Saturday, 14 December 2013

Social Recruiting



Effective Tips for Social Recruiting

You have already heard this many times before: social media websites are great tools for recruiting and sourcing potential job candidates. Identified, which is a well-known social scoring analytics firm, adds fuel to the fire by estimating that companies that have put social media into use for recruiting have 25% lower hiring costs per year. This estimation sounds too good for you to neglect it.
What happens if your company still hasn’t established its presence in the social media? How can you start recruiting and sourcing effectively? These simple tips will get you started in no time:
1. You already have existing contacts. Import them!
Launching social tools and getting connected to the contacts you already have is the easiest thing. Twitter and Facebook enable you to import your list of contacts, which will help you find people you know on these social tools. These imported contacts will be your foundation that will help you build your recruiting campaign – they will guide you towards people you would like to know and hire.

2. Use the employees that are well-connected on social media
Among your current employees, there are social media “stars” whose contacts you can use to manage and build your network. Make them advocates for your company and you will notice how they attract potential job candidates easily. However, you need to be careful with your approach; you cannot just ask your employees to connect you with every single contact they have. Instead of imposing that demand, you should learn from the way they use social networks. If they managed to create a successful social media presence, you can use their techniques for your own approach.

3. Promote your company through your employees
Most of your employees are already active members of social media communities, so they can help you enhance your recruiting efforts. If the company culture you have established is great, it won’t be a problem for them to promote you. Although the participation of all your employees is welcomed, you should first focus on the “best” ones (the ones who are well-accepted on social media websites and use them actively).

4. Pay attention to the public profile
Your company’s public profile will represent its values and success. Make sure to provide contact information and create a well-written profile with usage of keywords relevant to your business. If you make it easy for potential candidates to reach you, social recruiting will become much easier.

5. Don’t focus your social media presence on sales
If the main purpose of your social media presence is recruiting, you should promote your company as a great place to work. Your presence should be focused on building that brand perception instead of sales.

6. Add a personal approach to your profile
The profile of your company should definitely look professional, but you still need to add a touch of human presence in it without compromising the image of professionalism. Your profile is the first thing potential candidates will look at, so it has to create a strong impression if you want to get their interest.

7. Listen and learn!
Even if creating a social media presence seems easy and you think you know everything, you should still pay attention to the social media monitoring applications and learn from them. This information will give you knowledge about where you can find potential candidates, what topics interest them, and who else is trying to attract them.

8. Stay connected and contribute to the community
If you managed to connect with people from your industry, well done! Now you need to work on building and maintaining your reputation. The key to that is staying connected and hanging out where these people can be found. In order to find the niche network where people from your industry hang out online, you should ask and listen to the social media stars in your company.

9. Focus on one social media website at a time
If you want this campaign to be successful, you should choose one social media site and stick to it until you achieve strong presence. If you try to be successful on all of these websites at once, you will find them overwhelming and you won’t be able to devote your time to all profiles.

10. Share content that will be helpful to others
The right approach towards social recruiting is all about helping people. If you have a genuine wish to help more people with the content you share, your visibility will be improved and you will build your network more easily. You don’t have to develop unique content, although that’s advisable from time to time. Take your time to find and share useful videos and articles that are relevant to your industry and helpful for your followers, and you will soon attract many people that are worth recruiting.

Sunday, 1 December 2013

Surprising Facts... Creative managers and Employees



Employees don’t like working for creative managers

Carl Tsukahara is the executive vice president of marketing and product at Evolv, a big data company in San Francisco. For the past 25 years, Tsukahara has held senior marketing executive roles at a number of VC-funded enterprise software companies.
It’s a commonly held workplace belief that employees who succeed in their current roles should be rewarded with the chance to manage other employees. But big data reveals that what might be prized qualities for an employee are not necessarily traits that drive managerial success.
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Managers are the single most important influence on how long an employee stays at her job by a factor of six, which means that effective managers are essential to a healthy and engaged company culture. Attrition and engagement are material concerns for most businesses—employees who are unengaged cost the economy $350 billion yearly, according to a Gallup poll and “corporate directors identified talent management as their single greatest strategic challenge,” according to Harvard Business Review study.
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New data from Evolv reveals which leadership characteristics actually drive performance in an organization. The conclusions go against conventional, intuition-based business school wisdom from academics like Peter Drucker, Michael Porter and Dale Carnegie, perhaps because these luminaries didn’t have to deal with the challenges of today’s globalized and technical workforce.
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Are potentially good managers being overlooked because they don’t exhibit traditionally accepted “good” employee traits? Evolv’s research, conducted in 13 countries, 18 industries and across 500 million data points, debunk two common management myths: 
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Myth: “Managers who are creative are effective.”
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Truth: Employees don’t like working for creative managers. The higher managers test on the innovation and creativity scale, the more likely employees in customer-facing, front line roles are to leave. Idris Mootee recently argued in New York Times that management’s function isn’t about creating, but rather “ensuring that repetitive tasks were completed, improving economic efficiency, maximizing labor and machine productivity. Not a lot of creativity is needed; in fact, it might even be inefficient.”
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Myth: “The more educated my workforce is as a whole, the better employees will do—even in hourly positions.”

Truth: Education and experience do matter for leaders, but not for employees.
 For managers, having a technical degree, bachelor’s degree, or graduate degree allows managers to retain their employees at a higher rate. But for non-managerial roles, education does not serve as a predictor of performance at all. This finding comes at a time when college costs skyrocket; and the value of college has come into question for every American child.
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Managers matter even more as our workforce becomes more elastic and organization, more flat. Deloitte’s Human Capital Trends 2013 report finds that the single greatest challenge to effective management is managers’ ability to coach employees well. Picking the right people is, at the very least, a good place to start.