SHRM Kickball And No Kid Hungry (#SHRMKickBall)

June 10, 2013 — 2 Comments

SHRM_Kickball_2013

Next week is SHRM Annual, the Super Bowl for HR nerds. Whether this is your first time attending, or you’re a seasoned vet, SHRM is quite an experience. This year, I have the privilege of joining many of my HR colleagues in a charity kickball game to raise money for No Kid Hungry (you can check out the event page here).

The No Kid Hungry campaign connects kids in need with nutritious food and teaches their families how to cook healthy, affordable meals. The campaign also engages the public to make ending childhood hunger a national priority. You can learn more in the video below:

I’ll be proudly representing Team Green (Team Tassel) Sunday evening. The players and audience will skew towards heavy social media users, so there will be plenty of tweets, instagrams, vines and video to share the game events as they unfold. You can follow along on the #SHRMKickball hashtag. 

If you’d like to support our effort, please donate. Every dollar makes a difference.

Continue Reading…

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Tapping The Collective Intellect of SHRM (#SHRMAdvice)

June 3, 2013 — 3 Comments

One of the biggest values of being a member of an organization like SHRM, or any professional network for that matter, is access to the collective wisdom of its membership. SHRM is a massive global organization; with over 250,000 members and 575 affiliated chapters in 140 countries. Think about that for a moment. Amongst its membership, there likely is not a single HR or talent issue that has not been tackled by dozens of members.

How do we, the membership, tap into this collective intellect?

We can look to inspiration from some peer review models like GitHub and Quora. Let’s review how these platforms define themselves.

GitHub: GitHub is the best place to share code with friends, co-workers, classmates, and complete strangers. Over three million people use GitHub to build amazing things together.

Quora: Quora’s mission is to share and grow the world’s knowledge.

Both of these platforms take an open-source approach to sharing knowledge. Millions of users willingly contribute their time and expertise to help their respective peer communities. Imagine if we found a way to harness this spirit within the HR community?

SHRM 2012 HR blogger crew.

SHRM 2012 HR blogger crew.

Technically we already do, but not at scale. We have twitter chats, LinkedIn groups, Facebook pages, Google Plus groups, Slideshare, email lists, etc. We also have many peers in the HR blogger community who freely share their presentations and training materials. All of these channels provide value to the bettering of our field. The shortcomings are that the value is incremental, hard to find, and often times shared between the same peer networks – and not reaching those in our community who would benefit the most from this information.

How do we get this collective intellect to more people?

It doesn’t to be a high-tech custom-built platform like Quora or GitHub, though the investment by SHRM could pay big dividends and lead to a member-contributed resource center (hint, hint). It could be as simple as a hashtag. Let’s call it #SHRMQs. Together with SHRM, the HR blogger community can help promote this as a destination to share resources and ask questions. Yes, I realize it would be hosted within Twitter which has  limitations (real-time nature of Twitter, no file saving/tagging capabilities, and lack of familiarity with many in our community). The upside is that is has zero cost so could be implemented immediately, and would be a reason to get more of our HR colleagues participating in social media.

Fistful of Talent live from The Hive at SHRM 2012 (credit: Dice)

Fistful of Talent live from The Hive at SHRM 2012 (credit: Dice)

SHRM has made good strides over the past several years under Curtis Midkiff’s (@SHRMSMG) leadership. The Hive and Smart Bar at SHRM Annual are good illustrations of tapping into the expertise of the HR blogger network. This is valuable for conference attendees, but with full conference schedules and attendance by less than 10% of the membership each year, we’re missing the majority of our members. We also miss out on the opportunity to learn from our peers who may not be active participants in social media.

These are a few ideas. The aim of this post wasn’t to present an absolute solution, but to plant a seed.

If we find a way to truly tap into the SHRM membership’s collective intellect, the value of our membership increases exponentially.

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Job Search Advice: #NPRTwitterChat II Recap

May 31, 2013 — Leave a comment

This is a recap of the second #NPRTwitterChat, a collaboration between the HR teams of NPR and Twitter. #NPRTwitterChat is a quarterly chat that brings together experienced professionals at the intersections of HR, recruiting, and social media to provide job search advice and share jobs.

In this edition of the chat, we covered the following topics:

    • Q1: What Social Media advice do you have for recent grads or students/interns?
    • Q2: The job requires experience, but I don’t have any. How do I get it?
    • Q3: What are some tools, tips, and tech that can help in your job search?
    • Q4: I’m a perfect fit for the job why didn’t I get it?
    • Q5: How can I build relationships with recruiters and/or employees in companies I’m interested in?
    • BONUS: Hiring? Take the last 10 minutes to share your jobs with chat attendees.

We had over 50 participants sharing their experience, tips, and recommendations. You can find the Storify recap link below:

#NPRTwitterChat II Recap – 5/30/13

We’ll be back for the third installment of #NPRTwitterChat in late Summer. In the meantime, you can keep up with our friends at Twitter on @JoinTheFlock, and NPR at @NPRjobs.

Be sure to check out the Storify for many other participants who regularly share career and job search insights like Laurie Ruettimann (@lruettimann), Jessica Merrell (@Blogging4Jobs), Matt Charney (@mattcharney), Justin Mass (@jmass), Steve Levy (@levyrecruits), and others.

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Amplify Tool Review: Sprout Social

May 14, 2013 — 1 Comment

Sprout 2

As a talent leader working for a non-profit organization that is heavily vested in social media, I’m constantly looking for new tools and resources that increase our efficiency and enable us to have a greater impact in our recruiting and employment branding efforts. My budget is limited which generally steers me towards free, or nominal cost, platforms. It has to be a pretty valuable tool for me to make an exception to that rule. Sprout Social is one of them.

Founded in 2010, Sprout Social is a social media management platform that allows you to actively manage a variety of social media channels. The platform features robust analytics and a reasonable price point for SMB’s and non-profits (pricing details below). Sprout is a private company backed by the venture funds of NEA and Lightbank.

I’ve been using Sprout for several months now, and it’s become one of my ‘must have’ social media resources. The biggest value for me is efficiency and time-savings. I’m involved in the management of nine social media platforms (across Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn). I also manage three hashtag communities. The ‘smart inbox’ feature is an invaluable time-saver that aggregates all of that content into one stream I can review through the web or a mobile device. Sprout also provides the ability to ‘pin’ tasks. If you have multiple users managing your social media accounts, you can use this feature to delegate follow-up and assign tasks to team members.

There are some limitations that in my mind prevent Sprout from being an all-in-one social media platform. I prefer Buffer for scheduling as it allows more flexibility in scheduling send patterns for multiple channels. I also feel HootSuite and TweetDeck are better real-time social media monitoring platforms with their multi-column displays.

The above limitations notwithstanding, Sprout has become the most valuable tool in my social media tool belt. While there are other enterprise platforms out there that do all of this and more, Sprout’s feature-rich capabilities and price point make it a solid tool for many organization’s social media management efforts.

  • Website: 
    http://www.sproutsocial.com
  • Cost: Pricing starts at $39/user per month for the entry-level ‘Standard Plan’. You can expand your feature set at two other plans, including Deluxe ($59) and Premium ($99). Full pricing details can be found here. *Note: they do offer non-profit discounts, so if that applies to you be sure to ask.
  • Mobile Friendly: Very – they have Android and iOS mobile apps for iPhone and iPad that are feature-rich and deliver almost all of the functionality of the website.
  • Recruiter Benefits: Numerous. Managing multiple social media accounts, hashtag community management or tracking, keyword monitoring, built-in RSS reader, boomarklet for easy sharing, engagement analytics and reporting, conversation history, scheduled publishing and more. The ‘smart inbox’ is the single biggest time saver if you actively manage multiple accounts.   
  • Rating: 9/10
Sprout

Screen shot of Sprout’s iOS app.

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The Return Of #NPRTwitterChat

May 9, 2013 — Leave a comment

NPRTwitterChat2

We’re back!

The first #NPRTwitterChat was created to bring together seasoned professionals at the intersections of social media, recruiting, and HR with job seekers for a discussion about social media. The turnout was great, with hundreds of participants contributing their thoughts and insights. Mashable covered it in the article, “How To Effectively Use Twitter As A Job Search Resource“.

The most popular question once the event wrapped up? When’s the next one?

So we got together with our friends at Twitter and decided to make this a quarterly event. Our next #NPRTwitterChat will be Thursday 5/30 at 7pm EST. The format will be the same as the last event. We’ll bring in a diverse pool of experienced recruiting and HR professionals to cover 5 topics related to your job search. We’ll cover topics including:

    • Q1: What Social Media advice do you have for recent grads or students/interns?
    • Q2: The job requires experience, but I don’t have any. How do I get it?
    • Q3: What are some tools, tips, and tech that can help in your job search?
    • Q4: I’m a perfect fit for the job why didn’t I get it?
    • Q5: How can I build relationships with recruiters and/or employees in companies I’m interested in?
    • BONUS: Hiring? Take the last 10 minutes to share your jobs with chat attendees.

We’re also hosting a special one hour TalentNet Radio with Craig Fisher (@Fishdogs) and recruiters from Twitter Tuesday 5/28 at 7pm EST. This will be aimed more towards a recruiting/HR audience, but anyone can dial in or follow along on the #TalentNet hashtag. You can check out our last #NPRTwitterChat TalentNet Radio here.

If you’re new to Twitter chats, there are useful tools like TweetChat.com that make following live chats easier. You can find additional resources here. We’ll be posting a recap of the highlights on Storify following the event.

We hope to see you 5/30. It’s an open event, so invite anyone you think might benefit or have something to add to the discussion.

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Social Media, Recruiting’s Evolution, And Talk Shows: My Q&A With The FIRM’s Gary Franklin

May 1, 2013 — 2 Comments

Earlier this year I was asked to join The Forum For In-House Recruiting Managers (FIRM) judging panel for their upcoming FIRM Awards. This event will recognize the best recruiting teams around the world in a variety of categories. I’m really looking forward to taking a closer look at these best practices, and will share some of the things I’m learning on this site later in the year.

I recently participated in a Q&A with The FIRM’s founder, Gary Franklin (@garyfranklin), where we discussed a wide range of topics covering recruiting, social media, technology, career growth, early adoption, conference speaking, taking risks, and hosting talk shows. You can check it out below.

How would you describe yourself (professionally or otherwise)?

I’m an optimist who doesn’t take himself too seriously and looks for the good in things. I’m an admitted tech/digital geek; curious about social media and new technologies. I enjoy travel and sports. I drink too much coffee. I’m drawn to interesting people and regularly seek out laughter.

How did you get into recruitment and why?

It was by accident, really. I was a Marketing and International Business major in college and always assumed I’d get into advertising. I grew up in Florida and knew I wanted to move to Los Angeles after graduation. There was only one company at our college career fair with an office in LA so I figured I’d interview with them. The company, Pencom Systems, was a technical recruiting agency. I knew nothing about recruiting at the time, but that meeting led to a series of interviews and ultimately an offer. I was the first in my class to make a hire and have been hooked ever since. Continue Reading…

In Recruiting
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The ‘Busy’ Trap

April 24, 2013 — Leave a comment

“Things are great, just really busy.”

This seems to be my default response these days to the question, “How’s it going.” There are variations, of course, “really busy”, “crazy busy”, and on particularly brutal days, “insanely busy.” Sound familiar?

The reality is that the term ‘busy’ has become a crutch. It’s not that we’re not busy, it’s that the ‘state of busyness’ has morphed into something else. An automatic response, something we lean on without much thought.

If you work in a fast-paced role (or most any role these days), chances are you’re busy. You have a variety of demands on your time, and find yourself constantly juggling deadlines and deliverables. This ‘busy’ mindset, used as a crutch, can be detrimental to your productivity and well-being.

    • “I’d really like to spend some time mentoring my team, but I’m so busy on this project I’ll have to do it next week.”
    • “That white paper looks like it would be really helpful in my _____ project, but I don’t have the time to read it now so will get to it later.”
    • “I was really planning on going to the gym/for a walk/eat with friends at lunch today, but I’m swamped so eating at Chateau Le Desk…again.”

We’ve all been there. The truth is that ‘busyness’ is a self-fulfilling prophecy. While it’s true we have a myriad of responsibilities and obligations, we close ourselves off when we allow busy to rule our day.

In our quests to master our given fields, climb the corporate ladder, and/or add value to our organizations – we’ve lost sight of what balance means. We wear our ‘busy’ like a badge of honor.

I’m guilty of this, but I’m beginning to realize it. It took some introspection to come to this conclusion. I’m working to make a conscious effort to let go of my ‘busy’ crutch. That won’t mean lightening my workload, but it will mean finding new perspective – and letting go of my busy baggage.

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The War On The ‘War For Talent’

April 8, 2013 — 6 Comments

War For Talent

I have to get something off my chest. The term ‘war for talent’ is bullshit. It’s a tired idiom that’s been used and abused in recruiting vernacular for over a decade. It’s time for it to be retired.

Have you Googled the term?

202MM results. I’m not kidding. The term even has it’s own wikipedia page. It’s been attributed to Steve Hankin from McKinsey who coined the phrase in 1997. That was during the heydey of the first dot com boom. I suppose it was clever at the time, and I’m sure it earned him a few high fives from his fellow consultants.

I remember recruiting in 1998, working with clients like eToys who would hire and relocate technical talent based on a phone screen. It was a highly competitive market and you had to move fast if you wanted to compete – but it wasn’t a war. The tech hiring market is almost as competitive now. It’s still not a war.

The ‘War For Talent’ is everywhere

Books, conferences, across the pond, in healthcare, being taken on by CEOs, even searching for beasts?! Just when you think the white flags are out and it might be getting better, ‘McKinsey Predicts The War For Talent Will Go Nuts By 2020′. NUTS! We’re all screwed.

The good news is that some of my colleagues get it, and are doing their part to stop the madness. See Lance Haun’s, “Lay Down Your Arms: There Is No War For Talent“.

Rather than vent about the problem, let’s find a solution

Let’s put our collective brains together and come up with something new and snappy for our recruiting, HR, and marketing friends to use. I’ll get it started…

    • Hiring, Get Some!
    • The Highly Competitive Market For Acquiring Skilled Labor
    • Take Your Company To Hire Ground
    • My Hire Is Higher Than Your Hire
    • Yo Quiero Talent
    • Your Development Team Is Quite Extraordinary, We Will Take Them Now
    • Or you can get defensive: This Is Not The Talent You’ve Been Looking For

Have a substitute for ‘War For Talent’? Leave a comment and share them.

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My Guru Will Disrupt Your Ninja

March 26, 2013 — 11 Comments

Help Wanted: Only Ninjas, Gurus, Jedis, and Rock Stars need apply…

Recruiting has a problem. In the crowded world of social media it’s becoming more difficult to stand out. 

I applaud most efforts to create compelling job descriptions, I’ve experimented with infographics and other formats myself, but I’m afraid we’ve gone a few steps too far in our efforts to compel clicks, likes, and RTs. Job descriptions have become so buzz-jargonized that it’s hard to take some of them seriously. In a world of ninjas and gurus, how does a regular job seeker know where they fit in?

According to Indeed.com, there was a 2,500% increase in jobs using the term ‘ninja’ from May 2006 to May 2012. The term ‘guru’ has seen a steeper climb, increasing from 6,500% from its debut around March 2008 to its peak around March 2011.

I’ve spent most of my career with at least a toe in the waters of technical recruiting, and assumed most of this buzzword abuse came from that sector. I was surprised to find that these terms have made the leap outside of tech, and now can be attached to anything. In a few minutes of research I found these terms applied to internships, grilled cheese cooks, coffee baristas and my favorite – fun guru. Continue Reading…

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Social Media And Your Job Search – 5 Myths (And Truths) You Should Know

March 20, 2013 — 7 Comments

The following is a post I contributed to Careerealism’s Professional Emancipation Project (P.E.P.). 

There is a lot of discussion about how, where, and why one must use social media in today’s digital economy. It can be a bit overwhelming for some. The following myths and truths are intended to demystify some of the ways in which you can utilize social media as a job search resource.

Myth: You Must Use Social Media To Find A Job

Truth: Despite what many experts tell you, social media is not an absolute requirement for all jobs and careers. There are many fields where traditional job boards and resumes are still effective tools for finding your next job. Generally speaking, social media tends to be most effective as a job search tool in ‘corporate’ roles and careers where you have a cubicle, desk, or office.

Myth: You Must Build Your Personal Brand

Truth: The term ‘personal branding’ was introduced in 1937. It’s become a common, though somewhat maligned, term in today’s digital economy. Supporters view it as a word of empowerment, taking control of your ‘business of one’ and presenting your self in an orchestrated and deliberate way. Detractors argue the term is contrived, and positioning the individual as a commodity or ‘brand’ is wrong and lacks authenticity.

Perhaps a better term to define the concept is ‘Digital Footprint’. What does this mean? Google yourself. What you find is your digital footprint. It’s the sum of your collective digital presence – social media, blogs, interviews, etc. Putting some thought into how you present and organize these findings helps you cohesively build your digital footprint. You can use tools like Knowem to search domains and social media account for particular names you might want to use for your digital accounts. While by no means required, having similar names for Twitter, LinkedIn, blogs, and so on makes it easier for recruiters and hiring managers to find you.

Continue Reading…

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