There’s a gulf between Chief Executives and their HR teams in many Companies. The much publicised “War For Talent” is a phrase coined over 20 years ago, but, never has it been more relevant to Companies today.
The truth is the best people rarely move jobs, the standard methods of just emailing or following people on Social Media to attract them to your Company rarely catch their attention. Chief Executives know this, they accept it’s a reality and actually know how best to attract these people with Employer Branding, Crowd Sourcing and Market Intelligence. The problem is that the vision of the CEO is rarely filtered down to the HR / Recruitment people whose job it is to directly attract talent, their targets are still based around the out-dated, volume centric techniques of attracting potential employee’s.
Employer Branding – “the sum of a company’s efforts to communicate to existing and prospective staff what makes it a desirable place to work, and the active management of a company’s image as seen through the eyes of its associates and potential hires.”
A great example is Google: http://www.google.co.uk/intl/en/jobs/lifeatgoogle/index.html, this page gives potential employees a real feel for what it means to work at Google, who you will be working with and what the job you are applying for might entail, ok they have a lot to shout about, but, it’s mostly about the people and work ethos. Not only do these videos portray a great Company image, I’m sure they also give the employee’s and departments involved in the production a sense of value and belonging to the Company.
Social Media is a fantastic platform for Employer Branding, it’s interesting and can be fun with Facebook page competitions or Q and A’s with people who work at your Company, all these touch points empower HR staff with points of reference e.g. take a look at our video to find out more about working with us.
Crowdsourcing and Market Intelligence go hand in hand. Although Crowdsourcing is not generally a phrase used with Talent Attraction, it’s relevant now, it’s about collaboration, communication and interaction with your target employment market. To identify your target employment market you need Market Intelligence to profile the person you are looking for using real-world trends so you know where to apply Crowdsourcing.
A prime example of not using Market Intelligence is using Social Media to post jobs which was seen (and still is by a lot of Companies) as the best way to make potential employees aware of your jobs. It did actually work for a short time before Job Boards and Recruitment Agency basically saturated feeds with thousands of jobs rendering it useless for everyone.
The only real effective way to use social media to identify potential people for your jobs is by using the intelligence behind it, and I don’t mean having a feed on your TweetDeck or automated follow bots. JobsTheWord have created a bespoke application which can identify legacy and real-time trends across not just Social Media but any online form of media, whether that be forums, blogs or personal websites. By simply taking keywords from your job specs we can tell you about the people who you are trying to find, imagine if you knew what the most common website your target market visit or even what their interests, favourite TV shows are etc.
It’s great that we are reading about Employer Branding, Crowdsourcing and Market Intelligence in things like The Economist, CEO’s largely accept the changes that need to be made, it’s time they empowered their HR Staff by taking the step across the gulf.
“The truth is the best people rarely move jobs, the standard methods of just emailing or following people on Social Media to attract them to your Company rarely catch their attention. Chief Executives know this, they accept it’s a reality and actually know how best to attract these people with Employer Branding, Crowd Sourcing and Market Intelligence”
Whilst I agree with the sentiment of this blog, I don’t agree with the above statement. I think recruitment is in the state it’s in exactly because Chief Executives DON’T know this. They know even less about Social Media.
Firms like Google aren’t indicative of the rest of the corporate world.