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Video Topic: Online Employer Reputation & Social Recruiting

Earlier this evening I watched Shannon speak live at ERE’s Social Recruiting Summit at Google (it was streamed live on uStream). If you didn’t have a chance to watch her talk live you can catch up by watching the embedded video above.

Shannon’s talk was full of actionable information sure to be a boon to employers looking to engage in social recruiting. As a first step Shannon asks you to start by listening – which in Web 2.0 talk is called online employer reputation management. If you’re looking for a good place to start with social recruiting and online employer reputation management, tools to use, or simply want a good overview of social recruiting strategy, I think you’ll find her talk an hour well spent.

A couple of gems I wrote down during her speech:

“…you don’t build your community, you need to find your community.”

and on engaging your community…

“…you have to move in, not just visit.”

Of course, once I found out there was a live stream of the ERE event I had fun telling family members to go watch Shannon live.

Our six year old son took it in stride:

me: “There’s mum all the way across the country where you were born! She’s live.”

John: “oh. What’s she doing?”

me: “she’s talking with people about the Internet.”

John: “cool, can I have some popcorn now?”

It was also particularly gratifying to have Shannon’s mom posting Facebook status updates about her daughter’s talk as she watched it.

- Julian

Julian Seery Gude, EXCELER8ion Founder and co-author

Julian co-authors EXCELER8ion with his better half Shannon Seery Gude. EXCELER8ion is a blog about digital engagement.

Most of his time Julian works on behalf of his clients at exceler8 and LOCAL Na8ion. Julian is launching an evolving digital engagement practice called Brand Trampoline where his first client is John Sumser of HRExaminer.com.

I have been writing about utilizing social media and social networking to connect to candidates and build candidate communities here on EXCELER8ion for about 3 years, and in just the last 6 months, I have felt a very powerful wave of corporate acceptance and understanding that they need to have a social recruiting strategy. Large corporate clients are asking en masse to have their teams educated on social recruiting techniques and it is the number one topic that I am asked to speak about.

Does this mean that you should launch a blog (like my favorite MicroSpotting.com), start a facebook page or use Twitter to hold public chats with candidates like E&Y, or should you develop a YouTube channel to distribute video like Deloitte? Should you create widgets to distribute your jobs, events, and other career related content? Should you develop a social game or an employee social network where candidates can interact and ask questions to get the insider’s perspective?

Maybe you should do all of this. But before you buy into the latest service trying to sell you a socket page or build you a community – Do you know the status of your Employer reputation online?

Are you regularly monitoring what people find in Google when they search for information about working for your company? (and they are searching – to the tune of hundreds of thousands of career related searches every month.) Do you know what people are talking about as it relates to working for your company? Do you know who is talking, where they are talking, if it is positive – negative – or just neutral, and why?

No, this isn’t a test. Auditing, analyzing, understanding, and monitoring your online employer reputation should be the first step to developing a successful social recruiting strategy. Without first listening to and understanding what people are already saying about you as an employer, without knowing what issues exist or topics that are already being discussed – your company is in no position to begin effectively participating.

Launching social recruiting initiatives without understanding the state of your online reputation first can be a recipe for disaster. You may discover that launching a recruiting blog is the way to go, but you might also discover that there are issues that are actively being discussed that should be addressed as a first step.

So how do you gather this info about your online reputation? Google “Online Reputation Management” and you will find a myriad of resources from how to set up Google Alerts to full monitoring software packages such as Radian6 and SM2.

The information that candidates find online about you as an employer can be highly influential and considered more credible than the info they find on your corporate career site. I will cover these options, time needed, and how to tailor/focus your monitoring efforts to discussions that affect Employer Brand and candidate opinions specifically in the weeks to come.

Shannon co-authors EXCELER8ion with her other half Julian Seery Gude. EXCELER8ion is a blog about digital engagement.

Shannon is a regular speaker in the HR & Talent Acquisition space where she’s known for her work in social media and integrated digital engagement. By day Shannon works at a Recruitment Marketing Agency.

Today’s candidates have high expectations for the experience that is offered by a company committed to attracting and retaining Talent. From the type of information that an interested candidate is able to find about working at your company, to how initial connections are made and a relationship established, to the experience on the Career Web Site. And it doesn’t stop there. Once a successful candidate becomes a hire, they also have high expectations for the on-boarding experience, the Intranet, and even after they leave in the form of the availability of Alumni networks.

This expectation isn’t set by the type of experience they are used to having on career or internal company sites, rather it is set by the type of online experience that are available on much of the rest of the web where they are using social networks, blogs and articles that allow comments, and discussion forums to connect and interact.

In order for corporations to successfully use social computing tools to connect and build relationships with talent in an authentic way that builds credibility and trust, an internal resource needs to be identified to foster this “candidate community”. While consultants and agencies can help provide knowledge and guidance, brand reputation monitoring and process research, technical support, web development work, and ROI metrics – the actual building, evangelizing, and cultivation of the community HAS to be done by the people at the company itself.

“But who is going to manage and moderate this?”

Utilization of social tools and the publishing of work related content will/should/already does happen through many employees at a company (how many of your people have facebook pages?) – but the Champion of how encouraging, leveraging, and distributing this work related content should fall under a specific owner.

This position may eventually be known by many different titles, but for our purposes here, I will call this position: Candidate Community Manager (CCM). Jeremiah Owyang outlines the main Tenets of all “Community Managers” in his post from November of 2007 – The Four Tenets of the Community Manager. For the specific “Candidate Community” as it relates to recruiting the best to work with your company, these tenets are just as relevant:

1. Candidate Community Advocation – An advocate for the candidates that focuses on listening and understanding their expectations, monitoring and participating in the conversations that are taking place in a variety of online channels such as social networks like facebook, job seeker forums like Indeed.com Forums, and feedback sites such as JobVent. By being good at listening and understanding the candidate community, the CCM can focus all content programming on the interests and needs of their candidate community members and help to evangelize these needs with company stakeholders.
2. Employer Brand & Reputation Ambassadorship – The employer brand evangelist heads the team that communicates career opportunities, company culture, promotes career events, and highlights awards and news items through tradition and channels. I currently know of no better example of using social channels to communicate company culture and shine a light on the many employer brand evangelists (read *your employees*) than what Ariel Meadow Stallings is doing for Microsoft through her blog Microspotting and the corresponding flickr photstream, Twitter profile and videos.
3. Online communication and analysis skills – A candidate community manager has to “get it” when it comes to social computing. They will need to be savvy users of social networks, understand RSS and content portability and distribution, blog participation even if they do not author one, how to create and respond to forum threads, how to encourage comments, as well as how to effectively and authentically use microblogging sites like twitter and plurk. The successful CCM literally has to be an active member of the online communities. Having a deep understanding of the best way to respond to the community and how to address negative or even inflammatory issues and deal with online trolls. Finally, in order to understand user patterns and site effectiveness, the CCM need to know how to get access to and to understand site analytics reports.
4. Candidate focused site requirements gathering and process improvements – In order for a candidate community manager to be able to meet the needs of their community, they have to have a true understanding of their on and offline reputation as an employer, as well as an understanding of the effectiveness and candidate perspective on the current recruiting process. In short – they have to be the expert at knowing how their members define an “excellent recruiting experience” and be able to communicate this internally and to consulting/agency partners in order to present the business case to secure funding, as well as to communicate actual solution requirements to the teams that will develop and implement them.

This begins to outline the tenets for a true champion of social recruiting and the candidate community within a company. The results for a progressive company that implements a social recruiting strategy, lead and fostered by a Candidate Community Manager will be increased relevant and real online conversation about their employer brand, their culture and job opportunities that exist. This will lead to increased credibility, exposure and most importantly, an increased understanding of your target – The Candidate.

Shannon co-authors EXCELER8ion with her other half Julian Seery Gude. EXCELER8ion is a blog about digital engagement.

Shannon is a regular speaker in the HR & Talent Acquisition space where she’s known for her work in social media and integrated digital engagement. By day Shannon works at a Recruitment Marketing Agency.