The 1-2-3 punch of social media, relationship building and recruiting

I talked last time about building relationships and how you can use them for applying for jobs and for recruiting techniques. You don’t really want to cold call a place unless you have no other means of getting in touch – if you have a personal connection, you’re way more likely to attract the attention of the employer or the candidate. It’s something that’s been tried and true – that strategy has been so effective that there’s reason to believe in its accuracy. 

But let’s add to that with this whole social media thing that’s come about and revolutionizing the way we communicate. Like DC Dietitian mentioned (thanks for your comments!), you can use these tools to accomplish the same goals in a very different fashion, whether that’s landing yourself an awesome job (and congrats on that Jen!) or finding a stellar candidate that you’d like to bring on.

First, from the perspective of the job seeker, there are a lot of new ways to connect with brands. Though you may not want them in your news feed all the time, Liking a corporate Facebook page does get you one step closer to the organization and puts you in a position to meet others. You can follow organizations on both Twitter and LinkedIn, the former giving you a quicker and more concise way to get their updates and chat with them (assuming they aren’t too big to respond to every single thing that comes their way and that they don’t just push out their own news) and the latter giving you insight into recent staff changes and potential information that may come up. And you can use Twitter and hashtags like #HireFriday or #JobAngels to further your goals. And that’s just the beginning.

As for the employer side, while the relationship building hasn’t changed, the way you communicate with potential recruits has significantly. On the larger scale, if you’re not regularly publishing content, your talent is going to miss you – you can’t expect to establish your brand with 1 Tweet a week or 1 Facebook page post per month. When you’re pushing two-way content out (i.e. not just stuff about you, because no one cares, thank you Chris Brogan), you’ll build an audience and engage with people who have an interest in building a community.

On a smaller scale, searching bios and posts on LinkedIn and Twitter give you access to the things you’re looking for – for example, I can search for “architect” and come up with thousands upon thousands who have used that term recently. You can participate in industry livetweets to meet people. I partake once in a month in #aiachat, a conversation for architecture industry folks put on by the American Institute of Architects, where we discuss things related to the practice. You can convey your brand and share insight about the way you do business, but more importantly, you get to know people more personally and share great ideas with them – it’s a win-win for everyone.

This is just the tip of the iceberg. I want to leave some food for thought and not make this too long, but there’s so much more to be uncovered. What are your ideas about social media and recruiting, from either the jobseeker or employer perspective? What kinds of issues may come up with that? Any thoughts about the direction this is taking the application/recruiting process? Would love to hear from you!

You sure you can wear all those hats?

Last week I went to a social media learning/networking event sponsored by the Society for Marketing Professional Services, which was attended by marketers in the Architecture/Engineering industry – and me. The event (as all good ones should be) was followed by a happy hour, where I talked to the membership coordinator about what the benefits of joining were. She rattled off a solid list – learn best practices from marketers, meet marketers, etc. – but when I asked her what the benefits of joining were for me, the HR guy, as I’ve branded myself, she paused and said that she’d have to think about it.

I came up with an answer for myself. This whole social media thing has made it clear to me how important it is to get out of your comfort zone and wear multiple hats, so becoming the first HR person in a marketing organization can only help me to gain new perspectives and share my point of view with others.

When talking social media, as an HR guy, you gotta jump in and be a marketer – after all, isn’t HR just internal marketing? You should play the “employer branding” card and get your name out there on the PR front, strategize and think about how your campaign could bring in new business, technically work things on the IT front, develop a design of a Facebook page and Twitter background to be aesthetically pleasing, write what’s going to go out on your channels…OK, I could go on, but you get the point. You can’t just do one thing – you gotta dabble in it all. And work with others that can do the same so you’re not floundering by yourself.

The best example of this is writing a set of social media guidelines. It combines the writing of HR policies with a knowledge of social media usage and an understanding of an employee population. And it needed the marketing/PR push to make sure people read the guidlines and understand them without being turned off by the whole thing. If that’s not multiple hats, then I don’t know what is.

And incidentally, this is the exact topic that we’re talking about at the Social Media Club Breakfast in DC next Tuesday. So if you’re in the area, come out to Busboys & Poets on Tuesday 7/20 to see me and my colleagues/friends speak on the panel about crossing the departmental boundaries and working as a team to put together an effective campaign for social media! Should be a rockin’ time, so come out!

You say goodbye, Facebook, and I say hello.

Someone I connected with on Twitter asked me how I handle the generational gap with things related to technology. She mentioned that there are some who are not open to new technological advancements and that these same folks rarely want to get retrained (or trained for the first time, for that matter) to use the latest tech devices/sites/etc.

It’s pretty ironic that this is being directed at me, since I’ve referred a couple of times to my record when it comes to patience. But suffice to say I’ve been able to keep my cool, which has done wonders to help me push our social media campaign forward, even when it’s something that the people in charge aren’t as comfortable with.

So let me take a step back and say that a few months ago, I was constantly at odds with the person (a cusp Boomer/Xer) who is ultimately responsible for the campaign. It seemed like everything I was proposing (which was obviously perfect) was being ignored and/or shot down. My frustration got to me and I started pushing and pushing with a frequency that I later regretted. Let’s just say, this doesn’t get you anywhere. Trust me.

After wandering down this path, I let it be for a while. After a long enough break where I resisted every urge to raise new ideas, I got in touch and started to share my knowledge instead of hounding about what needs to be done. I realized that while technology is something I’m comfortable experimenting with, not everyone (including my colleague) feels that way. Sometimes, people need to have their hands held while navigating the technology. They need help to get all of the pieces of the puzzle. So once I imparted what I knew, I worked with my colleague to build a strategy, combining the knowledge and expertise we had in different arenas. And now, we’re a team, which has allowed us to put out a product that I’m proud of (warning shameless Facebook page plug!): http://www.facebook.com/SmithGroup.JJR.

So, how do I deal with generational-related technology challenges? I deflate my ego, put myself in someone else’s shoes and share my knowledge with the people that are struggling. While they claim they don’t want to be trained, in my experience, they just don’t want to spend the time because they think they can’t do it and they don’t want to have to do the work to get themselves up to speed. But if you’re willing to shelve your air of superiority (and believe me, if you’re asking ‘why is my generation more apt at technology’, you think you’re better) and take the time to explain to them the value and then dive into detail about the way things work, they’ll appreciate you and acknowledge that you want to help, that you want to work from the same page and that you’re looking for consensus before moving forward. With those things in mind, these folks will definitely be more willing to look to you for your input while crafting a strategy. They’ll respect you for what you know and involve you instead of pushing you away.

How have you dealt with things like this? Did I miss something? Am I throwing a lot of corporate-speak crap out? What do you think?

The Social Media train is leaving the station

It’s been a whirlwind of activity over the past month with our social media campaign.

As a quick refresher, this is something we’ve been talking about for a few months and something I’ve had the chance to help to push it forward. You may recall that I’ve been slightly underwhelmed at the pace of progress, but looking back now, it’s incredible how fast we moved. 9 months ago, this wasn’t even on our radar. Now we’ve got products. I’ll put one in the win column.

The first step was authoring social media guidelines to give our folks an idea of the point of all of this and a framework in which to operate. Unlike your stereotypical corporate policies that say no to everything, this was an encouragement to get involved coupled with tips and information to keep in mind when doing so.

Those out of that way, we moved to YouTube. We have a couple of professional videos that were filmed to showcase our completed buildings featuring commentary from the lead projects designers and the client representatives. That was an easy one. We had an account setup already, so it was a matter of loading the videos on, setting up some quick administrative stuff and tagging the videos (so that a search for “architecture” would yield our videos, since realistically, who’s going to be looking for our company name in a search field?). Check.

Except it wasn’t as simple as that. Almost instantly after the upload, we got our first test. Negative comments on our video. We worked on a project at Gallaudet University, a University for the deaf and hard of hearing in DC, but we didn’t think to put subtitles on it. We got 4 users reminding us that this wasn’t our brightest move. You can almost see the amorphous “corporate” (made up of social media-phobic Baby Boomers, always) putting an end to the whole project right then and there – this is, after all, their biggest fear realized. But, quick as a bunny, we hopped to subtitling the video in its entirety. We quickly re-uploaded it and we thanked our reviewers for the comments. Though I don’t necessarily agree with the removal of the video that took place while we were hastening to add words (leaving a blank page and deleting the negative comments and reviews), I was pleased to see that we handled all of this professionally with relative ease in the span of about 24 hours. It was probably good that we got a test like this up front, since it’s almost a guarantee that we’ll have to deal with something similar fairly soon.

I’m in the process of building a Facebook page, which is coming along swimmingly. That’s scheduled to come out in mid-April. You can expect shameless promotion here when it’s out.

“He who moves not forward, goes backward.” – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Recruiting 2.0 – Finding Candidates with Social Media

Edit: I wanted to include the Tweet that we sent out to give you a better look at it. You’ll see it below now.

Right now, we’re actually trying to fill an opening (take THAT economy!). Since the hiring manager and I have a slight obsession with social media, we decided to try to use our online tools to find some candidates. It’s not immediately pressing that we fill it and the position requires ingenuity and creativity anyway, so we figured we’d give it a shot.

We’re not finished with the hiring process, but in the hopes of starting a series of posts, here’s what the process has looked like so far.

I started by taking a look at how job seekers might find a job using social media. Mashable has a great resource for that. To give a quick summary, it’s all about building a network of people within brands, not necessarily the brands themselves. I did a search on Twitter for #jobs and saw what others were doing to get their ads across. It’s important that the tweet have the company name in it, refer people to a job posting (so they know what they’re applying for) and be creative enough that it actually catches attention instead of staying generic. I looked in all of the LinkedIn groups I am a member of and searched through the job boards. I also knew of Job Angels through Mark Stelzner and wanted to find a way to incorporate that in there because it’s an incredibly great thing to be involved with.

We posted the job to our website as a starting point. The hiring manager and I both tweeted out the job with a link to the posting. That included #jobangels to connect with the group of folks associated with that effort. We saw a couple of retweets within the first few hours. I put it on my personal Facebook account (since we’re not quite up to a corporate page yet) and my LinkedIn account to see what might come about. I posted the job to my groups/subgroups on LinkedIn to attract some attention from people I might not be directly connected with. I also put up something on Brazen Careerist in a couple of networks. And to wrap up the first wave, we posted something to a niche job board.

We’ve seen some candidates, but nothing that’s blown us away and not in overwhelming numbers. I’ll keep you posted on our progress.

Any other thoughts on what to do? It’s a learning process here, so I’m open to suggestions.

If only Facebook had been around in the 1950s…

We’ve been talking a lot about whether or not social media is the way to go for our firm. By the fact that I have a blog (and the fact that if you’re reading this, you’ve probably found out about it through the link I put on Twitter), you can guess my stance on whether or not we should do it (hint: it’s yes. Duh.). There’s been a lot of resistance from folks who aren’t familiar with things like blogging, Twitter, Facebook, etc. These people know that these things are part of the amorphous yet trendy “social media movement”, but they don’t really get what’s behind them and don’t really use them. These (typically over 50) folks are contributing to statistics that show a huge age divide in the use of Facebook. And from my vantage point, they’re holding up the whole process and making everything so difficult.

So what’s the deal? Different people have different theories, but I’m here’s an alternative perspective for you.

Gen Y grew up with computers at their fingertips. As social media spawned more social media, there was always a place to go to make a statement and share info, be it news or gossip. For folks like me who grew up using an online diary like a Livejournal or a Xanga, we were blogging (even if it was in a mediocre form of the medium in which I vented all of my teenage angst – man that was lame…) before we even knew what the term meant! When Facebook evolved, it wasn’t difficult for us to pick it up and use it to connect with our high school and college friends and later people from our childhoods or from our jobs because we were used to it. When we want to connect with someone, we do it. When we see someone updated their status, we don’t care if we haven’t spoken in months, we comment on it. We share with the world whatever we want, if only just to talk about ourselves, again and again and again (have I mentioned this is my blog and I’ll say whatever I want? Oh, just checking…). We’re honest to a fault and we’re not shy about saying what’s on our mind.

But Baby Boomers (and some shy Gen Xers) aren’t really comfortable with that. They’re not as willing to share things with the whole world because that’s not how they were raised. There’s no “here’s my two cents” from BBs – if it’s important, they’ll speak up, but if it’s not, they’ll keep it to themselves and move on, plain and simple. As one Baby Boomer said to me today, “If you had something negative to say, you were told to shut up”. And that’s because there was nowhere else to turn, no online portal to go to. It was keep your chin down and do what you’re told to do or get out. So now, when there are a million channels to use, they’re not only overwhelmed from not being familiar with all of the options, but they’re conflicted between branching out and trying something new (and BBs aren’t really known for their willingness to play around with technology) and their reticence to rock the boat.

You can start to see it from their point of view, eh?