person's engagement level is unlikely to go up.
• The relationship between the manager and the person - and the team the person works with.
• Organizational culture 

Social tools can help a person do his/her work faster by making discovery of information and experts faster. However if any of the above three factors cause engagement, it's unlikely that the employee would be using social tools - unless the tool is embedded in the way of work. As in, it auto updates details and updates when the employee updates a business record. These kind of "social glue" technologies (as Sameer Patel calls it) is still early stage.

Companies who expect such employees will get engaged and involved in sharing and participation need to address the root causes of disengagement and then expecting the tools to increase engagement.

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]

Don't hire "Rockstars" cautions @AbhijitBhaduri

Abhijit Bhaduri (Photo credit: Mediocre2010)

Abhijit Bhaduri, the Chief Learning Officer of Wipro has written a book called "Don't Hire the Best" on how to hire CXOs.

Have you wondered why when certain leaders who have been tremendously successful for a long time in a company and are recruited into a new company cannot repeat their success and actually quit soon?

Abhijit says that most hiring decisions at the critical senior positions are still assessed subjectively by hiring managers. The real issue is that the predictor of success is not knowledge that the new employee brings, but the cultural fit with the organization's culture and values that are the real predictor of success.

Using tools like DDI's Success Profile and Hogan Assessments, Abhijit explains the various ways in which organizations can save time, money and employee morale by hiring the right fit rather than running after "stars". Drawing an analogy, he says it's like buying a great shirt without testing whether its your size.

The most insightful part was the chapter on "derailers" or what causes people to fail. These are deeply ingrained personality styles that affect leadership behavior, and flare up during times of stress. People with more than 3 high risk derailers would be very problematic to handle.

The book is written for recruiting leaders, but I think it is very useful for even people who are looking at joining a new job. It shows what are the various kind of organizational cultures also and what kind of behavior is expected in that - and one can assess a company in that way and think whether one's own personality would fit into a culture like that.

So if you're in a leadership role or trying to get into one - go ahead read this book. It might save you a lot of money and bad experiences!

What I am upto these days in #SocialHR

Here's a little update. I am currently in Mumbai on a two month long stint, working along with India's largest social media agency - Social Wavelength. They handle social media management and marketing for some of India's largest organizations. Social Wavelength has been a winner of the Red Herring Asia 100 award too.

My role at Social Wavelength is to conceptualize their first big different service vertical - into Social HR. Over the next two months I would be interacting with external HR heads to take their inputs into what the readiness of the HR community is to embrace social.

Some thoughts I have - which I'd like to validate are:

1. Organizations that are looking at embracing social media internally, need a partner to understand their needs, and help them choose relevant tools and guide them through with implementing it successfully.
2. Organizations need to monitor social conversations about their employment brand and joining those social conversations and would need help to do so.
3. Organizations understand the benefits of employees acting as social media evangelists for their brands but are wary of the risks vs the returns. They would like a partner to suggest an enabling social media policy and educating/ training employees on how to use social media.

Would you be interested in any of these offerings? Let me know at gautamghosh @  socialwavelength.com 

Linkedin launches a "blogging platform". Unimpressive

Image via CrunchBase

Today Linkedin announced that you could "follow" 'thought leaders' in generic areas like Richard Branson or in specific areas like Charlene Li.

By doing so Linkedin is following the lead of Twitter which allows people to "follow" a person and later Facebook which allowed people to "subscribe" to a person.

A two way connection between is smaller but is stronger. Linkedin had earlier thrived on a smaller more tightly knit network. If I had to connect to Richard Branson, I had to have his explicit permission that he knew me.

The purpose of Linkedin is also getting diluted in this race with Facebook and Twitter. While Twitter is the place most people go to follow celebs and others, Facebook is the place they go to converse with people they know.

Where does Linkedin feature in this? Facebook's notes features have not been a success as they don't get indexed in the open web. Am not sure if Linkedin's will. Even if they do, it begs the question why a thought leader would share content on Linkedin and not their own blog.

Personally I think this is not a strategically significant move for Linkedin.

What do you think?

Related articles

• PRO: Is LinkedIn trying to become WordPress for the business executive set?
• LinkedIn Launches Blogging Platform With Help From Obama, Romney
• Ugh, LinkedIn Gives "Thought Leaders" Another Platform for Bloviating

Musing on Innovation and learning

Innovation (Photo credit: Seth1492)

Last Friday, I was part of a panel discussion at Amity University's HR Summit on Innovation. The panel moderator asked me what the challenges were for large companies who wanted to innovate. Here were the points I made:

1. Disruption vs Learning: All learning should lead to change in behavior, which should lead to a better way of doing things. However this disruption is tough to achieve
2. Processes: Most organizational processes are designed for predictability, however innovation needs unpredictability
3. Tolerance for failure: Organizations normally penalise failure, however innovation needs failure to finally succeed. Companies need to start penalising inaction rather than failure.

What do you think are the challenges for innovation in large firms?

Salesforce launches @Rypple as Work.com and partnership with Workday #DF12

In the huge Dreamforce user conference by Salesforce here are some interesting updates in the HR tech sector.

You might remember that I reviewed Rypple on this blog which was acquired by Salesforce later. Well now Salesforce in its quest to become a total cloud and social ERP solution announced the launch of Work.com and a partnership with the hot cloud based HRMS vendor, Workday.

Work.com helps companies deliver performance in three key areas:

• Alignment — Today’s workplace is more fragmented than ever. We work remotely and virtually and have people spread across the globe. At the same time, the pace of business is accelerating, placing a premium on getting the right information to the right people as quickly and efficiently as possible. In fact, a recent study by Savo Group found that 40 percent of businesses suffer from poor alignment of messaging, sales tools, and seller skills. With Work.com, teams can manage in real-time, drive alignment with social goals, and solicit and receive ongoing feedback and coaching.
• Motivation — A recent study from Market Tools found that 76 percent of workers are unsatisfied with the amount of recognition they receive at work, while 77 percent said they would work harder if their efforts were better recognized. With Work.com, enterprises can create a culture of meaningful recognition at work. Now people can recognize colleagues with custom badges that reflect company culture and values. The recognition a person receives becomes part of their social profile in Salesforce, allowing people to build their reputation and colleagues to identify experts.
• Performance — Performance reviews are among the most hated processes in business. A study by Reuters found that 80 percent of workers are dissatisfied with their performance reviews and would like to see them better reflect their real work. Work.com enables painless, productive reviews that actually improve performance by capturing all the achievements, recognition, and feedback a person receives and calibrate performance across teams.

Work.com employee social profiles reflect their expertise, goals and performance right inside Chatter, helping them build their reputation.

Interesting times ahead for Social HR :)

Oracle puts its money in the #socialrecruiting ring

Image via CrunchBase

Image via CrunchBase

So after the Taleo ATS acquisition Oracle has now acquired SelectMinds, a cloud based social networking company used by recruiters.

“Recruiting candidates through employee referrals is widely acknowledged as the most effective method to find talent through trusted contacts,” Oracle executive vice president Thomas Kurian said in a release. “Making recruiting efforts efficient and seamless by leveraging social connections and through mobile applications helps companies find better quality candidates and continue to build the pipeline for future talent.”

Taleo has some social recruiting feature with Linkedin and it would really get bolstered by SelectMinds' acquisition which adds the ability for social job distribution, creating talent communities and Facebook pages. 

Musings on Social Learning

Learning has always been social, in the real world. Think about the time you learned how to cycle or drive a car. You decided to ask an expert you trusted. They gave you instructions. You practiced. They gave you feedback. You failed a couple of times. And then if you kept at it, you could cycle/drive - first tentatively and then with time, without consciously thinking about it.


However, learning in the real world is different from how organizations believe it to work.

In organizations, your manager decides you need to learn something (mostly because the "competency model" tell him to do a job, you need a skill). Your wishes on whether you want to learn it are hardly taken into account.

Then you are packed off to a "training program" where others like you have been "nominated" by their managers. And then you are subjected to some "training games" and exposed to some theory about whatever you have to be trained on. And if you're lucky you do some role plays, case studies and tests , post which you returned to your workplace with a certificate of training.

So training over. But when does learning take place?

Learning takes place when the "knowledge" gained is actually applied in the context of work. What happens with a person tries a new way of working that he has supposedly "learned"? Work suffers. He fails once or twice. And then his manager, impatient that time is passing tells him to get a move on.

So he reverts back to the old way of doing things. And learning is nipped in the bud.

That is the sad truth of "learning & development/training" in most organizations.

How could social technologies help?

1. First, creating a community of fellow learners before they "attend training" would help them to learn from each others' experiences.
2. Focusing away from "competencies needed" to people sharing their expertise and strengths.
3. The facilitator sharing content and theory before the training - so that face to face time could be used for practice and feedback
4. The community of learners could be a support and ideation group when they go back to the workplaces and implement the learnings.
5. The managers could also be a part of the community to understand how better to support their people's learning to be translated into the workplace

What are the other ways in which social technologies can aid learning? Share in the comments below