Why Teachers should Twitter

There are dozens of good reasons for educators to get on Twitter, I am not going to try and re-hash them all again here, but rather tell a simple, quick story of the real power and strength of Twitter for classes and students.  One of the assignments in class is a presentation of a company or organization's application of technology to support or enhance a Human Resources process.

We had a series of excellent presentations on topics like employee self-service, onboarding, and corporate social networks.  We also had a great presentation on the use of technology for recruiting by the US Army.

The student, Jessica Wagner, did a fantastic job of discussing the challenges faced by the Army in meeting their recruiting targets, the makeup and psychology of the 'target' demographic for potential candidates, and the Army's application of innovative technology to bolster their recruiting efforts.

The next morning I sent out a Tweet with a comment and observation on the presentation, which led to the following exchange of Tweets between myself and Amy Lewis, Director of the Talent Acquisition Community on the Human Capital Institute.

 

After that last Tweet, Amy and I took the conversation to a few private Twitter direct messages and arranged a time to have a chat on the subject.  A couple of days and one really great discussion later, we arranged for my student and I to deliver an HCI webcast, 'Tell the Hiring Stroy with Technology' on May 14, 2009, which will be largely based on her original class presentation.

Needless to say, for a student (who is also a new HR Manager) to participate in delivering an HCI webcast presents a phenomenal opportunity, and I want to thank Amy for her interest and support.

The larger point though, is if you are a teacher part of your role should be to advocate and promote the work of your students beyond the four walls of your class, and even outside the boundaries of your school.   Twitter can be a fantastic avenue for that kind of recognition and promotion.  Jessica gave a great presentation in class last week, and now thanks in large part to Twitter, she will get the chance to share that presentation with a wide audience. 

Thanks Amy, thanks, HCI and thanks Twitter.

HR Technology for the Small Business - The Resumator

Small businesses that need to hire traditionally have had limited technology resources available to help Flickr - Nonsequiturlassmanage the flow of applicants and resumes that come in for any of their openings.  For most, they remain stuck on the last 'big breakthrough', that is applications and resumes sent through e-mail, rather than in snail mail or submitted in person on paper.

Once e-mailed resumes start pouring in to the unfortunate HR rep or hiring manager, then starts the tedious process of opening, downloading, forwarding, saving locally, printing, and copying resumes, cover letters and anything else the candidate e-mailed you.  Big companies with staffs of recruiters and (at least once upon a time) hundreds or even thousands of openings long ago implemented full-featured Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS), that provide wide-ranging functions like job posting, online applications and resumes, screening and assessment, interview scheduling, and finally offer management. These systems greatly improve the productivity and effectiveness of the recruiting function, but have traditionally only been implemented by, and accessible to the larger organizations.

The problem for the small business that needs to hire is that they need to complete all the same processes as the large company, but usually with no tools (other than e-mail) to assist them.  They spend comparatively way more time that the large organization manually processing paper and resumes.

A new entrant into the HR Technology market The Resumator, recognizes this problem and delivers a simple, inexpensive, yet elegant solution.  The Resumator is a basic ATS in 10 screens.  It allows a company to enter job openings, collect applicants and resumes, engage multiple staff members in the hiring process, and overall streamline and remove so much of the tedious, manual paper-pushing that most small organizations have to endure.

Nothing really remarkable yet, but where the Resumator distinguishes itself from its competition, is the ability, with a single line of code, to embed and include up to date job listings and a form to accept resumes directly on a company's website.  So in a flash, candidates who find your corporate website and see and submit for your open positions.  Very few, if any, 'enterprise' ATS's offer this kind of simple website integration without quite a bit of custom code.

Other beneficial features of the Resumator include aggregated ratings. The tool allows unlimited people to participate in the candidate evaluation, enter their indiividual candidate ratings on a 5-star system, and the Resumator produces an aggregated ranking.  Space is available to enter team comments, and communications with the candidate are also visible to all team members.

Finally, the Resumator offers help to the small business that may not be terribly tech-savvy by recommending local, industry specific, or niche web job boards that may be a good fit for posting the job opening.  And finally, it automates the process of actually posting the job opening to many of these boards and keeping track of the candidate activity that gets generated.  Again, this is a feature I have seen enterprise class ATS's struggle to pull off.

As for the cost, The Resumator is priced at a flat fee of $59 per month for unlimited jobs, applicants, and users. A 30-day free trial period is offered with registration. Even the smallest shop hiring one person a month easily spends 59 bucks of labor passing around paper.

I really like the Resumator, and I would encourage any small organization that is lucky enough to be in position to be hiring to give them a look.

New Series - HR Tech for the small business

The relentlessly bad economic news continued this morning, just a few snippets:

Caterpillar to lay off 20,000

Home Depot axes 7,000

Sprint to hang up on 8,000

Seemingly no end in sight, major corporations shedding workers like my dog sheds in the summer.

Seems like this could be a bad time for folks in my space, HR Technology to be thinking, writing, and talking about new technology and advocating to folks to convince their organizations to invest in new technology.Flickr - cobalt123

But actually very strong arguments can be made that times of crisis are EXACTLY when organizations need to ensure that their HR Technology can support their strategy, yes, even if the strategy is 'let go of thousands of people and hope we survive'.

But I'm not going to try to 're-make' that argument here, I am going in a bit of a different direction.  I am going to kick off a new series of posts specifically focusing on HR Technology solutions for the small business.  I don't know if the small business space is any more healthy than the giants who are hemorrhaging jobs, but since some of the solutions and technologies I am going to highlight are dirt cheap (some even free), I figure they all have a better chance of remaining relevant to the typical small organization than big, expensive, or out of reach talent management or collaboration platforms.

I have not decided how many or which technologies to write about yet, (and actually last week's post about Rypple could be viewed as really the first in this series), but I will write a few technology solution profiles, and let comments and feedback determine how far I go with this.

So, that's my plan, devote some time and energy bringing to light some tools and solutions that are inexpensive, accessible, easy to implement, and possibly beneficial to the small (or medium-sized) organization.

Any suggestions, links to vendors or solutions I should research and write about are really appreciated.

Do you need a Corporate Social Network?

Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn all have seen dramatic growth in the last year.  The chances are extremely high that your employees are already engaged on one or more of these networks.  And the chances are also high that your employees are interacting and engaging with each other on these platforms, during the 'normal' work day.

That is not necessarily a bad thing.Flickr - Zach Klein

In fact you could make the argument that staff engaging each other on these networks is really no different than them e-mailing each other, or talking on the phone. But there is a difference.  Corporate e-mail and phone networks are essentially 'private', no one outside the organization can get in, the data and networks are secured and likely archived.  Companies don't usually have to worry about inappropriate content or embarrassing revelations on the internal e-mail network.  Contrast that with stories like this one - Virgin Atlantic Facebook scandal.

But the truth is that many (if not most) of your employees are going to continue to engage on social networks.  As a company you have a few options available to address this situation:

1. Don't do anything, treat employees like adults, and manage performance and performance alone.

Whatever mechanism and tools employees use don't really matter, only results matter. Whatever information, learnings, and discourse take place on external social networks remains 'in the ether' so to speak.

2. Block employees from accessing Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and the like from the office

Estimates vary on the number of companies that block social networking sites.  Last year the firm Challenger Gray & Christmas released a study claiming 25% of companies were blocking Facebook. Blocking these sites addresses your immediate concerns (time wasting, inappropriate content, etc.), but may spawn a new set of problems (employee dissatisfaction, Gen Y employees leaving, disconnecting staff from their networks that actually help them with their job duties).  But if you feel like you have a problem that blocking these sites will solve, chances are you have more serious employee relations and performance issues.

3. Allow access to external social networks, but set and enforce guidelines as to their appropriate use

So you realize that staff are on these networks, and while you may not be ok with that, you understand it, and define and enforce guidelines for their use. Many organizations are going down this route, it is a more pragmatic approach that attempts to balance corporate and legal concerns with employee satisfaction.  There are lots of examples in this area, a good one from the Higher Ed space is from DePaul University.

4. Develop or deploy a Corporate or Internal Social Network for your employees

This option recognizes the utility and attractiveness of social networking to your employees and attempts to harness that power and energy to drive increased productivity, knowledge management, and community building.  If you are not familiar with corporate social networks, the simplest way to explain one would be 'Facebook for just your employees'. But that kind of description is certainly incomplete and possibly misleading. 

Most corporate social network platforms start with the employee profile, a way for the employee to indicate personal and professional information about themselves. This profile information enables staff to 'find' each other, based on tags or keywords.  This facilitates making connections with the right people for supporting a new project or initiative where specific skills are needed.

In addition to the profile, these platforms usually possess some type of collaboration tools, like blogs, forums and wikis to promote information sharing, discussions, and the development of a sustainable corporate knowledge repository. There typically is the ability for employees to upload and share content such as documents, images, and video. Also, chat and integrated IM may be included.

These platforms can be developed from widely available open source platforms, be licensed from one of many vendors in the spaces and deployed as a subscription-based service, or licensed and installed on the company's own servers and then deployed to employees.

This market is crowded, so I will hold off to another post getting into the details and vendor profiles, but I will say that it is an emerging market and one that deserves attention. But for a company that really wants to capture the value and promise of social networking to drive business results, the internal social network may just be the way to go.

Trying out Rypple

Heard of Rypple?

Until a few days I hadn't either until I read this post, from the HR Capitalist blog.  After reading the post, and checking out some other press and buzz on Rypple, I applied for the Beta program and thanks to David Priemer at Rypple, I was quickly invited to participate.

Why was I so intrigued?  Well, Rypple has a great concept, it enables anyone to solicit fast, meaningful, and anonymous performance feedback on literally any topic.

The process is straightforward and intuitive. Ask a question, enter three attributes or criteria to be assessed, and invite folks to provide feedback.  Responders are not required to give their name or e-mail address, so the responses are assured to be anonymous.

For my test, I decided to use Rypple for a quick, mid-course evaluation for the students to rate my performance as an Instructor.  Rypple lets you pose a topic or question for feedback and then indicate three criteria, or attributes that are to be evaluated.  You can re-use these same attributes or tags on further feedback requests, enabling you to get a view over time of your performance against a key measure like 'Creativity' or 'Leadership'.

So for my test, I asked all the class members to respond to the following question:

How do you feel the Leveraging Technology class is doing in these three areas?

The three categories or attributes I asked to be evaluated on were challenging, interesting, and relevant. Respondents can also enter free form text responses to 'What you like' and 'What can be improved'.

I sent out the request for feedback on a Sunday morning, and within 10 minutes I already had received feedback.  Within an hour or so, I hade received feedback from six students, and three or four more gave their feedback in the next day or so. Most of the feedback was really solid, and I immediately noticed a theme in the responses, something I need to improve in the second half of class.

So about ten students gave precise, informative, anonymous feedback in a day or two, and the entire process took me about 15 minutes to set up, and each student no more than three or four minutes to respond.

My other alternatives to soliciting this kind of feedback would be to use a tool like Survey Monkey (good, but certainly takes more time to create and administer), or the survey tool in my Course Management System (not that good, and I would waste time figuring it out since I've never used it).

The advantages of Rypple - ease of setup, anonymity, sheer speed of the feedback loop, cost (free).

The shortcomings of Rypple - not easy to get summary information, no ability to export feedback into another tool or system for further analysis. 

But honestly, Rypple seems designed for one thing, simple and fast performance feedback, and it does that one thing very well.

I encourage you to check it out - Rypple.