Social Media and HR

Ready or Not, It Is Here

Are you using Social Media for recruiting or are you thinking that you should be using it but feel overwhelmed by the enormous amount of information in cyberspace and being touted at various conferences and seminars? If you are somewhat tentatively using it for recruiting purposes or made some attempt to learn more, you are in good company and it is understandable if you have merely dipped your toe in the waters not quite sure what to do with it all.

Social Media is simply a series of tools that uses technology to build communities that share information, ask and answer questions, educate, collaborate, and connect. Why do we want to build internal and external communities that use Social Media tools and what does this have to do with HR? Let’s start with asking the same question about HR - what does HR do? Share information, ask and answer questions, educate, collaborate and connect. Social Media tools create the ability to start, monitor, and participate in discussions about your organization both among the employee base and with everyone outside of the organization. HR professionals can use Social Media tools to monitor and participate in discussions within the organization but also gain knowledge about what is being said about their organization on various Social Media sites and develop cost effective and wide ranging recruitment programs.

If the organization is not participating in a meaningful way they not only lose the opportunity to build communities and present a balanced discussion about it but they take the very real risk of allowing the conversation to go unchecked. And it will, actually it is whether you are paying attention or not.

HR professionals have a great opportunity to take the lead with adopting Social Media and demonstrating how effective it can be by using the competencies that all great HR professionals develop as part of their practice. In previous posts I commented that collaboration may be the most effective competency that HR professionals can use in their work. Being skilled at collaborating can help develop communities within an organization and externally with customers (both business to consumer and business to business organizations will benefit from such communities). A must have for developing strong collaboration skills is to also continuously update your communication skills and in the world of Social Media, communication skills can make all the difference to attaining your goals and minimizing or mitigating negative outcomes.

A real world example of one thing that Social Media tools can do to help you in your work occurred in a LinkedIn group for HR professionals in British Columbia. A member of the group asked for sources of information to help write a Social Media policy. Within a few hours he had three of the best resources and examples available on this topic. This saved him hours of searching for the information himself and the cost of paying an external consultant to help with his project. It is fairly easy to imagine how many other uses of Social Media are available to help you in your work.

We are currently working on a book that takes Social Media out of the realm of hype and conflicting sources and uses plain business protocols to start the Social Media journey for professionals. This book will provide references to sources that our research over the past year unearthed as reliable and user friendly for those of us that are not technical whizzes but use technology to improve our work.

Do you feel like you want to take the lead on Social Media in your organization but are not sure where to start? Does the constantly evolving world of Social Media create confusion about how to choose which tools that will help accomplish your goals effectively? My goal is to bring the discussion down to earth and help untangle the complexities of Social Media. I will continue to post on this topic over the next while based on the thoughts raised in conversations with HR professionals.

What thoughts cross your mind when you think about Social Media? What do you wish would exist to make the learning process easier and faster?