TalentVine - Combining Old and New

Quick - what source has consistently been demonstrated to be most organization's best source of good, qualified candidates?

No, it is not Craigslist.

Of course it is employee referrals. But you knew that.  Everyone knows that, right? 

Here is another question - what has been for the last two or so years been the most talked about, dissected, and analyzed development in corporate recruiting?

No, it is still not Craigslist.

It's 'Social Recruiting'.  Broadly defined as leveraging the wide variety of social networks like LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook (as well as others), to advertise jobs, define and communicate the employer brand, to develop communities of potential candidates, and to help build a robust pipeline of talent.

But unlike employee referrals that have a track record of delivering good candidates and high performing employees, in many respects the jury is still out on social recruiting. Just as many well-made arguments can be made advocating its adoption as a necessity for the modern recruiter as can be made that is not much more than a fad, and the buzz will eventually wear off, and recruiters will return their focus to strategies that have previously been shown to work effectively.

Like employee referral programs.

What I like about TalentVine, a new product from SelectMinds, is that it builds upon and improves a traditional employee referral program by introducing highly configurable and powerful integration with social networks.  

Essentially here is how the solution works:

1. Available positions are scraped from the company website (or other sources) into TalentVine.

2. Automated and ad-hoc email notifications are sent to current employees informing them of specific jobs that they may want to refer to their friends and business contacts. For example recruiters can forward engineering jobs to all or some of the company's engineers, or send an email with links and information about a particularly important or 'hard to fill' job to the entire organization.

3. Simple, yet powerful integration with the three big social networks, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter enables employees to share job opportunities to some or even all of their contacts. TalentVine possesses internal logic to help an employee try and find the 'best fit' for the position from among the employee's social network contacts.

4. Candidate details are captured in TalentVine - contacts that see the referral can click the unique, trackable link, see the job details in TalentVine, and either choose to apply, or even forward to some of their contacts. Recruiters can see the history of a referral as it progresses from and through social networking chains.

5. Referral program management is supported.  Companies can configure the referral bonus amounts and ensure that top referrers and sources are identified.

6. Tracking - TalentVine keeps track of the referrals sent, referrals forwarded, links clicked, and applications received.  Insights can be gleaned as to the most effective referrers and the networks likely to produce the best candidates.

Throughout the solution, the navigation links and visual cues are interesting and well-designed.  Large and attractive design elements add to an easy and almost fun user experience.  In fact, of the numerous enterprise and corporate systems I have seen lately, TalentVine looks and feels the least 'enterprisey'. That is a strength. 

Organizations that are looking for methods to strengthen their existing referral programs, or seeking ways to empower more of the organization's employees to tap into their personal and professional networks would be advised to take a look at TalentVine. Combining a classic and successful recruiting approach with the latest capabilities and potential of leveraging social networks for recruiting is an innovative and interesting combination.

Knowledge to go

In my role as a part-time HR Technology instructor I have been a user and quasi-administrator of a wiki platform called Confluence, a product of the Atlassian company based in Australia.  We have used Confluence in the class to organize the course content, share information on assignments, post readings and presentations, and provide the students the opportunity to learn in a more hands-on way, what a common enterprise collaboration tool looks and feels like. 

Thousands of organizations use Confluence for wiki collaboration, and there is an active and vibrant developer community surrounding Confluence that continues to produce useful and innovative extensions and enhancements. 

Last week I noticed a post on the Confluence corporate blog about the release of 'Mini Confluence', aImage source - www.miniconfluence.com new mobile client for either the iPhone or the Android, that allows enterprise users of the Confluence wiki and collaboration platform to view and update content, interact with colleagues via status updates, and tailor the interface to keep track of contributions and comments from key colleagues and teams while you are on the go. 

For enterprises that have adopted Confluence as their knowledge repository, collaboration platform, or organizational intranet, the ability to deploy a functional and effective mobile application to the iPhone and Android (BlackBerry is also supported via a mobile web interface), further enhances and improves the creation, sharing, and discovery of information and expertise anywhere employees happen to be.

And organizations that do elect to adopt and deploy modern, fast, and highly functional mobile versions of enterprise collaboration tools will likely further strengthen their ability to act, react, and execute on new opportunities and ideas faster and better than their competitors that are stuck in the old dispensation.

So if you are in an organization that has yet to materially embrace new ways of working and new collaborative tools like Confluence and others, it is certainly fair to say that you are behind your competition that likely has done so.  But don't forget that while you continue to rely on your tried and true methods (email, private instant messaging, labyrinthine shared network drives), your competition continues to move forward. 

It could be that they are not just collaborating and creating more effectively than you are while in the office, they are beating you from wherever they go.  And the longer you wait, the gap just keeps getting larger.

The Conference Room Paradox

It’s 10:00 AM on a Tuesday and you are standing huddled in the hallway with six or seven of your colleagues all awkwardly clutching notepads, files, coffee (and not the take out cups with protective plastic lids, regular office type mugs with funny sayings like ‘Number 1 Boss’ or ‘Wake me up when it’sflickr - faungg Friday’ on them), and maybe a laptop to take notes. Your standing weekly status/update/check-in/whatever meeting with the extended group is booked for 10, and the ‘big’ conference room, the only one relatively close to your cube farm that will comfortably fit everyone has been put on ‘reserve’ for this date and time for the next 179 weeks.

As usual there is another group meeting in the conference room before you, and once again their meeting has not broken up by their allotted ending time. So you do the right thing, you and your group give them a minute or two to wrap-up, no need to get all uppity about an odd few minutes.

It is now 10:03 and the conference room door is still closed, someone puts an ear up to the door and can hear some animated and excited (but muted from behind the closed door) conversations going on inside. Could be something innovative and exciting and important going on in there. Or it could be just another work team making casual small talk as their meeting winds up.  Hard to say, but you decide it doesn’t matter anyway, it is now 10:04 and your time is now being wasted, so you give the token quick ‘double-knock’ as a split-second warning and immediately open the door and state (politely but firmly), ‘Hi - I believe we have the room at 10:00’.

The folks inside do the right thing, quickly gather up their assortment of belongings (remarkably similar to all the stuff your team is carrying), and beat a hasty retreat to the door, pairs of participants sharing final bits of information, giving directions, making plans, etc.  You can’t help but hear most of what they are saying as your teams intermingle during the ‘file out/file in’ process.  It does sound like they were working on some interesting ideas on the new product line you have heard some rumors about.  Definitely way more interesting (and probably important) than another weekly meeting reviewing the same list of action items/tasks/statuses or whatever that you have to endure for the next 55 minutes.

But none of that really matters when availability of the ‘big’ conference room is at stake.  It is kind of a mark of status and importance to have a standing claim to a few hours a week of time using that prized resource.  Good thing when your assistant booked the room for you (for the next 179 weeks), the scheduling program didn’t ask you for a justification or an explanation of exactly how you manage to harness and direct insight, creativity, and innovation into exact one-hour increments on the same day every week.

You know you have all been there before. The big conference room paradox. Organizations drag everyone into a central location called ‘the office’, but then parcel out space in small increments of cubes and private offices, and there is hardly any space to actually interact and communicate and collaborate. The ‘big’ conference room becomes highly prized as a gathering place, and slots are tightly distributed by the hour, and snatched up without much thought to importance or value to the enterprise.

Dang, I just heard a knock, I can’t finish this post with an epic conclusion since my hour is up, I guess I’ll have to hold that thought until next Tuesday at 10:00, (or 10:04).

Comfortable Being Scared

Last night on the HR Happy Hour show we talked about social media in the workplace, why organizations should have social media and social networking policies in place to guide employee usage (although quite a few listeners argued that specific social media policies are unnecessary), and some of the concerns and outright fears that many leaders and HR professionals seem to possess when these topics are discussed. After all, many of the large mainstream HR associations have trotted out a stream of speakers and 'experts' pitching at best caution and restraint, and at worst outright bans supported by a few anecdotes about miscreant employees gone wild. Flickr - Scr47chy

Rather than contribute yet another (unnecessary) piece attempting to refute item by item the typical laundry list of 'bad' outcomes (time wasting, loss of productivity, exposure of company secrets) that may arise from the increased use of social networking in the workplace by employees, I wanted to touch upon one of the observations made on the show by our guest Eric Meyer.  During the conversation about the use of 'scare tactics' by some legal experts, Eric noted that many HR professionals are 'comfortable being scared', in other words hinting that rather than dispassionately evaluating the potential benefits of these tools and technologies, many in HR are happy to use the horror stories to keep them safely entrenched in their personal comfort zones of uninformed bliss.

Mulling over this some more last night I don't think it is all that surprising considering how popular and often successful 'going negative' is in many other aspects of our culture.  Think about our interactions with our kids, 99% of political advertising, the stories on the local TV news, and even the relentless focus on the 'bad' or negative in the coverage of the World Cup. How much more emphasis has been placed on shoddy officiating, annoying vuvuzelas, and dysfunctional team dynamics than on any of the positive aspects of the competition? 

Why are we so drawn to the negative? 

Why do we try to avoid, mitigate, reduce, manage and every possible other thing except embrace risk?

Why are so many of us 'comfortable being scared?'

HR and Indie Culture

One of the mainstays of the 'business' blog world is the occasional book review post.  Bloggers get pitched by PR agencies or writers all the time to see if there is interest in reading and potentially reviewing the latest work on management, marketing, leadership -  you name it.  Other times bloggers provide their take on one of the popular business books of the day that have a subject matter in line with their blog's focus and target audience.

Some recent (and good) examples of this kind of review are Paul Hebert's look at 'Switch', or Kris Dunn's take on 'Linchpin'. Switch is all about influencing people to change, right in Paul's sweet spot, and Linchpin, with its focus on results and getting stuff done aligns well with some of the recurring themes of Kris' blog.

I don't write many book reviews on this site, since in the case of books like Switch or Linchpin I am either a bit late to the party, or don't really have much to add to or improve upon what people like Paul and Kris (and lots of others) have already covered. More so, in the case of the majority of books I read, they are not really in line with the realm of what this blog is (theoretically) about, technology and HR topics.

So when I picked up Kaya Oakes' 'Slanted and Enchanted : The Evolution of Indie Culture' a few weeks ago I did not intend on writing about it on the blog. I am actually not sure why I bought the book, maybe I was a bit tired of reading about how to convince people to do stuff they really do not want to do, or undergoing more admonitions of how to be fantastic and awesome by just being fantastic and awesome.  Possibly it was the cool looking cover.

Either way, after completing the book I felt like posting about it. Not so much a 'review' but just some observations of the similarities between indie culture and what is going on in the HR space lately. The book is essentially about the history and evolution of so-called indie culture, that is creative works done outside the 'mainstream' of corporations and organizations and without much concern about the viability or financial rewards.

In the book's retelling of the origins, early heroes, development, and export of indie music, books, art, and design I saw some parallels in the creation, distribution, and eventual attempted absorption by big corporate interests of indie culture, and some of what is starting to happen in the HR and Talent world where this little blog (and hundreds of others) reside.

When I think about the growing influence of the HR and recruiting blogs, radio shows, and bootstrapped 'unofficial' Unconferences in the Human Resources community it seems to me not unlike some of the stories in Slanted and Enchanted. Death Cab for Cutie gets a major label deal and makes regular appearances on The OC, and HR bloggers now routinely get press credentials to 'mainstream' HR events, get asked to make speeches or sit on panels, and many major and entrenched organizations and associations are trying to figure out how to understand, embrace, and possibly even absorb elements of this growing 'indie' movement in HR.

I think it is fantastic the the 'Indie HR' community is getting more recognition, notice, and is gaining (subtly) in influence with the mainstream HR world.  But here is the thing, as 'Indie HR' gains acceptance and gets more intertwined with 'traditional' HR is it in danger of losing what makes it so vibrant and meaningful?  Will it get toned down, homogenized, or otherwise turned into just another extension of the status-quo?

Last thought, in 'Slanted and Enchanted' Kaya Oakes says this about what being 'indie' really means:

Independence means rebellion, risk, tenacity, innovation, and resistance to convention.

She was referring to art, music, and poetry.  For those of us in 'Indie HR' we could be talking about interviewing, social networking, performance management - you get the picture.

As Indie HR goes more mainstream, can it still remain rebellious?  Or will it resort to making VH1-friendly videos and counting the royalties?