The Employer Brand, New and Improved (if it exists at all)

Tonight on the HR Happy Hour Show, (8PM ET, if you don't know what time that equates to where you live, then you have bigger issues than catching a recruiting podcast to worry about), we will welcome Jake Dunlap, VP at Glassdoor.com to tackle the always interesting and occasionally controversial topic of Employer (or Employment) Brand. Glassdoor is the leading destination for employee and candidate authored company reviews, salary information, interview experience, and a whole lot of 'What's it really like to work here' testimonials.Cubs legend - Mordecai 'Three Finger' Brown

Controversial in the sense that Bigfoot, unicorns, or a Chicago Cubs World Series title are controversial - some folks are adamant and passionate that these things exist, attempt to point to (at times) circumstantial evidence to prove they are right, and eventually end up resorting to the 'nyah, nyah, nyah' line of argument to cement home their intellectual triumph.

Like unicorns, we want to believe the Employer Brand exists as more than just a concept, but rather an almost tangible, manageable, and potentially leverageable (I know, I hate that word too), component in our Human Resources and recruiting strategic toolkit. The idea that the way the organization presents and helps shape their brand message - the collection of what the organization values, represents, promises, and rewards its employees, (and by extension its candidates), can help that organization achieve superior results in recruiting, retention, and employee performance is certainly quite compelling.

But whether or not the Employer Brand actually exists is still not a given across the HR profession. Yesterday, Brent Rasmussen writing on TLNT.com shared some of the results of a recent Careerbuilder survey that indicated nearly half of HR managers questioned reported they did not have an employment brand. So despite some evidence to the contrary - that same Careerbuilder survey also indicated that job seekers strongly take into account elements of 'brand' in their decision processes, the idea of organizations possessing a distinct employment brand from whatever face they paint on themselves on the consumer side still has not seemed to achieve widespread or mainstream acceptance in the halls of HR.

Tonight on the show we will talk with Jake Dunlap from Glassdoor about the concepts of employer brand, whether or not it really does exist, (FYI - the Cubs last won the World Series in 1908), and more importantly whether debating about its existence is kind of a silly exercise anyway, and that sites like Glassdoor and a few little social networks you may have heard of called Facebook and Twitter can 'prove' the point of the employer brand advocates and end the debate in about five minutes.

We will also discuss how smart organizations are using all available resources, both ones they can control, and ones they can only guide, to try and portray their unique value proposition to effectively compete for talent, both on the open market, and inside the enterprise.

Employer branding is a great and interesting topic, I hope you can join the conversation tonight.

You can listen to the live stream of the show starting at 8PM ET tonight here, or by calling in on 646-378-1086. You can also follow the backchannel conversation on Twitter on hashtag #HRHappyHour.

Can you give a brother a +K?

Tonight on the HR Happy Hour Show (8PM ET/ 5PM PT, rest of the country you are on your own), we'll be talking about Klout, and other measures of online or digital influence in the context of sourcing, recruiting, and career management. Can tools like Klout accurately measure a concept to ambiguous as 'influence?'  Does the Klout score and others of its like, have any role at all in the recruiting process?  How about some +K action?

You can listen live at 8PM ET tonight on the show page here, or on the call in line at 646-378-1086.

Before you jump to the high and mighty ground and declare that Klout, and other lists of digital influence, whether created using proprietary algorithms or hand-curated by actual people, have no place in professional recruiting processes, you might want to ask yourself if you've ever researched a candidate on LinkedIn, and made some kind of subtle evaluation of said candidate simply on the number of connections they have.

Recently, none other than my friend Kris Dunn, on the HR Capitalist blog offered this observation, in the context of candidate evaluation for a sales position:

My client in that search forwarded me a profile of a Salesforce candidate from LinkedIn.  "Have you talked to this guy?".  I looked at the candidate, which remember, was for a hunting sales pro.  43 contacts in LinkedIn.

43 Contacts.  For a hunting sales pro.  I could hear "I need some leads if I'm going to close business" in the background.  Your cost of customer acquisition just tripled by hiring that guy."

For better or worse, the (lack of) LinkedIn contacts factored into an instant perception being formed about the guy. He could be carrying around a tattered, 25 year old Fil-o-fax (Gen Y'ers, Google it), stuffed with all the names and contact information of the key decision makers and influencers in his industry, but chances are the paltry 43 connections on LinkedIn were not going to let anyone find out.

And here's one more, from the marketing space taken from a post by Mark Schaefer on the Business Grow site:

Let me relate a few of my experiences this week …

• A very talented friend told me he was rejected for a job at a major ad agency because his Klout score was too low.
• A B2B marketing agency Managing Director told me he chose between two qualified candidates based on their Klout score.
• A friend in D.C is creating a Klout 50 Club exclusive to people with high Klout scores. Why? He wants to find good hires for social media marketing.
• A woman told me her boyfriend was accepted to a prestigious conference based on his Klout score alone.

These experiences occurred in the span of 72 hours

Sure, I know what you are thinking - those jobs are all in digital marketing and PR, and therefore using Klout as a screening tool might make some sense, but out here in the real world, where 99.3% of people don't even know what Klout is, it really does not matter. Possibly.

But on the show tonight, while talking about Klout, the discussion is really a bit more expansive than that, and I hope we can avoid getting caught up in the nuances of algorithms, and talk about online and digital influence at a more fundamental level. I think it will make for an interesting show.

Our guests will be Megan Berry from Klout, and Jennifer McClure, aka CincyRecruiter, and the feisty Dawn Hrdlica-Burke, aka DawnHrRocks will be along for the ride as well. 

I hope you can join us tonight at 8PM, and if you listen and enjoy the show can you share the love with a little +K action on Klout my way? My score has been tanking lately.

Revealing organizational strategy via job ads

I caught this piece on Gamespot.com about Google's recent job listing for a position called 'Product Manager - Games', located at Google's Mountain View, CA headquarters. Here's the information about the role straight from the job listing on the Google careers page:

Rare opportunity to grow a brand-new business - Games at Google! We are looking for a strategic, technical and game-loving Product Manager to drive Google's gaming strategy. You will design strategies for game distribution and discovery, player identity, game mechanics, and more. In addition to designing a great user experience and building out key partnerships, you will be significantly influencing Google's social platform as you work directly with a critical set of early adopters, game developers. Interesting and impactful decisions involving social gaming, privacy, virality, business, and technical APIs await you and the strong, passionate team of gamers you will work with.

Sounds like a pretty interesting and challenging job, right? A chance to really shape and drive what one day might end up being an important line of business for one of the biggest tech companies in the world in a space that is super-hot right now - think Farmville, CityVille, et. al.

So Google is getting more serious about social games as evidenced by this job listing.  Before the news of this listing broke, perhaps that was not so obvious. According to the Gamespot piece 'indicates that Google is definitely planning to get into the games business.' The strong implication is that the posting for the Games Manager job was the validation of some ongoing rumors about Google's potential involvement in the space. 

But I am not highlighting the post just because it seems like a cool gig, but to wonder a bit about how often organizations reveal their business strategies via public job ads. Let's play devil's advocate for a second and pretend that Google had some kind of skunk works project underway meant to try and make a splash in the social gaming space. It would make sense to keep that information on the DL, grab some engineers from other internal groups, have your execs and recruiters work their networks on the phone or online to seek out the talent they need, and really do what they could to keep the word that they were looking for a rockstar Games Manager off the radar of the rest of the Silicon Valley talent sharks.

Again for the purposes of this piece we are assuming Google would benefit from keeping these aspirations for Social Gaming under wraps for a while, so posting an ad like this sends a red flag up to all the other competitors in the space, and gives them public affirmation and impetus to take action, either offensive or defensive. Does the job ad serve as a signal of strategy that a smart recruiter would have never posted publicly, preferring to work this under the radar so as not to broadcast the company intentions in the space?

Is lazy or ineffective recruiting giving away too much?

Or is Google pulling a classic sleight of hand maneuver, posting a job it really will never fill, fr a business it may or may not be interested in, just to throw the pack off of the scent?

How much do you monitor the job ads of your competitors?

Let's Pass on That, (The Hamster Wheel)

Really late to the story on this, (about nine months late to be more precise), but I recently found and read an incredible piece by Dean Starkman for the Columbia Journalism Review site titled 'The Hamster Wheel'.

In the article, Starkman compares the changes in journalistic approaches, and the increasing demands on journalists to create tons of consumable content for a myriad of platforms, (TV, radio, Web, Social Networks, blogs, live blogs,and on and on), to the proverbial caged hamster running on an exercise wheel. Lots of activity, lots of energy being expended, but no real progress, and of course the hamster ends up in exactly the same place when exhaustion sets in as it was before the running started, and theoretically it still had some options.

In the context of the news business, Starkman describes the Hamster Wheel psyche like this:

The Hamster Wheel isn’t speed; it’s motion for motion’s sake. The Hamster Wheel is volume without thought. It is news panic, a lack of discipline, an inability to say no. It is copy produced to meet arbitrary productivity metrics. But it’s more than just mindless volume. It’s a recalibration of the news calculus. Of the factors that affect the reporting of news, an underappreciated one is the risk/reward calculation that all professional reporters make when confronted with a story idea: How much time versus how much impact? This informal vetting system is surprisingly ruthless and ultimately efficient for one and all. The more time invested, the bigger the risk, but also the greater potential glory for the reporter, and the greater value to the public (can’t forget them!). Do you fly to Chicago to talk to that guy about that thing? Do you read that bankruptcy examiner’s report? Or do you do three things that are easier?

It is perhaps difficult to find another industry than news and information services that has been disrupted more massively in the last 15 years or so by the rapid development of the web, the birth of so-called 'citizen journalism', and the perfect storm of cheap data plans, incredibly powerful smartphones and other mobile devices, and hundred of millions of social network platform users ready and eager to report and comment on the news - all in real-time. In the CJR piece, Starkman paints a vivid picture of increasing activity with possibly dubious benefit, and that underscores more endemic tensions in workplaces today - we are all asked to do more, or at least the same, with far less people and resources.

The article contains an example of the Hamster Wheel in action using the illustrative chart on the right - over the last ten or so years, story production in the printed Wall Street Journal has increased substantially, with corresponding reductions in headcount leading Starkman to conclude the average WSJ reporter is now 69% more productive that in 2000. 

In the race for web traffic, more views of a networks' or news organizations' YouTube videos, 'likes' on Facebook, or Twitter followers; Starkman makes the argument that the traditional values and importance of deeply reported and in-depth investigative pieces (the ones that can't really be tweeted), are suffering. And not only are news organizations steering away from the investment of time and resources to produce these pieces, the long-term financial benefits of the current 'Hamster Wheel' strategy are dubious at best. Some estimated claim the popular and 'Web 3.0' model of journalism The Huffington Post only creates about one dollar of revenue per reader per year.

Is that a large, more applicable to the workplace take on all of this?  In other words, why did I just spend 45 minutes and 600 or so words writing about a nine-month old article on the news business?

Well here goes - I think many of us of running on our own personal or organizational Hamster Wheels. We too have to be everywhere. We have to connect and communicate with colleagues and staff on many more platforms than ever before. We have to engage potential job candidates all over the social web, and create compelling engagement strategies for the conversation, (that will work on all kinds of mobile devices including ones that have not been invented yet). We have to stay on top of news, information, coming and goings in our industry in a 24/7 global context.

In short, we kind of have convinced ourselves, just like the execs at many of the news organizations that Starkman discusses in the CJR piece, that we can't take a breath, miss a tweet, an update, follow the hashtag from a conference we could not get to, or let someone else beat us to the punch.  It is a hard way to live without any kinds of filters to know what is truly important and meaningful and what isn't.

I'll leave you with a final nugget of insight from the the piece:

The most underused words in the news business today: let’s pass on that.

They might be the most underused words in your business too.

Webcast - Thursday June 9th - The Social Referral

Tomorrow at 1:00PM EDT I will be presenting a webcast for the Human Capital Institute and made possible by support from the recruiting technology solutions provider SelectMinds titled - 'Referrals Powered by Social Media'. The basic premise of the presentation is that while source and quality of hire studies consistently demonstrate that referrals, (employee, alumni, even customer), are a high quality and important component of an integrated sourcing and recruiting strategy, than many organizations fail to adequately capitalize on their stakeholders' existing networks to further and enhance their referral programs.

Advances in technology, coupled with the rise of the extended networks of staff and other interested parties as a valuable and highly leverageable asset for recruiting, have given rise to a new set of tools, processes, and approaches to referral programs, and the most forward thinking organizations will sense these trends, and take steps to capitalize on them to enhance their sourcing efforts, power and challenge their employees to participate in critical recruiting activities, and augment and develop the unique employer brand and value proposition in the market.

I plan on talking about the importance of a healthy referral program as a key component of a robust recruiting strategy, some of the barriers to implementation and performance, (and ways to address them), and the increasingly important role new technology solutions play to help make these so-called social referral programs scale, perform, and impact the organization.

One of the points I will try to make is that technology-enabled social referral programs really share most of the same challenges as old-fashioned, paper or email-based, programs of the past. Communication, motivation, ease of use, responsiveness, and connection to the organizaton's important objectives are just as important today as they always have been. The new technology certainly makes the processes and the mechanics easier to administer, and the best new technology can even lead to better referrals, but if the fundamentals are not in place, then the program will prove ultimately disappointing.

You can register for the free HCI webcast here, and again the presentation is scheduled for Thursday June 9, 2011 at 1:00PM ET. 

I hope you will join me tomorrow!