At the recent HRevolution event in Atlanta, Craig led one of the most popular sessions about 'Cool New Tools for Recruiting', and Ty has actually created and operates one of those tools at Zuzuhire. If you had not had a chance before now to check out Zuzuhire, give it a look - it provides an innovative and fun way to create online interviews and applicant screening processes that can incorporate video and audio response, text, and simple multiple choice questions.
But beyond the 'cool factor' of these new tools, tonight we will also dig a little deeper as to how corporate recruiters and hiring managers can make better decisions around technology in the hiring process, and even how candidates can better prepare themselves and make the most effective presentations in this rapidly changing space.
After all, cool is only cool if it helps us hire better, faster, and more efficiently.
It should be a fun show and I hope you can join us live, and be sure to follow the backchannel on Twitter using the hashtag #HRHappyHour.
Admission - the title for this post is an almost complete lift from a recent piece on the MIT Technology Review blog titled 'Figuring Out Whom to Please First', an examination of the growing importance and integration into traditional customer service processes of so-called 'social influence' measures, specifically the Klout score.
The MIT article postulates that in addition to the segmentation of customers based on level of spend or history of past purchasing behavior, that more companies are and should consider newer measures of relative customer importance and influence in their customer service strategies. This consideration and awareness of social influence, (assuming for the moment you believe the Klout score does indeed, measure influence), is made more manageable and possible by the integration of the Klout measure into existing CRM systems and processes, as well as newer third-party tools (Hootsuite, CoTweet, etc), that are used by both customer service representatives as well as corporate PR and communications folks.
From the MIT piece:
Several providers of customer relationship management (CRM) software have incorporated Klout into their applications in the past year. If a customer calls up a company that is using such an application, the phone rep can get a quick readout of the person's score—assuming the rep has key pieces of information, such as the e-mail address that the customer uses on Twitter or Facebook. Citibank, McDonald's, Delta Airlines, and Coca-Cola are among the companies that can pull up a Klout score, according to Jesse Engle, the CEO and cofounder of CoTweet, which incorporates Klout into its CRM software and counts those four companies as customers.
And with the incredible growth and use of the social networks, and the getting-too-many-to-count examples of major social media PR disasters stemming from poorly handled customer service situations, more companies are keenly aware of the potential harm that even one highly aggrieved and motivated customer can cause on the social web, a situation that is potentially even more risky when that customer in question can effectively connect to a wide audience of friends and followers.
So does or should this new and emerging ability to attempt to quantify 'influence' impact organizations in the recruiting and assessment processes? More Applicant Tracking Systems are delivered with pre-built and simple to deploy integrations with the social web for a variety of purposes, (sending referrals, looking for common friends, porting job listing to social outposts), so incorporating a candidate's Klout score would likely be a simple matter of inserting a small bit of Javascript.
Could we see a time where it made sense to include these kinds of scores in conjunction with more traditional screening processes, and not just for the kinds of roles that 'require' some kind of social chops, but really any rank and file job throughout the organization?
If you buy in to the notion that employees from any part of the organization can be your best brand ambassadors, then wouldn't it make sense to think about influence scores and a given candidate's potential to help communicate, promote, and define your company brand? All things being equal, would companies be more interested in 'influential' candidates? Or is there a down side to online influence and popularity that could actually work against the candidate?
We know not all customers are 'equal'; anyone who has walked past all the premium status passengers in first-class on the way back to seat 29B gets this. All candidates are not equal either, but figuring out which ones get the upgrade to the front of the plane seems to be getting more complex all the time.
Recently the Tech news aggregator Techmeme, launched a neat little sidebar titled 'Who's Hiring in Tech', that contains a list of some of the biggest names in the tech space that are actively looking for talent.
Not terribly interesting on the surface, many companies, especially tech enterprises are facing targeted talent shortages, and increasingly pitched battles to duke it out for the best developers. But the cool aspect of the 'Who's Hiring in Tech' ads, are the little soundbite messages that follow the company names, that according to Techmeme, are written by the hiring companies themselves.
Take a look at the image on the right and see what you think of some of the even-shorter-than-a-Tweet taglines that attempt to answer the 'What's it like to work here?' or the 'What do we actually do here?' questions.
What taglines seem to connect and resonate with the most?
I kind of like Zynga's - 'It's fun over here. Let's play.' and Foursquare's funny URL redirect that actually takes you to their home page, (it might have been smarter to have the kitten URL redirect to their Careers page, but still it is kind of neat).
It is interesting to see these mostly recognizable and complex organizations try to distill their employment branding message down to a short phrase, and kind of instructive as to the aspect of their company that they decide to emphasize, when clearly the format allows only an incredibly targeted focus.
I would think it would be a good exercise for those corporate recruiters and talent pros to undertake, to see if you could distill the essence of your unique employer value propostition to a short phrase.
I suspect if your phrase comes easily to mind, or if you ask 10 people to craft one, and 7 or 8 of them are really similar, then you likely have a pretty good idea of what your company offers current and prospective employees.
On the other hand, if you struggle to come up with your tagline, or if their are widely divergent opinions on what the tagline should read, then it may be time to step back and sort out what you do indeed want to portray to the outside world of candidates and prospects.
What do you think? Does it even make sense to try and sum up an EVP in about six words?
Of course you know about the rapid growth of the series of Facebook-based games Farmville, CityVille, and the like. Some estimates indicate as many as 250 million people play one of the 'Ville'-style social games. Ah - Industry!
With so many people, across all demographic groups, engaging in these massively popular games online, it only makes sense for organizations that are facing recruiting challenges to look for opportunities to leverage these gaming concepts in their recruiting and candidate engagement efforts.
The Germany-based industrial company Siemens, is one such company that is experimenting with games, at least in part as a recruiting vehicle. Specifically, Siemens has developed an online interactive game called 'Plantville', that gives players the opportunity and challenge of running a virtual factory, complete with evaluation of key performance indicators, allocation of scarce capital funds, and the ability to improve process efficiency with the purchase and installation of (naturally) more Siemens equipment. Factory managers in Plantville have to hire and deploy workers, balance worker safety and satisfaction against production delivery schedules, and continuously adapt strategies to changing external conditions.
It actually sounds like a fun game, in a geeky kind of way.
The 'Getting Started' in Plantville video is embedded below: (email and RSS subscribers may need to click through)
While the game serves as a kind of marketing tool to help educate the public, current employees, and potential customers about Siemens products, the executives at Siemens also see the Plantville game as a part of their employee recruiting strategy.
In a recent Business Week article about the increasing use of games in various business scenarios, Siemens Tom Varney, Head of Marketing Communications, observes, "With Plantville, we think there's a big educational play with colleges and high schools." Varney also indicates he hopes the game can help make manufacturing more attractive to young people. "We have about 3,000 jobs posted in the U.S. at Siemens, many in technology or manufacturing," he says. "We're hoping to inspire a new generation of plant managers."
It is an interesting approach, and one that makes sense in what by many accounts seems to be a tightening labor market for high-skilled and high-tech candidates. It has to be difficult for more traditional manufacturing companies that are facing mounting pressures to groom the next generation of technical and managerial talent to compete for the most desirable candidates with the likes of Google, Facebook, and ironically, Zynga, the makers of many of the popular 'Ville' games.
Could online interactive games like 'Plantville' capture the energy, attention, and fascination of enough young people to help make manufacturing exciting again?
Are you seeing more companies looking to leverage the insane popularity of these kinds of games for recruiting purposes?
Meanwhile, I need to run - I am thinking of installing some high-tech security cameras in my 'Plantville' factory.
More tales of high-stakes, big time recruiting from the world of sports, this time from the National Basketball Association, where last summer an unprecedented crop of high-quality players were free-agents, available to sign with the team of their choice. One of the prizes of the free-agent class was Carlos Boozer, a veteran scoring power forward, coveted by several teams. Boozer eventually signed with the Chicago Bulls, and part of the story of Boozer's recruitment is recounted in this ESPN.com piece - Bulls went high-tech to land Boozer, that describes some of the high-tech, high-touch, and personalized tactics the Bulls employed in order to convince Boozer to to sign with the team.
A key component of the Bulls efforts was the creation and presentation of a personalized 'Carlos Boozer' iPad, loaded with Bulls information and team history, current player profiles, and a custom app that allowed Boozer to 'see' himself as a Bull. From the ESPN.com piece:
That dude at Boozer's doorstep was Bulls senior director of game operations Jeff Wohlschlaeger. He presented to Boozer the newest and most cutting-edge recruitment tool that the Bulls, and several other NBA teams, had used: a decked-out iPad with a personalized app for the newly minted free agent, detailing how he would fit in with the Bulls if he would sign.
"He gave me a briefcase," Boozer said. "I pop open the briefcase, and it's an iPad with an intro to the team and the players that they had. The history, showing the championships that they had won in the past. Showing how good we can be if I came."
Boozer was impressed.
The Bulls certainly showed some initiative and creativity in creating and delivering the custom iPad, and even more importantly, they delivered the iPad to Boozer that day before the interview, and early enough in the free-agency period that the Bulls iPad was the first of many 'custom' iPads that the player eventually received from many other teams vying for his services. While the custom iPad and custom apps were certainly cool and innovative, they were also easily copied, so having moved first, and aggressively at that, (hand delivery by a team official to Boozer's hotel room), the Bulls scored some serious points in the process, a process they eventually won, when Boozer signed with the team shortly after getting the iPad.
Lesson here - no matter how cool and ground-breaking your recruiting strategy is, chances are it can and will be copied by your competitors. When everyone is cranking out custom iPads to star candidates, if yours wasn't first, then it may as well have been last. Or you had better figure out where the game is going next and beat the pack there.
But the more important point is that once again we can take essential lessons from the world of sports and apply them to the realm of business. A point that the crew known (really only to each other), as 'The 8 Man Rotation' will make on tonight's HR Happy Hour Show at 8PM ET on BlogTalkRadio.
Steve
