Can HRO be Social, Smart, Quick, and Effective?

Linda Merritt, HRO Research Analyst, NelsonHall

Smarter Workforce and Smarter Commerce are the two major themes of this year’s conference for customers and business partners at IBM Connect 2013.

IBM is Messaging, Managing, and Delivering

First, I want to complement IBM on the clarity and alignment of its strategy with action. I have not seen this level of aligned organization and action across such a large and complex corporation before.

Building out under the Smarter Planet umbrella, IBM is bundling its many products and services, coordinating internal research and development, making targeted acquisitions, working across product and organization lines, and communicating clearly in its go-to-market campaigns. Given the great number of successful Smarter Workforce client case studies being presented, the proof points are already building to show business value can be delivered.

Smarter Workforce Supports Smarter Commerce

Smarter Workforce and Smarter Commerce are each separate service lines that can be coordinated to achieve greater business impact. Each is a combination of the IBM Platform for Social Business (social networking, social analytics, and social content) bundled with other new and existing products and services. Under the hood is a myriad of product lines making it work operationally, all tied together by messaging:

• Smarter Workforce: Activate the workforce to improve productivity and unleash innovation
• Smarter Commerce: Delight customers to increase loyalty, advocacy, and revenue.

Balance Individual Focus with Collective Value

Jonathon Ferrar, IBM vice president of Smarter Workforce, talked about the need to be social, smart, quick, and effective. Other words that were used a lot included community and relationships. Connecting communities of practice and building relationships, not for social intimacy, but for learning, leveraging, and leading to delighted customers and achieve business success.

Embedded throughout the social aspects of the services is a focus on the individual user that takes into account ease of use, mobile device access, points of need, and other behavioral aspects that are built in to increase collective business value creation.

Kenexa is Key to Smarter Workforce

The Kenexa acquisition closed in December 2012 and it is already being integrated into current offerings and it will be a key to plans for enhanced Smarter Workforce services as early as the second half of 2013:

• Kenexa’s software platforms for recruiting and learning will be used for RPO and learning BPO services as well as integrated with the social business platform
• Kenexa’s behavioral science expertise will be used to inform leadership, organizational, and talent management services and add to the analytics component.

IBM’s HRO services will be impacted by the changes. New options will be available to existing and new clients as talent management, learning, and RPO are brought together.

A lot of complexity remains to be managed, but it would be great to see IBM set a new high bar for making its services, client workforces, and HRO social, smart, quick, and effective!

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Social Networking Sites: An Increasingly Bountiful Boon for Recruiters and Job Searchers

As revealed in NelsonHall’s latest recruitment process outsourcing (RPO) market analysis, social networking sites are the most rapidly emerging source of job candidates, and were identified as the third top hiring sourcing channel, preceded only by job boards and employee referrals. Further, according to the results of a recently released Social Recruitment Survey conducted by a provider of next-generation recruitment solutions, 80 percent of companies use or are planning to use social networking to find and attract candidates this year. And those looking for jobs are increasingly leveraging these sites for networking, connections, job referrals and marketing methods.

Let’s look at why social networking sites are proliferating as a tool for both RPO providers and job searchers.

RPO Providers

The top business-oriented social networking sites, LinkedIn and Plaxo, respectively cite over 41 million and 40 million members. Massive candidate bases! Further, search capabilities and these sites’ special interest-focused Groups can assist recruiters in drilling down to a smaller group of potential candidates for a specific job to be filled. Additionally, LinkedIn referrals can serve as an initial vetting point for RPO providers looking for specific qualities and characteristics in a potential candidate. While these referrals may be viewed as a bit biased as they are often from personal or work friends, no referrer will risk damaging his or her reputation by stretching a referral too far. Given all this, an increasing number of RPO providers are leveraging their recruitment technology and Applicant Tracking Systems to search for both active and passive candidates on these sites.

A lesser known job networking site is JobAngels.org, a non-profit founded in January 2009 whose stated mission is, “To help bring people together in a community setting where each person commits to a single goal: to help just one person find gainful employment.” With more than 6,000 members in its Linkedin Group, 4,000 members in its Facebook Group and nearly 10,000 Twitter followers, JobAngels is another candidate sourcing site ripe for recruiters.

Note to RPO clients: If your RPO provider isn’t using social networking sites to source candidates for you, it should be.

Candidates

As recruiters – both in-house and from RPO firms – are increasingly using social networking sites as a sourcing channel, candidates both active and passive should up their game in this realm as well. If you don’t yet have a profile on these types of sites, establish one. It’s not only a solid way to create your own enhanced business network, but could also lead to a potential job opportunity (even if you’re not actively looking for one.) Your comprehensive profile should include your background, specific achievements, key capabilities, education, etc., as well as some referrals if you can obtain them. But a quick word of caution here: be careful how you respond to incoming emails and of the content in the postings you may make directly on these sites. Assume whatever you say resides in the public domain.

And let’s not forget the Groups on these sites. Once you’ve created your profile, join Groups in your industry and your areas of interest, and interact with the other members by posting or responding to posts. They are a great place to “see and be seen.”

The bottom line is that social networks are an increasingly useful channel for recruiters to find candidates and candidates to be found.  As a result, they are an opportunity both sides of the equation should exploit.

Gary Bragar, Lead HRO Analyst, NelsonHall