Wednesday, July 30, 2014

Recruitment is Adapting to the Social Environment



imageThere’s no doubt about it – social is the talk of the town. Almost every business, industry, and company is trying to tap into the opportunities that the explosion in social media provides. And almost all the leaders across IBM are telling their teams to get on the social media train.

Leveraging social media has become imperative for companies to engage with customers, employees and business partners. Marketing & Communications department has been the first to jump on the bandwagon to engage in two-way communication models to reach out to customers and increase sales. In the age of information overload, attention becomes the currency and branding acquires center stage.

Can HR remain impervious to this excellent opportunity?

Definitely not. After all, HR is all about people – attracting, engaging and retaining talent. And with social being one of the fastest and most dynamic ways to connect and interact with the workforce today, we see the rise of HR job roles that has components of social elements embedded to it.

Recruitment is taking the lead in harnessing the power of social media to attract and engage prospective candidates. With the responsibility of telling the outside world about the strengths of our culture, employer brand, and getting a targeted set of qualified talent interested in working for us – IBM has fully embraced the concept of Social Recruiting.

What is Social Recruiting and why is it relevant to IBM?

Social recruiting revolutionizes the recruitment experience for both candidates and hiring managers. IBM has transformed  its social media strategies to make recruiting processes more transparent and to tap into and engage with the talent pools.

In the process, we talk about how to enhance the IBM employer brand on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Pinterest, etc. - to advertise jobs, showcase our company culture and provide a glimpse to candidates about the working environment, growth, learning, career and development opportunities.

But social recruiting is so much more than that. It’s also about tracking and analyzing all the available data to know where the hard-to-find qualified talent is hiding, what he/she is doing, what he/she is up to; monitoring workforce trends to know how our candidates are moving and what would make them interested in us. It’s about allowing our candidates access not just to our brand, but to our recruiters as well; it’s making our recruitment process more real-time and transparent so they know what to expect from us.

In other words, social recruiting is about connecting with our market in a dynamic and relevant manner that will make the best candidates want us even before we need them; getting the word out about the brand and our opportunities; and gathering all the data back in and putting it together to make the best, most informed decision to keep our pipeline, and our company, growing.

How does IBM do Social Recruiting?

IBM’s online recruiting has come a long way from the days of posting job ads and praying the right candidate will see it and think it’s interesting. In the recent months, we have moved from the static online advertising to an integrated and social form of interacting with our mostly passive market. Our transformation capitalizes on the strength and reach of social networks that are necessary to attract a talented and diverse workforce.

Using the five key dimensions of social recruiting, we have deployed a recruitment strategy which provides integration, optimization, interaction and collaboration.

  1. Career Destination Sites – Establish our online presence through sites that not only talk about IBM’s employer brand, and keep our market informed of the latest news and interesting stories about the company and the industry, but also post career opportunities and our ability to make it easy for them to apply using their ready online profiles.
  2. Community Management – Build relationships with our target talent pool, and keep them interested and connected with our brand via engaging them in live and active conversations.
  3. Advertising – Actively drive and advertise our jobs to the market for active jobseekers because, after all, if we do a great job with our brand building, we will turn them into active and eager candidates.
  4. Sourcing Talent – Create tools that allow us to reach our target market, including passive job seekers, and to generate leads of qualified talent
  5. Referrals – Turn employees and applicants into referrers using social media tools. One example of this is the use of the widely successful social referral tool, a tool that allows us to harness the power of our strong workforce to talk about our brand through social channels, and expand our network.

In order to stay up to speed, we are quickly adapting all these dimensions to a mobile environment.

With all the analytics available across these five dimensions, we are finding out that there is so much more to be done, and so much more to learn. The whole social landscape is just so dynamic and is continuously evolving. But as we continue to explore and analyze the ever changing dynamics of social media, and as we move forward with the integration of tools provided by Kenexa, and we can only expect better things to come.
Authored by: Ruchi Bhatia and Cheryl Ann

Sunday, July 6, 2014

Vacation and An experiment ~ WOW HR

Slogged and enjoyed every bit , for3 months into my new role  ,  and earned the recognition. for good work.





Took a planned mini vacation. I had planned this leave early in the year. Usually, I proceed on leave twice a year. One around mid year and second around Christmas New Year. My ex- US functional manager Craig is an organized  Manager. We have a global tool - Vacation planner so that team knows which team members are proceeding on leave and when . It is quiet a transparent process. Each one in the team knows about other team member's leave and can plan accordingly to minimize impact of absence on business. Most of the time, team members volunteer to be each other's back up.

I traveled to  MC- Leodganj to escape heat and summer in Delhi ~ A spiritual place , provided moments of Solitude. However, on vacation , I had 3 work related calls and an opportunity to connect on a call with VP,HR IBM India .  Work - Life Integration as they call it.

A very interesting thing happened while I was on vacation and had free mindshare.
I pinged Nabomita ( CiteHR, Community Manager and a dear friend )

Ruchi : 
Hi Nabomita-  Do you know good HR group on WhatsApp to join ? Thanks in advance

Nabomita :
Haha...please add me if you find one :D found many but not really good.

Ruchi :
Ask Kunjal, Do you have his phone number ?

Nabomita  Hmmm..Sure. Lets speak to him  . Adding you two on whatsapp

Ruchi : Thanks buddy
Lets start an HR Group on Whatsapp ourselves. What say ?

Nabomita :
So sweet :) You read my mind:-) Let me know who else should we add.


And thats how instantly ~ WOWHR was Founded.

Kunjal, Micky, Shweta, Ankita , Amita, Anindya, Paras, Krishna, Sarang , Sandeep joined in quickly.

Achyut, Rakshita  came along later.



















I also learnt that Shweta is doing a thesis on Employer Branding . She is willing to share her thesis with WOW HR members and many of us showed interest.



Disappointed in Gautam Ghosh , who is sort of in a hurry to write the obituary,  mis-represented the facts on twitter.  How could I keep quiet.







Members are brewing lot of interesting ideas on structure for discussions , guidelines for the group.
I will wait to see what comes of this impromptu experiment. One can witness Sharing and Co-Creation,  Value Co-Creation is what keeps such groups sustainable.
















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