Attracting Talent to Your Organization [VIDEO]

Shane Creamer, partner at Granite Consulting, talks to HR Reporter about the current trends in recruiting and how to attract employees to a company.

Finding a Job on Google+

On July 22, 2011, Google+ hit 20 million unique visitors. Of these 20 million visitors, 60% of them are between the ages of 18 and 25 and 63% of them are male. As Google+ continues to grow, users are beginning to find various uses for the fledgling social network. One of these uses is recruitment and job search since most of the users are early adopters and industry experts looking for like-minded people. Here are some early tips for how to use Google+ for you job search.

Announce your job search
Let your network know that you are looking for a job by mentioning it in your "About" section or by posting a status update. Try to communicate your unique skillset and value to the company and job that you want while not appearing desperate.

Create a job search circle
Obviously, you do not want prospective employers to see your weekend party pictures or your  sarcastic status updates. One of the primary appeals of Google+ is that you can send out tailored messages to different circles. Create a circle for contacts at companies that you want to work with and demonstrate to them that you are professional and knowledgable in your desired field of work. When other users see who is in your circles, it will portray youself as connected in the industry.

Talk over Hangouts

Invite the contacts in your job search circle to discuss industry topics in a Google Hangout. If you are truly in-the-know with the latest industry issues, you will portray yourself as an expert and someone who is truly passionate about his or her work. Another tactic is to set up an informational interview through Hangouts. Hangouts can save employers time while adding value for little to no cost.

Follow relevant Sparks
Google's Sparks are a great way to stay informed on topics of your choosing. Sparks brings in great content from all over the Internet that you can then share with your network, particularly your circle of prospective employers.

Source: Mashable

Google+: A New Way to Recruit

With the arrival of Google+, many recruiters who have embraced social media are wondering, "Should I bother or is this another failed attempt at social networking by Google". While the user base remains intentionally small, there seems to be the sentiment among critics and users alike that Google+ has staying power. Some have tried to make comparisons with other social networks by saying that it is "Facebook for adults" or "Twitter with a better interface" but Google+ really is less of a social network and more of a means to share content.

At the moment, Google is still working on its platform for businesses (which won't be ready until late 2011) and have been actively disabling business accounts that have already been created on Google+. The reason, as Google Product Manager Christian Oestlien puts it, is that "how users communicate with each other is different from how they communicate with brands" Oestlien hints that the business version of Google+ will include deep analytics and the ability to connect with products. Google intends to offer a test trial of the business platform to a limited number of companies over the next few months, much like how the personal version of Google+ has been limited to invitees.

That does not mean that recruiters should wait until their company is on Google+ before joining the network themselves. The "Circles" feature, which is Twitter's Lists function, is a great way keep tabs on potential candidates and organize them into groups. For example, you can create circles for each job you are filling and place candidates in as many of the job circles as you wish. If you find a candidate that is worth pursuing further, you can set up a "hangout"to enable voice and video chat with that candidate or with the entire circle.

Google+ can also be a valuable resource for screening and identifying what candidates are truly passionate about. While Google+ allows for more private sharing of content and information than Facebook (by letting users selectively choose which circles to share with), it is fully integrated with other Google products showing images from blogs that the user maintains on Google Blogs and any +1s from Google Search. While you may not be able to see a candidate's scandalous party pictures and controversial status updates, you will be able to get a sense of his or her interests and passions.

Lessons from Catbert: Downsizing

If you are downsizing do your best to ensure everyone's dignity and pride is intact. They will certainly appreciate it.

Lessons from Catbert: Employee Surveys

Create an open environment where employees are free and comfortable offering feedback on how to improve the organization.

Mobile & Gen Y Recruitment [VIDEO]

The Purpose of Social Media Policies [INFOGRAPHICS]

63% of companies with a social media policy believe they are effective in maintaining productivity.

(via Granite Consulting)

Lessons from Catbert: Align policy with culture

Do your company policies match your organizational culture? If not, employees will find it hard to buy into the culture and in turn, .your company.

Talent Wars: An Arms Race in Tech [INFOGRAPHIC]

By 2015, 60% of the new jobs being created will require special skills held by only 20% of the population. In contrast, in 1991 less than half of U.S. jobs required special workers.

Creative Ways to Create an Online Resume

Your resume is boring. How do you expect to stand out in a crowd of job seekers when your black-and-white, list-formatted resume and formulaic cover letter blend with all the rest?

Luckily the Internet is here to save you. With the coming of social media resumes, video resumes and visual resumes, the world of job seeking just got a lot more interesting.

Your Website
First, if you don’t have a personal website or blog, get one. It’s a great way to showcase your passions, thoughts and experience and portray yourself as an expert, whether you are searching for a job or not. If you name your website after yourself, it will probably rank highly when people search for your name online.

Consider listing your resume (or at least an “about me” page) on your website, so site visitors can learn more about you.

Hagan Blount, a self-described writer, editor and producer, hosts a compelling infographic resume (pictured above) on his personal website. The “Resume” tab on his site includes his resume, alongside a stream of his most recent tweets. The resume is creative in that it includes a non-traditional approach to his professional (and personal) history, complete with fun stats, QR codes and recommendation quotes from influential business people.

Document Sharing Websites
You probably already have a .doc or .pdf format of your resume in your job-searching arsenal. To get the most out of it, upload it to document-sharing websites such as SlideShare or Scribd as Erica Swallows has done.

Both sites enable viewers to download, embed and share your resume, giving it the opportunity for many more eyes to see it. As a bonus, these sites ranked highly on search engines so the next time someone is searching on Google for your resume, it’s likely he or she will stumble upon your uploaded versions on these sites.

Both sites allow users to upload revisions of a document. As you change your resume, you can replace it on SlideShare or Scribd to keep it up-to-date. This is particularly useful because the URL never changes, so you won’t lose search engine optimality or confuse recruiters who already have links to previous versions. Furthermore, the view count on each document never starts over, and the upload date, tags, description and document title stay the same.

Slideshare tends to have the best upload quality, because the formatting of the preview stays true to the original document. But it’s advisable to use both sites, as search rankings can vary.

Try to get creative, like Chris Ferdinandi, a human resources professional based in Boston. His visual resume has nearly 29,000 views and showcases his “not-so-traditional” approach.

Social Media Resume

View more presentations from Chris Ferdinandi

LinkedIn
Of course, there’s always LinkedIn, a staple of the professional’s online presence. LinkedIn has become the standard online professional network, and like Facebook and Twitter, it often appears near the top of search inquiries involving people, as a result of its high ranking across search engines. When a potential employer searches for information about you online, you’ll want some semblance of your professional life to appear in search results.

Once employers find your LinkedIn profile, you’ll want it to be flawless and 100% complete. For the most part, you can bling out your profile by filling in the basics, asking for meaningful recommendations, using value-added applications and becoming an expert with LinkedIn Answers. For more detailed tips on creating a picture-perfect LinkedIn profile, check out my recent post on “HOW TO: Optimize Your LinkedIn Profile.”

(via Mashable)

Why People Network With You [VIDEO]

(via Granite Consulting)

Lessons from Catbert: Employee complaints

Create an open system where employees can vent their frustrations or deal with their grievances with other employees.

Employment Value Proposition (EVP) [VIDEO]

(via Granite Consulting)

The Who, Why, and How of Twitter [INFOGRAPHIC]

The average Twitter user is a female, Hispanic, 20-something college graduate. Although many companies want to attract diverse, young and educated workers, only 10% of the top 100 Fortune Global 500 Companies use Twitter to release job information. What this means is that there is tremendous potential for any company who embraces social media recruitment.

Lessons from Catbert: Employee Potential

It is your job to see the potential in every employee and work tirelessly to help each and every one of them fulfill that potential.

The Ins and Outs of a Social Media Policy

Whether you like it or not, users online are talking about your brand - postively and negatively. More and more organizations are realizing that they need to be proactive with handling their brand online by establishing a social media policy. Your corporate social media policy is a set of guidelines that employees will be able to turn to when they are unsure about how to approach social media.

However, this does not mean that you should write a social media policy as a first step before venturing into social media. "It might be beneficial not to create some arbitrary rules without first seeing where the opportunities and risks really are” says Chad Houghton, the director of e-media and business development at the Society for Human Resource Management. The social media policy should be tailored to your organization's unique culture and presence on social media and address company-specific issues.

Many companies already have communications policies that provide guidelines for how employees use the phone or e-mail. A social media policy can simply be an extension of the communications policy, adapted for the online world. Scott Monty, the head of social media at Ford Motor Company, agrees that if there are existing policies in place, "amending them to include the changes to communications platforms and anticipating future changes should occur ASAP” Eric B. Meyer, an Associate in the Labor and Employment Group of Dilworth Paxson LLP, emphasizes that employees “should be made aware that company policies on anti-harassment, ethics and company loyalty extend to all forms of communication both inside and outside the workplace.”

Writing a Social Media Policy
Like most rules, an effective social media policy should focus on what employees can do as opposed to what they can not. Shannon Seery Gude, VP of Digital for Bernard HODES Group, believes that they key to a successful social media  policy is for authenticity to exist "without the need for what may be perceived as forced company morality” You want to provide a guide to best practices rather than a list of punishable offenses.

The policy should set boundaries for personal content, especially with corporate accounts. Your employees should understand that although they have the right to freedom of speech, companies have the right to monitor employee use of social media, even if it occurs outside of the office. The Internet expression "dooced" is used to describe when an employee loses his or her job because of something that was said online. One of the most recent and well-known examples of someone getting dooced is comedian Gilbert Gottfried, who was fired from his job as the Aflac spokesduck after tweeting a joke about the devastating earthquake in Japan.

Although a goal of social media is to establish transparency, Meyer states that organizations need to "make employees aware of any obligation they may have to protect confidential or proprietary information.” Although this can be accomplished with good judgment on the employees part, it is much easier to simply state what information is confidential in the social media policy.


Below is an example of a social media policy from Headset Bros. Most organizations post their social media guidelines online such as Canada Post, IBM, and Intel.
HEADSET BROS – SOCIAL MEDIA POLICY

Sources:
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Why talent communities are the future of recruiting [VIDEO]

(via Granite Consulting)

Worldwide Internet Traffic in 2015 [INFOGRAPHIC]

Cisco's Visual Networking Index predicts that by 2015, Internet traffic will quadruple to 80.5 exabytes and that Asia will surpass North America as the leading continent for Internet traffic.

Lessons from Catbert: Job Requirements

If the requirements are too high you not only discourage potential candidates from applying but you place undue pressure on qualified candidates.

How Facebook Affects Your Relationships [INFOGRAPHIC]

Online Dating University and AllFacebook have teamed up to create an infographic about how Facebook affects your health, personality, and relationship with others.

(via Mashable)