#HRTechConf (un)session Preview - Social Tools in the Organization

Today at 9:00AM Central time at the HR Technology Conference, I will be co-presenting along with Trish McFarlane a session titled: #HRevolution : How Social Tools Can Empower a Global Organization.

The session, about how organizations are leveraging both public-facing social networks and platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, as well as behind-the-firewall tools like Yammer and Sharepoint, in HR, Recruiting, and Talent Management processes; will be conducted in classic HRevolution 'unconference' style - as a facilitated discussion among and by peers and colleagues in the industry, with the goal to open the lines of communication and share lessons learned, challenges, and goals with each other.

The HRevolution style of facilitating presents some risks of course - if attendees are shy or reluctant to share openly with the group, then the session presenters are under the gun to some extent, and there's nothing worse than a interactive session with no interacting.

So attendees of our session tomorrow are expected to play an active part - sharing their knowledge, discussing their approaches in bringing social technology to their workplaces, and even challenging some of the widely held and often repeated assumptions about social technology and its role in the workplace. 

In addition to the conversations that will happen in the room at HR Tech, we also encourage anyone following the #HRTechConf hashtag on Twitter to engage with us as well.  The hashtag for the session is #UNSESSION and the basic questions we will raise in the room will be tweeted out on my user name @SteveBoese as follows:

Q1 - What social recruiting success stories can you share? #unsession #HRTechConf

Q2 – What collaboration tools are you using and getting positive results from? #unsession #HRTechConf

Q3 – How can social  technology encourage recognition in the workplace? #unsession #HRTechConf

Q4 – How can social tools help drive innovation in the organization? #unsession #HRTechConf

Q5 – How can social tools fix, improve, or blow up existing processes? #unsession #HRTechConf

We will be checking the backchannel throughout the session for questions, answers, comments and for general feedback from the Twitterverse.

Trish and I are really looking forward to the session, and if you are at the HR Technology Conference we hope to see you there, and if not, we hope you will join in the #UNSESSION discussion on the backchannel.

If you're not sure who the customer is, then it probably isn't you

I don't really care about the Olympics, with the exception of a couple of Men's Basketball games I'm looking forward to catching. For some reason I find it a little odd that so many people suddenly fake interest about things like archery or air rifle or synchronized diving for one day every four years just because we hope our 17 year old kid can defeat the 17 year old kid from some other country.That looks like a fun game, I must admit

But even in my state of extreme Olympic apathy, I have caught, as I am sure you have as well, the ridiculous amount of complaints about the USA TV coverage of these Olympic games, being brought to US TV's, (and smart phones, and tablets, and computers), by NBC.

The chief complaint?  Tape delayed TV coverage, i.e., not televising certain marquee events as they happen live, (mostly in the morning or early afternoon in the USA), and 'saving' them for Prime time broadcast later that evening when TV audiences are at their peak, and in the only part of this that matters, when advertisers pay a hefty premium for commercial time.

Of course in the modern, social age, where everyone is a critic/pundit/expert, the Tape Delay strategy has resulted in what has been branded a colossal #NBCFail, with Twitter, Facebook, and the rest of the more traditional news outlets results of the actual competition outcomes are just about impossible to avoid for the five or six or seven hours lag until NBC deems it appropriate, (and most profitable), to air on TV.

So what many Olympics fans are left with (at least here in the USA), is what amounts to a set of pretty poor options - watch events live on a computer or smart phone (in the middle of the day, not always possible or convenient), try and avoid news or social media reports of event outcomes all day and watch the prime time broadcast (not really feasible for most), or give in to curiosity or inevitability and learn the event outcomes ahead of time, and watch the prime time tape delayed broadcast anyway, (you know, to get all the 'human drama' stuff). 

All three options kind of stink, and if you really cared about this stuff, I can understand your frustration.

But here's the thing, NBC doesn't care about you. NBC is delivering what the customers demand, and they ain't you. The customers are the advertisers, and what they demand - lots and lots of eyeballs on its prime time broadcasts, is definitely being delivered despite the tape delay #NBCFail approach.

You want to know how you can get over your anger and frustration with NBC's Olympic coverage?

Just keep reminding yourself that you're not the customer, you're the product. Say it with me again, you're not the customer, you're the product.

And file the NBC Olympics broadcast coverage into the file along with Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, foursquare - and wherever else you waste spend your time these days.

Now I have to get back to watching my new favorite sport, Team Handball.

#SHRM12 Social Recruiting session wrap: Don't be quick to judge

The last dispatch from me from #SHRM12, aka, the SHRM Annual Conference & Exposition which wrapped up yesterday from Atlanta.

Aside: which major industry event will be the first one to actually adopt as its 'official' name the event hashtag? It would be kind of cool to see SHRM or some other organization to just drop the tired and formal sounding 'Conference and Exposition' part and just go with #SHRM12 as the event name.

Where was I? Oh, yeah, wrapping up the final day at #SHRM12 which for me was highlighted by the panel discussion I was fortunate to be asked to moderate, titled 'Is Social Recruiting Really Working?', and that featured industry leaders and experts Robert Hohman, CEO of Glassdoor.com, industry analyst and legend John Sumser, and Jeremy Langhans, who leads Global Brand and Talent Attraction for Expedia.

The panel discussion was, I think, pretty lively from the start, it took about three minutes before the panelists were (respectfully) disagreeing with each other, which I've always felt is one sign of an interesting panel discussion. As the panelists stepped through and discussed some of the common perceptions and assumptions surrounding social media for recruiting several common themes and best practices did start to emerge - the need for organizations to be more open and committed to engaging with candidates on social platforms, that trusting your employees to fairly portray the brand message is paramount, and that HR and Recruiting can and should work closely with their internal social media experts in Marketing and PR to help define, tune, and communicate the brand message.

It was, I thought, a really good discussion overall, with some insights, shared experiences, and even a few laughs - particularly when Jeremy was getting talking points texted to him during the session!

But for me, the biggest personal take-away happened after the session, and in the conversations with the folks that came up to the stage to chat with the panelists. During the session, an audience member asked about the value of Pinterest as a recruiting tool.  As I recall, Jeremy indicated that he had not personally seen much usefulness there, and I made a (lame) joke about needing to delete my Pinterest account. But essentially our panel did not have much positive to say about Pinterest in the recruiting context.

But after the session an audience member, someone in Talent Acquisition from a major retail brand that you have absolutely heard of, told us that for them, Pinterest was, in her words, 'gold'. The kinds of people that the brand would want to find and connect with were all over Pinterest, were really engaged, and definitely wanted more interaction and communication with the brand. So while for us guys on the panel, laughing off Pinterest might have made sense from our limited world view, but for this major organization, the platform is starting to represent an increasingly important source for recruiting.

The bigger point? 

Every organization's experience, approach, and results in social recruiting is going to be unique. While there are some general guiding principles and leading practices that are emerging, (and we talked about many of them on the panel), there are no true and repeatable recipes for success that will be successful in all situations. One size does not fit all. In fact, it hardly fits anyone.

It was a good lesson to learn, and I am thankful for the attendee who shared her view with us after the session.

Thanks again to the panel members, and to the team at Glassdoor.com for making the panel possible, and for including me in the event.

And I promise, no more on #SHRM12 from me!

#SHRM12 Session Preview: Is Social Recruiting Really Working?

Dispatch #2 from the SHRM Annual Conference and Exposition in Atlanta, Georgia, where the coffee, bus, and bathroom lines remain long, the temperatures remain hot, and a drop-in to Atlanta from President Obama threatens to muck up travel plans for many a conference-goer.

Today's effort is a bit of shameless self-promotion for 'Is Social Recruiting Really Working?', the panel discussion I will be moderating at the big show, tomorrow, Wednesday June 27 at 11:30.

The session features a stellar panel consisting of Glassdoor.com CEO, Robert Hohman, industry analyst and legend John Sumser, and Jeremy Langhans, who leads Global Brand and Talent Attraction for Expedia.

In the session, the panel will walk through some basic, fundamental issues and questions surrounding social media and social recruiting and challenge the audience to think a little past the hype, buzzwords, and confusion to try and get to the reality of what social recruiting is today, whether or not it is truly being effective for recruiting in the real world, and what the future might hold for social media in recruiting.

The slides with the questions we plan to ask and discuss are included below, but certainly the slides themselves don't offer much in the way of answers, you'll have to come and see us on Wednesday, June 27 at 11:30.

Is Social Recruiting Really Working?

View more PowerPoint from steveboese

Many thanks to the entire team at Glassdoor.com for all the fantastic work helping to organize this session and for asking me to participate.

See you at the session!

Media and Consumer Tech Trend #3 - Information Acceleration

Recently the analyst firm Gartner issued an interesting press release sharing their '10 consumer macro trends shaping the technology, media and service provider markets over the next 10 years', and I have covered two of these trends Gartner called out here on the blog. The first one, the importance of understanding the customer profile as you create products and services, and perhaps more importantly, as you make decisions on hiring and promotion into leadership roles has definite implications for the design of enterprise technologies and programs. The second, the desire for simultaneously powerful, multi-functional, but simple and easy to use solutions that are prevalent in the consumer world, is increasing in relevance in the workplace as well.

Today I wanted to wrap up this series by taking a look at one more of Gartner's '10 trends', the one titled 'The Impact of Acceleration/Deceleration: The Temporal Digital Divide Widens'. What does this mean, and why is it significant? First, more details from Gartner on this trend:

Acceleration means consumers expect regular and increasingly frequent product upgrades. Over time, there has been a closing of the classic "digital divide" between the haves and have-nots in terms of access to basic technology products and services. However, new digital divides have opened up, especially inequalities in relation to the social graph and consumers' ability to access and manage — or not manage — real-time, nonstop ubiquitous connectivity that is the product of technological acceleration.

Interesting take no doubt, but as technology, particularly mobile technologies and more specifically mobile access to the internet particularly in the developing nations has the effect of levelling the playing field at least in terms of basic access, then the next source of advantage and opportunity shifts from providing basic technology and access, to providing ways to make sense of the flood of information that has become more widely available. On the consumer side think of it this way, most everyone is online, has access to more information than has ever been available at any time in history, and more than likely is building personal social networks that span local areas, states, and nations. The answer to just about any question can be found, the problem often is actually sorting the good from the bad from the ridiculous number of options.

At work, we see similar challenges, (and opportunities). As electronic communication and digital technologies have been introduced over the last two decades, most organizations no longer have a shortage of data and information, in fact, in some cases workplaces are drowning in too much information. The problem of collecting or at least digitizing information is less and less a problem, but making sense of it all, and turning or transforming all this raw information in its many forms, (email, voice, video, documents, IM, activity streams, external social network data, and more), into relevant, meaningful, accessible, and actionable insights is the next frontier for organizations and solution providers to master. More simply put, the next set and group of more interesting future developments in workplace technologies will be the ones that help to effectively address what Gartner aptly notes in their predictions, enabling people to quickly make sense of the massive flood of digital data that better and faster transaction processing systems, cheap data storage, and increasing mobile and virtual access to it all has made available.

What do you think? Where you work is your problem lack of information, or the ability to sort through all the information you have?