HR and New Technology

Over the cold, snowy weekend read this quote from Gartner's 'The Effects of Social Software on Your Employer Brand'

The typical HR department's failure to understand or take seriously social software and its effect on employer brand and Generation V is a significant weakness, and it will affect the ability to reach Web-savvy candidates and to mine the company's current talent base.

Flickr - Matt Hamm

The article goes on to exhort HR departments to take a few simple starting steps to begin to understand the Social Software environment and the potential impact on your Employer Brand.  Here a just a few simple, basic, and essentially free steps that any HR Department can take starting right now:

1. Start listening - review what employees and prospects are saying on Twitter, Glassdoor, and by Google Blog searches
2. Create some simple 'Day in the Life' videos hosted by some of your superstar or well-know employees and post them on YouTube
3. Create a survey or wiki page to collect and evaluate real candidate's experience and impression with your employer brand, your corporate website, and your application processes.  You may think you have a great site and simple process, but it doesn't matter what you think, it matters what the candidates think.  If you wnat to be bold, embed a Meebo chat room on your job site, and start interacting with candidates in real-time.
4. Start a blog. If your HR director does not blog at all, you are missing a huge opportunity.  The HR Director's title really could be 'Chief Talent Marketer'.  So marketl!
5. This one is important - Get out of the HR Department (yes, put down those files, I9 forms, and direct deposit authorizations) for a while and talk to your Marketing, PR, and even IT departments about what they are doing in Social Software.  Learn from their experiences and explorations and see if you can't leverage the internal experience for your HR initiatives.

There are loads of other approaches and opportunities for the informed HR pro to start leveraging and exploiting the new landscape. I won;t go on and on, if you want an even longer list, see Michael Specht's excellent list on 52 Social Media Ideas for HR.

The point really is, You can't get away much longer as an HR department ignoring these opportunities.

Otherwise, you'll still be pringing three-fold 'It's fun to work here' brochures and feeling satisfied.

Comments

[Amy Smith]

Great post! I think this goes for senior leadership, not just HR folks.

[Mark Stelzner]

Great post Steve. Curious to see what it's going to take to get mainstream HR to stand up and pay attention to the rapid evolution surrounding 2.0 technologies and social media. Seems like you have the foundation of a webinar or presentation in this post.

[Steve]

Thanks Amy and Mark for the feedback and observations. I am hoping that in 2009, we will see less talk and more action from HR departments in this space. I have some ideas on how to progress these ideas further and hope to be doing more with them in the coming months.

[Ben]

Steve, your link to Michael's site is broken. Need a period in there. :-) This post is awesome. I am bookmarking it for future reference!

[Steve]

Thanks Ben, I corrected the issue with the link, thanks for pointing in out and for your comments, I really appreciate the nice words.