That change could come from Async Interview. Developed by Christopher Young and partner Ehud Israel, Async Interview is a video interview technology, which allows employers to meet face-to-face with potential employees.

“By reducing the expense to hire candidates and making the interview process easier to manage, we want to help companies hire candidates and improve their bottom line while helping the economy at the same time,” says Young.

Human Resources industry expert and President of HCM Freelancer, Sarah White agrees. “Video interviewing presents a unique opportunity to save travel and interview costs while making the candidate selection process more consistent,” says White. “By recording interviews, hiring managers are able to evaluate each candidate side by side without the uncomfortableness of a group interview with multiple candidates.”

Could you see your company switching to this type of interview process? Let us know in the comments.

Additionally, Oracle’s Chief Finance Officer Jeff Epstein was headhunted for the position via his LinkedIn profile.

And with 80% of companies using LinkedIn as a recruitment tool, it’s clear to see that social media (at least from LinkedIn’s side) is a great tool for any recruiter or human resources department to find their next employee (or for employees to find their next position).

But what about the other main networks and platforms? How could you use them as part of your employee needs, current and potential?

Twitter

Because of its instant conversations and weekly chats, there are a ton of ways that Twitter could be used as a recruitment tool. Think of some of the ways you operate your HR team or recruitment agency offline:

• You check resumes.
• You make phone calls.
• You place job ads.
• You interview.
• You cold-call potential clients (more from a recruitment agency point-of-view).

Now, flip these around and see how Twitter could replace them (or work alongside them).

• You see how people act online and what they’re discussing (resume checking).
• You have conversations with folks you’re interested in (phone calls).
• You share a link to your latest offerings (job ad placement).
• You talk and get a feel for people directly (interview).
• You use Twitter Search to look for keywords of company hiring needs then make contact through your tweets (cold calls).

Same needs, different approach. You also have a ton of weekly chats that you can participate in – there’s a great and ever-growing resource on Google Docs if you need to find one in particular.

Facebook

A different platform with a frequently different mindset, Facebook is still a great outlet for your HR needs. And as the platform continues to evolve into a business-friendly one, it’s a platform that offers a lot from a recruiting angle.

• Build a company Facebook Page and have a dedicated tab for your latest positions.
• Use your page to show the culture of the company and why people would want to work there.
• Set up a dedicated Facebook group purely for job-hunters. Make it a resource on best practices for interviews, career progression, etc.
• Go to Facebook Search and type in “jobs” – you’ll find a huge amount of companies and people on various pages, groups, etc, sharing and looking for work. Use these existing resources to find your next superstar.
• Build a Facebook widget that can be added to a user’s profile and shared with others. Update this with your latest jobs, news, careers, etc, and update interested parties as soon as your position goes live.

There are also a bunch of other ways you can use Facebook as both job hunters and employee seekers – these are just some of the immediate ones.

Website/Blog

This should be a given, but you’d be surprised how many companies don’t advertise their latest positions on the company website. Instead, they’d rather rely on external ads and agencies to do the hard work for them.

Fair enough – but wouldn’t it be better to be the source of information about your company to a job seeker as opposed to them getting third-party reviews? Again, there are a few ways you can start to use your site now.

• Like your Facebook Page, have a dedicated tab or area that not only has all your latest positions, but also positions recently filled. This shows interested parties that, while they may have missed out this time, at least you’re occasionally looking for their skill sets.
• Add an HR blog and have your employees tell their stories. We all love stories – it’s how we connect best. Have your people share why you’re great to work for is a huge way to humanize your business.
• Offer an HR newsletter sign-up to alert folks when you have a position coming up. By giving them “first refusal”, you’re immediately building rapport because you’re looking out for those that are really interested.
• Have a client services section, that shows what roles and what companies your new employees would be part of. Seeing the scope of project can help make someone’s mind up if they’re unsure of career growth and fulfillment.

Again, these are just some of the ways your site (or blog) can be adapted to be more beneficial to potential employees.

You don’t need to stop there, either. These are just the main outlets you can use.

Think of other ways to share your HR needs. It might be a YouTube channel where you give insights to the company. Or it could be a niche community or network you sponsor that’s tied into your current and future needs. And with Google+ about to set business accounts live, candidates finding you through social search could be about to step up to another level.

The main point is, you want the best. So are you making sure you’re presenting yourself as the best?

Comments

In one of her latest blog posts, HR guru Laurie Ruettimann addresses what she sees as direct discrimination, and suggests an idea that would do away with such potential pratfalls, all based on the way a person appears instead of their ability to fill the open position in question. Before that, however, the idea that attractive people make more money is perpetuated by Daniel S. Hamermesh, who, in an interview with Time Magazine, indicated the difference between the earnings of attractive people and their apparent unattractive counterparts is almost a quarter of a million dollars.

That’s quite an amount, especially if the only difference between potential hires is their ability, practiced or natural, to appear more attractive than those who didn’t get the job. In fact, based on that, it’s easy to see why the discrimination angle was brought into the discussion. As indicated, Ruettimann tackles the situation head-on, and offers a simple, yet effective alternative instead of letting an HR rely on a gut feeling:

Ugly people are screwed.

Except HR professionals know that we could absolutely automate our hiring process, kill behavior-based interviewing, and hire for competency. Then we could do the hard work of defining and measuring performance via algorithms and automate the annual increase/bonus process.

Would automating the hiring process get rid of these kinds of issues? Would people be hired based on their ability and not on the way they look, especially if the HR process was automated? It’s almost a certainty, although, it’s not hard to envision a creative programmer developing an algorithm that compares images of the applicants, one that focuses on facial structure and other related appearance attributes.

Even if the human resources process never gets automated, Ruettimann offers a common sense approach that would address such potential discriminatory hires:

But if HR oversees a system that adversely impacts ugly people, we can fix this. Affirmative action for the butterfaces?

Of course, if a company wants to avoid hiring the IT genius who happens to look like Carrot-Top because they prefer the cute blond who doesn’t know anything about the computers they being asked to support, then that company deserves whatever fate it receives.

Deb mentioned that a key differentiator is employee motivation. I have recently seen research to support her position. For example, a study by consulting firm Blessing White found only 33 percent of North American workers engaged in their jobs. Further research has shown that low engagement levels have a proven negative impact on business performance. That would make sense. A study from HR consultancy Towers Watson found that organizations with high employee engagement had a 19 percent increase in operating income versus a 32 percent drop for companies with low levels of engagement.

Deb said that one way to create engagement is with a clear sense of purpose for the organization. This was part of her keynote at the recent Boston Enterprise 2.0 Conference. She said that in the firms she has worked with she have found one single predictor of success. It is a sense of purpose. Even the best people are not successful without a sense of purpose.

Deb expanded on this is a recent blog post, The Pursuit of (Organizational) Purpose. She notes that, ”in a purpose driven organization, every conversation, every meeting is infused with “how do we get better at making this important difference” The company is creating value faster than its taking it out of the market. The purpose acts as the primary criteria for decision-making. Without a purpose, there is only the balance sheet and politics… People become competitive, self-protective kingdom builders.” I have certainly seen this dysfunctional behavior many times. I have also seen the power of a shared sense of purpose. Once you experience this you do not want to go back.

OpenText has created a website to promote this concept. There is a speaker series and they are sponsoring a Prize for Purpose-Driven Business to acknowledge teams and individuals who show innovation and dedication to the pursuit and achievement of organizational purpose. The prize is $10,000 to the charity of the winner’s choice. The winner will be judged by the speakers in their series.

Deb went on to discuss three types of collaboration. First there is creative collaboration that is intended to create something. It could be a product team, a legal team, a team responsible for an RFP, or a marketing launch. There is a specific goal in mind and this goal requires more than what an individual can provide. In a blog post on the topic Deb explains that with this type of collaboration, “what we need to do to encourage such collaboration is make it easy for teams to form, communicate, get organized, contribute, aggregate and iterate on work.”

The second type is connective collaboration that “refers to connecting with a broader community – the organization as a whole, or even more broadly than that… The goal of this type of collaboration is to connect dots – find expertise and resources as you need them.” There are different requirements here as connective collaboration “requires a broad, loosely connected community that can maintain awareness of activity, and ideally, technology that helps them find, discover or get pinged about relevant information, resources, insight and expertise - that they may or may not have been aware of – elsewhere in the system.”  This is where monitoring systems and activity streams can create an ambient awareness and help you follow the pulse of the organization.

Third, there is compounding collaboration which is designed is to “ensure that whatever our endeavor, we are leveraging, to the greatest extent possible, the work that has been done already.” This was one of the goals of knowledge management and now we have much better tools for this purpose.  I was involved in a number of these initiatives in the 1990s and wish we had today’s tools at that time.

Deb notes that compounding collaboration is much more than collecting documents. I could not agree more. The documents frequently become out of date as soon as they written, and even when still current, they require a greater context of what people did than is usually recorded.  As Deb notes in old school KM efforts failed because the documentation was separate form the work. I would agree but only add that not all 1990s KM went down this path. All of the successful ones that I observed where process aligned and work centric. The new tools make it easier to be work centric and add the additional dimension of being people centric.

This people centric capability, along with the flexibility of the new social tools, allows the technology to support how people work rather than having people conform to the structure imposed by the technology as we experienced with traditional enterprise apps.

I found that looking at collaboration through these three types is very useful as there are different goals and different uses of tools within each type. Within Enterprise 2.0 all three types need to be supported. 

Check out Portals and KM for more articles by Bill Ives

With the app employers can call, email, send letters to applicants, and even receive push notifications when new applications are ready to review. They can even save candidates to a folder on their CareerBuilder account, if they wanted to further review the applicant at a different time.

The new app also enables employers to sync directly to their existing CareerBuilder accounts and also provides:

• Employers can call, email, or send a letter to the applicant directly from their iPhone
• Employers can save a candidate to a folder in their CareerBuilder account for later review
• Employers can flip through applicants by swiping left or right on the application or use the page button at the top right
• Employers can receive push notifications when new applications are available for review

“Being able to reach potential employees wherever you are provides a whole new level of speed, efficiency and convenience to recruitment,” said Brent Rasmussen, President of CareerBuilder North America. ”Our new app is designed to help employers quickly connect with the fast-growing population of mobile job seekers and get a leg up on the competition for talent.”

It should be noted that the app is only accessible by hiring managers and HR reps.

Blogging

Blogging may be the most important qualification you can look for because a good blogger has many skills that translate to successful social media marketing.

Good bloggers know how to use social media channels to drive people towards their blog, have an eye for pleasing aesthetics (few are going to read the posts if the site disgusts their pupils), have a consistent work ethic (you need one if you post every day), have experience injecting a little SEO-goodness into everything, and more. All those skills can easily adapt to any company. There’s also published catalog of their writing samples available to view at your leisure so you can determine if they have the style you like.

Most importantly, they know how bloggers think, which is essential in Social Media PR. As Ignite Community Relations Specialist Christian Sullivan explains, “Bloggers share stupidity faster than your regular reporters. Your typical reporters will scold you via email, and tell you how far off you are from knowing anything about his/her audience- a blogger will write an open letter on their blog which garners thousands of unique monthly visitors.”

A Background in PR, Marketing, or Advertising

I begin with a caveat. A person with many years (perhaps a decade) of PR, marketing, or advertising should not automatically be viewed as a better candidate than someone who has several years of social media marketing experience. Christian elaborates: “Social media marketing is so new and changes on a daily basis that no matter what prior experience you have in PR, marketing, or advertising, you’ll essentially come in starting with a blank slate. It’s a different world. Messaging is different. The way you reach your fans is different. The methods of engaging with customers (now fans) are different.”

That said, a person who understands marketing and has experience driving business results could be an excellent candidate. They will most likely have experience in campaign building, development, execution and client relationships. They will have to learn to think differently but they’ll have a good foundation.

Social Media Campaigns

Whether it’s fan acquisition, blogger outreach, a contest, or any other number of social media campaigns, there is a bevy of experience that they’ve probably gained during its execution.

Including but not limited to:

• Blogger outreach
• Channel Management (i.e. monitoring, responding, posting)
• Researching and mastering new engagement tools
• Helping develop strategic and innovative methods for both engaging current fans/followers
• Creating terms and conditions (i.e. how one can enter a contest, how winners are chosen, details of the prizes being given away, dates and times of the contest, who’s eligible, etc.)
• Customer service skills (dealing with passionate fans can be very tasking)
• Crisis management (Murphy and his Law can pop up frequently)
• Understanding of the technical side (if not coding themselves, they probably at least worked with someone and learned how to better communicate their ideas)

Best of all, if you bring them in for an interview, you can quiz them on the process and actually find out if they know what they’re talking about. This will help separate them from the so-called social media “experts.”

So, there you have it: a few things to keep in mind if you’re hiring someone to help manage your online reputation. Are there any other qualities you think help demonstrate that a company has got their stuff together?

Comments

With that in mind, it’s helpful to find a consistent, common sense approach to these kinds of tasks. Which advice should you follow? Which consultant is right? If confusion reigns when dealing with these dilemmas, perhaps a streamlined, easy-to-follow approach is in order. With that in mind, a previous set of useful guidelines — the Punk Rock Employee Handbook — has been updated for 2011.

The options, suggestions and hints, courtesy of Laurie Ruettimann, are as universal as ever, especially the “Things I expect from HR” list of tips, which we’ve reprinted for your consumption:

1. Implement a concept called ‘right first time’ in everything. If you can’t get it right the first time, don’t do it until you can get it right. Saying ‘I don’t know’ is allowed.
2. Your job is rooted in ethical behavior. The financial crisis didn’t happen in a bubble. Someone hired, onboarded, and compensated those employees who brought our financial system to the brink of collapse.
3. Speak with a strong voice of reason and know that it may get you fired. Nothing sadder than a scared HR department.
4. Have a willingness to be disliked. You’re not here to make friends.
5. Demonstrate the ability to rise above it. Not every issue is an HR issue.
6. Do whatever the opposite of ‘mission creep’ is. Just because it involves people doesn’t mean it belongs in HR.
7. Have an interest in something other than HR. Nobody likes a one-note-Johnny.
8. Why don’t you smile? It’s really not that bad. You could be in Haiti.
9. Use google. The internet is your friend and ally.
10. Have the desire to teach, to lead, and to work yourself out of a job. We both know that 90% of what you do can be done by managers and administrators. And let’s face it — you don’t want to work in HR forever.

As indicated, this is very much a common sense approach to HR, but apparently, some departments need to be reminded about the keeping it simple concept, something Ruettimann does quite nicely. Comments on the HR expectations list are incredibly supportive, with one user going as far to say:
“That is why your blog should be part of HR education at Universities.”

Granted, this is an example of perhaps excessive praise, but the fact remains, Ruettimann’s HR suggestions resonate throughout the industry. However, did her list miss something? Is there a concept that needs to be addressed more thoroughly, instead of relying on a witty list of tips?

Whatever the case, having a set of guidelines that HR departments follow isn’t the worst idea in the world. In fact, it’s one that could dramatically improve the hiring process on both ends.