Top 10 ways to Maximize your Social Networking Strategy!
- Join industry specific blogs or user groups.
- Always make sure your own information on social networks is up-to-date.
- Devote time each week to expanding your network.
- Understand how to build effective search strings.
- Involve your company and colleagues in leveraging networks.
- Use social media to advertise any open positions.
- Participate in the conversation in online groups and blogs; then ask questions to make yourself more knowledgeable in your industry vertical.
- Share company updates.
- Network through twitter and twitter search.
- LinkedIn and Google + are your best networking buddies!
Helios Recruiting Blog
Welcome! This blog will provide you with the best practices and needed advice on resume writing, interviewing, tips for researching potential employers, techniques on finding the right people and finding the right opportunity for your growth. Our mission is to share best practices with those involved in talent management and provide current tips and trends to our readers.
In the coming days and weeks, we will cover many topics, but I wanted to start with trends that will shape tomorrow’s talent searches for firms. The same practices can be used by job seekers to see where they should be posting resumes and the best places to connect and network with Talent Managers. The first action that any recruiting team needs to tackle is to create a competitive advantage in their space.
How can this be done? Our recruitment practice subscribes to the philosophy that the quality of an organization’s talent will have a direct correlation to its success. We will share some of the ways we have become the “go-to team” for our clients. Having a team of consultants, each with their own niche or specialty, is an added resource to your internal HR team, and will help you build and establish a workforce environment that creates a competitive advantage.
Use your resources wisely
Using Social Networks is new, needed, and effective. However, when used incorrectly it is a tricky policy. In order to be effective, firms not only need to have a presence, but a policy that is well suited to their needs and that works for them. If you encourage employees as individuals to connect with others and share their own information, they will expand their following, but not drive people to your firm.
It is important when using social media to make sure the branding of your firm is consistent and that you do not have multiple employees using the same media, in the firm’s name. An effective way to transform or shape this is to encourage senior management and recruiting staff to have a work account. Using a professional account on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, and The Ladders allows your team to have their own following. Candidates of various job skills and locations can follow your firm or your firm’s representative. You also encourage better communication between your own internal recruiting team and senior management.
At Helios, we typically incorporate social media in our searches and particularly LinkedIn. Job boards may have revolutionized recruiting, but many of the larger services, although useful, have become weighted down with resumes of unqualified candidates. Sometimes it is more time consuming to run a complex search on a larger board or really find candidates in the top talent pool our clients are interested in. While job boards are still an avenue of candidate sourcing, they now take a back seat to more strategic and innovative ways to build a superior candidate pipeline.
Generate buzz!
It is important to create targeted social and traditional media buzz designed to attract top talent. We no longer rely on just being known or doing only traditional passive/active recruiting strategies. To be successful requires the ability to use several strategies and build a consistent presence. By using the tools in social media, like event notification and scheduling, immediate updates, and location check-ins, you not only invite but include your followers in your company’s news, events, and successes, and really form an identity that people will relate to.
As we still rely on the old faithful niche websites, industry associations and event networking, we also look to search “aggregators” {which are search engines} such as Indeed, Simply Hired and JobSniper.
Other sites that can offer recruiters, firms, and prospective employees potential employment profiles are jobfox, Itzbig and My Perfect Gig, which are popular because candidates and employers remain anonymous until there is a firm, mutual interest between the two parties. This creates a venue for the passive candidate to entertain opportunities without having to commit or risk being identified by their current employer as a candidate. For firms, it gives you the means to interact without having to know a specific opening. You can locate and interact with people with specific skill sets, locations, levels of experience, and really see what they are looking for and how it is a match to your firm.
A Look Ahead
At Helios, we are expanding our Candidate stream to LinkedIn, our recruiting team, corporate blog and Twitter. The ability to connect and network through these avenues seems endless. This is the main factor to LinkedIn’s job listing service having tripled in revenue in one year. With industry blogging, we are now able to set up email alerts through RSS feeds which can lead to new and more defined qualified candidate pools.
Social media is ever-changing and it is critical to understand leading trends to stay ahead of the curve. We are hoping that each member of our team could add “Social Media Development Manager” to their title very soon! We will continue to use these methods and others (hence the consultant rears their head for the fee 
to create a searchable and customized database of qualified candidates for our clients. The bottom line is each team knows their industry and corporate needs. Marrying this information to the tools in social media and fostering a team whose main goal is to improve will allow you to form best practices. Being committed to the highest quality in human capital will allow you to unleash the potential of your workforce and gain that competitive edge.
Welcome to the new era of candidate sourcing!
So, what is it that you would like to know? Please let me know what questions you have (general or specific is fine) with regards to getting hired in today’s economy…. and stay tuned for regular updates!
Feedback is great. But will your message be heard?
Remember the blatant directness of a young child? And as that child grew, his behavior was managed so that he learned not to say what he was really thinking. But even as adults, isn’t that what we really all want? To know what people think? Truly believe? Of our performance, our word choices, our requests?
When I was 23, in my first professional role, I was in human resources for a well respected engineering firm. At 7:30 am one morning, the day after I had been asked for feedback on a firm-wide employee communication, I proudly waited for the managing partner to see me—knowing I was bypassing the gatekeeper at that hour. After reading the redlined hardcopy, the managing partner of a national firm said to me; “Kathy, I asked 5 people to review this memo, and you’re the only one who tore it to hell.” I responded by telling him that I thought he asked me, because he wanted my honest opinion.
I believe I’ve been successful in my career, to a great degree because people know that when they work with me they will get authentic feedback. And often my feedback is unsolicited. Ken Bartee once referred to me as an honest broker. I wasn’t even sure if that was a compliment at the time. At Helios we have said for years that we have a ‘feedback rich culture’ and I laugh as I also think, Be careful what you wish for. I get feedback all the time and am grateful that our team is comfortable in sharing it.
As I have matured, I have realized that how we deliver our messages will, to a large part, determine whether they are heard. Choosing our words is such an art, and one that I have gained a growing appreciation for. It is a constant developmental challenge for me, to anticipate how my words will be perceived. I have learned however, that if you are clear about your intentions, people will tend to give you the benefit of the doubt. I have learned that making clear requests and ensuring people understand the intentions of your feedback goes a long way in being heard.
Harnessing the Power of Enterprising Women
Wow. As I travel back from the Enterprising Women conference and awards gala I realize how ill prepared I was. Not prepared for the level of camaraderie, support, creativity and excitement that I found in collective abundance. 49 female CEOs from around our nation and Canada were honored as award winners across multiple categories and represented incredible diversity. Diversity in products, in services, in cultures and in background. Yet these women were far more similar than different.
A differentiator of these women is that they don’t want to be just the ‘best’ in their industry. They want to ‘change’ their industry. Their vision is to have their company be seen as an employer of choice, all while ensuring philanthropy is a part of their corporate culture.
Giving back is integral to their leadership as they are personally involved in expanding and enhancing philanthropy in their community.
These women are gracious, authentic and supportive. They believe in ‘loving your mistakes’ as they’re the best learning tool you have. I encourage you to check out Enterprising Women magazine and consider nominating a deserving CEO for the 2012 award. Then come to the conference and awards gala. You’ll be very pleased you did. www.enterprisingwomen.com ~ Kathy Albarado
Taking Care of Your People Takes Care of Your Business
In an economy where every dollar is cautiously and carefully spent, the most important investments become apparent. Companies admit the secret to their success is their employees. Even in a down economy, investments in employee programs are on the rise.
Organizations with strong employee development initiatives achieve a critical competitive advantage. A global workforce survey conducted by Towers Perrin found that companies with the highest levels of employee engagement achieve better financial results and are more successful in retaining their most valued employees. In fact, companies with the largest percentage of engaged employees experienced an increased operating income of 19 percent. By engaging employees with development and training programs, they believe the company values their efforts and feel a part of the organization’s overall success.
For four years, Helios HR has hosted the Apollo Awards, a program dedicated to recognize employers that invest in employee development initiatives. In parallel, leading market research firm, Market Connections, collects survey data from all nominees. This data is analyzed in a best practices program overview. Through the Apollo Awards, executives and human resource (HR) professionals can learn about the actions of enlightened and innovative organizations, which exemplify strong HR programs. Certain commonalities become evident, this year a clear trend emerged: leading companies are offering their employees customized training programs in skill development (i.e. personal, time management, technical) via a diverse array of learning channels.
Offering Multiple Channels of Learning
The finalists for our awards program take very unique approaches to employee development, but one common thread is in offering customized training through different channels. Most of these top organizations offer a variety of employee development opportunities such as peer-to-peer mentoring, attendance at events, seminars, online training and instructor-led classes so that employees can select the training that will be individually most effective.
The benefits of offering different learning approaches can include increased retention, a positive effect on company culture and productivity, improved ability to effectively recruit, enhanced quality of work, and increased organizational expertise. Reduced opportunity cost also occurs when employees are assimilated into an organization more rapidly. Two of these forward-thinking organizations, Dewberry and Métier, offer customized programs, with a variety of channels to cater to individual learning styles and preferences.
Dewberry’s Blended Learning
Dewberry, a professional services firm, recognizes that people learn different ways; therefore, they utilize a blended learning approach. This approach offers employees a variety of learning channels as part of The Dewberry Learning Center including: classroom, software, mentoring, coaching, one-on-one, seminars and brown bag lunches, among other approaches.
One key to Dewberry’s blended learning success is in involving internal resources such as corporate leadership to host or participate in the programs. The active involvement of top executives impresses upon employees the seriousness of the training and demonstrates that their efforts are valued.
Métier’s Development on Day One
Métier, a project portfolio management solutions provider, doesn’t have an assembly line. Tweaking and fine-tuning the organization is all about polishing their greatest asset – the employees. Métier considers each employee’s learning abilities and needs with customized development beginning on the employee’s first day. Every new employee attends a two-week orientation known as Boot Camp, where each individual’s strengths and weakness are assessed to provide a benchmark for their career-long professional development activities. The Boot Camp also provides instructive and interactive orientation in a variety of learning ways such as instructor-led, computer-based, seminars, webinars and on-the-job-training.
Métier’s approach paid off: the company witnessed greater employee camaraderie and improved knowledge retention. In fact, when Métier shifted Boot Camp from one week to two weeks, the percentage of employees with tenure of one year increased 25 percent and tenure of two years increased by 12 percent.
One Size Does Not Fit All
Dewberry and Métier are just two companies finding value in offering their employees multiple development opportunities. It’s no surprise that both organizations are service providers that understand their success is tied to the performance of their employees. Both provide innovative employee development initiatives. We can look to these companies as models in implementing strong programs.
Companies that don’t explore developing their greatest resources – their employees – will loose a competitive advantage that can be a costly loss. Organizations are quickly finding that there is no “one size fits all” approach to learning.
Hubert Humphrey, former Vice President of the U.S. put it very simply, “There are incalculable resources in the human spirit, once it has been set free.” And it was Oliver Wendell Holmes who quoted, “The mind, once stretched, never regains its original dimension.” Innovative employee development practices offered through multiple learning channels provide an organization the opportunity to stretch beyond “its original dimensions.”
~Kathy Albarado