Hello reader! You are reading a blog about HR written by Heli Toivonen. If you are interested in stuff such as recruitment, employer branding, social media and HR technology with focus on Finland, just keep on reading..
Intunex provides here a list of the best web tools, which are currently available to support your business operations. The best thing is that most of the tools are free and you can also easily use them for private purposes. Nothing to add on that list.
A quick look on the career pages of the largest social media companies such as Facebook, YouTube, Google, Twitter and LinkedIn shows how they are successfully using their own tools in recruitment and employer branding. It seems to be very simple to create a positive image by giving open and honest information about the employees, their working conditions, atmosphere in the office, benefits, career opportunities etc.. One really gets the feeling that the employees truly like to work for these companies:
PS. What do you think about the new Twitter office?
Jobvite has listed 4 main reasons why social recruitment makes sense for companies in times of the digital revolution:
You can read the complete article here.
Jobvite also conducted a survey on the usage of social recruitment in the U.S.. The survey results showed that already 80 % of the companies are using or are planning to use social networks in recruitment. LinkedIn is clearly number one (95 %), followed by Facebook (59 %) and Twitter (42 %) when sourcing candidates on online networks.
It is obvious that the survey does not reflect the current situation in Europe but it clearly shows where the trend is going.
As soon as you have understood the importance of social revolution, you need to start rethinking your recruitment and employer branding strategies on the web (in case you haven’t done that yet). What would I do in HR if I got the task to build a presence for a company in online networks? I could think of the following steps:
If you are not familiar with the web 2.0 environment and you don’t have a digital native in your team, why don’t you hire an intern who is more than happy to spend his/her working days in social networks and get paid for that?
Google Zeitgeist listed the most popular searches for Finland in 2009:
Just to compare: in 2008, Youtube was leading and Facebook was on 8th place.
If you are a digital immigrant, you should read the speech about digital revolution by Rubert Murdoch, which he held to the American Society of Newspaper Editors in 2005. Here are a few quotations from his speech:
Like many of you in this room, I’m a digital immigrant. I wasn’t weaned on the web, nor coddled on a computer.
What is happening is, in short, a revolution in the way young people are accessing news. They don’t want to rely on the morning paper for their up-to-date information. They don’t want to rely on a god-like figure from above to tell them what’s important.
Instead, they want their news on demand, when it works for them.
They want control over their media, instead of being controlled by it.
They want to question, to probe, to offer a different angle.
In short, we have to answer this fundamental question: what do we – a bunch of digital immigrants — need to do to be relevant to the digital natives?
Probably, just watch our teenage kids.
What do they want to know, and where will they go to get it?
They want news on demand, continuously updated. They want a point of view about not just what happened, but why it happened.
The digital native doesn’t send a letter to the editor anymore. She goes online, and starts a blog.
We may never become true digital natives, but we can and must begin to assimilate to their culture and way of thinking.
PS. If you don’t know what a digital immigrant means, google for it :-)
