Posts belonging to Category social media

Succeeding in the social-media space requires an ability to communicate in short, fast and succinct bursts.

If you want to be a digital media manager at Pizza Hut, you’d better be able to adopt this straight-to-the-point, social-media mindset right out of the gate.

Representatives from the Plano, Texas-based restaurant chain descended on Austin’s annual South by Southwest music festival this past weekend, to seek out and interview job candidates for the aforementioned position.

Lots of candidates, apparently: Each interviewee was to be given just 140 seconds (an homage to Twitter’s 140-character limit) to sum up their social-media bona fides, and convince the organization he or she has the goods.

One of the people they’ll need to convince is Caroline Masullo, Pizza Hut’s director of digital and social media. Masullo, who conducted interviews at the SXSW site for four hours on Sunday, explained the rationale behind the 140-second interview to Bloomberg Businessweek:

We need this person to be super-knowledgeable in the social space. They need to be able to communicate with our consumers in fun, quick, concise ways. … We need someone who knows who they are, what they are looking for, someone who’s super-passionate, quick on their feet, able to communicate clearly in a short amount of time.”

Candidates were also asked to bring only their IDs and smartphones, the latter of which would be used for a quick review of the applicant’s LinkedIn profile during the interview.

Ultimately, the 140-second interview is “like an elevator [pitch],” Masullo told Businessweek. “Tell me in 140 seconds why you think you should be the next manager of … . ”

Pizza Hut, which will conduct another lightning round of interviews via Google+ on March 14, is already being lauded for its unique strategy in finding sharp, quick-witted candidates; a tactic that Masullo hopes will net the company someone “on the cutting edge of the social space” that will “keep us at the forefront” of said space.

Time will tell if they find that someone, but you have to give Pizza Hut some credit for taking a novel approach. Just do it quickly.

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How much of a role does social media play in shaping perceptions of your company?

Depends on who you’re asking, according to a recent poll. 

The study of 225 HR managers and 2,035 employed adults, conducted by Harris Interactive for Ft. Lauderdale, Fla.-based Spherion Staffing Services, found some significant differences in how employers and employees see the importance of a company’s online reputation.

In the study, nearly half of workers (47 percent) said they “strongly agree” or “agree” that, when considering new employment, a company’s online reputation is just as important as the offer they’re given. Just 27 percent of companies, however, said they believe social media outlets are influential in how a candidate views their organization.

Some other findings suggest a connection between companies’ online cachet and satisfaction among existing employees, but declining employer interest in using social media to recruit, retain and rally the troops.

According to the survey, employees who are highly satisfied with their employer’s online reputation are nearly four times as likely to have high job satisfaction (76 percent) than those who are not satisfied with their organization’s online reputation (20 percent).”

However, fewer employers (6 percent) reported using social media to motivate and retain existing employees in comparison to its 2010 study, in which 20 percent said they relied on social media for such purposes. Companies also appear to be turning less to social media as a recruiting tool, with 28 percent of respondents using social media to find new talent; a 16 percent drop from 2010.

Employers would be well-served to reverse this particular trend, says Sandy Mazur, division president of Spherion Staffing Services.

“Organizations must become socially engaged in order to drive key business outcomes such as talent attraction, engagement, satisfaction and positive brand awareness, and reputation,” according to Mazur.

Decisions, including whether people want to work for your organization, stay with your organization, and sing your praises socially are all highly dependent on your ability to be socially engaged and socially adept.”

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Leave it to the HRExaminer site, a frequent font of succinct and straightforward takes on HR, to provide us with this gem — “Is There Free Speech at Work? – by Heather Bussing, an employment lawyer and one of the site’s regular writers.

Not only is it informative, it’s timely — as a confluence of social media and rules and guidances from the National Labor Relations Board about social media streams into the workplace. (See this earlier post that provides a rundown of the NLRB’s new rules, with links to further background on them.)

Bussing starts off with an interesting and perhaps little-known fact, especially outside HR and employment-law circles: “Employees don’t have a Constitutional right to free speech or freedom of expression at work.” It’s only in the murky sea of social media, an employer’s attempt to control it to save its reputation and image, and the government’s attempt to squelch that attempt when protected concerted activity comes into play that the murk gets murkier.

“You know you can probably get fired for telling your boss to her face ‘Go to hell,’ “ she writes. “But complaining about her on Facebook can be protected speech.”

Interestingly, she writes, “employees’ protected speech under the National Labor Relations Act [which gives employees the right to discuss wages, hours and working conditions as well as organize a union] is actually an exception to an employer’s broad rights to restrict both speech and expression at work.”

I love her directness:

Saying the supervisor is a wing-nut, even to another co-worker, is probably not protected until there is something more that shows the employee was trying to get other employees to change working conditions. While getting rid of a bad boss would certainly change the work environment, just calling her names won’t. So name-calling is usually a personal gripe, and not protected.

The whole piece is worth reading, so I’ll stop with all these teasers. Except this last one, a key point to remember as you navigate this ever-expanding social-media-policy murk. Plus, Bussing just says it so well:

If what the company is really worried about is looking bad, then it should probably look deeper to see if there are things going on that would make it look bad. If so, it’s not a social-media problem, it’s a management problem. And policies and controlling what people say are not going to help.

There is no way to stop current or former employees from trash talking on social media. Employers shouldn’t try. It just creates a culture of monitoring and suspicion. Discipline, denials and drama just make it worse.  Social media is fast moving and things pop up and die quickly if they are ignored.

The best way to encourage employees to say great things about you is to be a great employer with a great service or product.

There are some companies that are horrible places to work or their products and services suck. They won’t survive social media. And that’s a good thing.

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The folks at Fisher & Phillips (Atlanta-based employment law firm) sent me this link to a pretty formidable write-up by D. Albert Brannen (a partner there), spelling out just how much you need to keep in mind now under the more aggressive National Labor Relations Board.

“Under President Obama,” he writes, “the NLRB has been very aggressive in further expanding employee rights to engage in [protected concerted activity through its] rulings or official guidelines with regard to social media, employment-at-will and off-duty access policies. [Of those], no other policy area has received more attention by the NLRB than social media.”

What really impressed me were Brannen’s lists of rules or policies now deemed unlawful and lawful, based on the last of the NLRB General Counsel’s guidelines on social media, issued May 30. He lists 23 — repeat, 23 – under the unlawful category. Here’s just a sampling:

• Employees should not release confidential guest, team member or company information.
• Employees should not share confidential information with coworkers unless they need the information to do their job.
• Employees should not have discussions regarding confidential information in the break room, at home, or in open public places.
• Employees should not “reveal non-public company information on any public sites.”
• Employees should not post photos, music, videos and personal information of others without obtaining the owner’s permission and must ensure that the content can be legally shared.
• Employees should not use the employer’s logos and trademarks for non-commercial purposes.

There are 13 social-media policies or rules declared lawful. Again, just a sampling:

• Employees should not post “any opinion or statement as the policy or view of the employer or any individual in that capacity as an employer otherwise on behalf of the employer.”
• Employees should not post “inappropriate postings that may include discriminatory remarks, harassment and threats of violence or similar inappropriate or unlawful conduct.”
• Develop a healthy suspicion. Don’t let anyone trick you into disclosing confidential information. Be suspicious if asked to ignore identification procedures.
• Employees should not discuss information related to the “safety performance of the employer’s systems or components or vehicles” and “secret, confidential or attorney-client privileged information.”

I’d memorize these if I were you.

For the record, here’s my latest blog post on the NLRB’s first social-media ruling (against Costco), which contains links to the rules and guidelines — and purposes behind them — issued thus far by NLRB’s Acting General Counsel Lafe Solomon pertaining to social media in the workplace and social-media policies. For a full explanation from the NLRB as to all of its guidances and rules, start on its home page and search or drill down to what you’re after.

Also, for the record, Brannen includes helpful advice about employment-at-will and off-duty access policies as well.

As he cautions in his conclusion:

By its nature, the NLRB is prone to what experts call ‘policy oscillations’ where its interpretations of the law may change with the political party in power at any given time. To some degree, these fluctuations can be expected. However, the current NLRB seems to have taken a dramatic turn in the expansive way it views employee rights. Employers should be aware of these recent developments and should review their work rules and policies to make sure that they still comply with the law as viewed by the current NLRB. Specifically, employers should revise their social-media, employment-at-will and no-access polices as soon as possible.

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Once again, as in previous HR Technology^® Conferences, the union of recruiting and technology — and what it’s going to look like going forward — was the juggernaut for consensus and debate on the 15th annual conference’s final day.

Led by moderators Gerry Crispin, principal and co-founder of CareerXroads, and Sarah White, principal and founder of SW & Associates, this year’s panel of four staffing leaders from Lockheed Martin, Key Bank, PepsiCo and Deloitte took up the still-evolving, often-troubling topic in Wednesday’s session, “What’s Next? What Talent Acquisition Challenges are Seeking Technology Solutions?”

All agreed that, despite great strides in social recruiting, and recruiting technology in general, even their organizations — leaders in this new frontier — have a long way to go.

“I would challenge any one of us to say we are fully prepared and where we need to be,” said panelist Frank Wittenauer, associate director of global talent solutions for Deloitte. “Recruiting is still the last thing that gets defined. When the economy is good, it’s, ‘Let’s go, let’s get the butts in seats, let’s do the background checks after they’re hired.’

“When it’s slow,” he said, “it’s, ‘Let’s do six interviews, six times, and then six more, divide the results by pi … ‘ ” you get the idea. So did the standing-only roomful of chuckling attendees.

The panelists were mixed on whether leveraging new recruiting-technology tools should be a local activity for global companies or a global one. Should companies be allowing their smaller, more remote recruiting teams to innovate and move forward within their own domains and unique sets of circumstances or should they all be aligning under one global-recruitment umbrella?

“It’s OK to let your recruiters have blinders on when it comes to recruiting technology,” said Mike Grennier, senior vice president of talent acquisition for Key Bank.

Crispin cautioned, though, that “there should be some way for that global alignment to take place. They all have the tools to reach across global boundaries,” he said, “but who in your organization is showing them the reach beyond their own domain? We have all that recruiting data, but is anybody really communicating about it?”

Still emerging and highly imperfect, panelists agreed, is the effectiveness of workforce planning as a pre-emptive, proactive social-recruiting tool. At the very least, at PepsiCo, “we ask HR to identify jobs or profiles that are hard to find and then keep [candidates] in store there — in waiting — so there, we’re pre-emptive,” said Sheila Stygar, PepsiCo’s senior director of talent acquisition.

Also fledgling and inadequate, they agreed, are the processes in place for dealing with the plethora and proliferation of new, often smaller, vendors with specific solutions to particular problems, or, as Crispin described them, “small pieces to add to the entire [social-recruiting] function.”

“Where do you have in your organization someone who filters through all the solutions out there?” he asked.

Grennier suggested companies trying to find that “solution-filterer” look for someone with “a real passion” for the social-recruiting function” and technology in general.

Panelists also agreed that, as social recruiting continues to “find itself” as a defined function within companies, recruiters learn to treat it professionally and network with what Wittenauer described as “those go-to people” in the vendor community — people they can bounce all these new offerings and suggestions off of.

“If you don’t have those networks,” Crispin concurred, “you’re not going to be learning in real time.”

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Two major vendors exhibiting at the 15th annual HR Technology^® Conference in Chicago have released new studies that take a close look at some important trends. SilkRoad Technology’s “Social Media and Workplace 2012 Report” pokes a hole in the widespread misimpression that employers are demanding that workers share their social-networking passwords with them: 97 percent of the 1,200 employees surveyed said they hadn’t been asked by their company for their passwords. Guess someone better tell the governors of Maryland and Illinois. The survey also found that employees are checking their mobile devices frequently throughout the workday, with more than 60 percent saying they check their personal social media more than once a day on their mobile devices. And which sites are they checking? Twitter is the most popular social media site accessed at work, at 70 percent, closely followed by Facebook at 65 percent. Only 19 percent use corporate intranets.

ADP’s Research Institute, meanwhile, has come out with a report detailing what’s on the minds of leaders at mid-sized businesses in the U.S. Although 52 percent of respondents believe the economy has improved during the last four years, only 15 percent are extremely or very confident that it will continue improving over the next 12 months. There also appears to be a bit of false confidence at play, with 81 percent of executives and business owners expressing confidence that their organizations are compliant with payroll tax laws and regulations, yet a full third (33 percent) report having incurred fines, penalties and/or lawsuits related to non-compliance.

Finally, 48 percent of respondents are concerned about the quality and skills of the available workforce, yet less than half (49 percent) say they’re confident that they have the tools to find and keep the best talent.

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In rapid-fire — at times, almost dizzying – questions and answers, participants in the HR Technology^® Conference’s Third Annual Social Media Panel grappled with what to do with, how to encourage and how to handle today’s also-rapid influx of collaboration tools in the workforce.

Led by moderator Kris Dunn, vice president of HR for Kinetix, the three panelists – Todd Chandler, vice president of learning and performance for Helzberg Diamonds; Ben Brooks, senior vice president and global director of enterprise communications and colleague engagement for Marsh Inc.; and Phoebe Venkat, director of digital and social media communications for ADT Security – fielded questions via Twitter (including the conference’s own HRTechConf group) and the audience that seemed to underscore just how much the corporate-collaboration movement has entered everyone’s lives.

Not to mention how untested and fledgling the movement still is. Perhaps Chandler said it best: “We are just starting this journey.”

How do you create that culture change you need? What’s it going to take in people and resources? How do you incent those ambassadors you find in your workforce to help champion and sell the idea? What should HR’s role be? Who should own it? The questions were perhaps as telling as the answers, indicative of just how vast the social-collaboration frontier is.

Interestingly, more than one panelist bemoaned the fact that HR professionals are not out front as some of the best social-collaboration ambassadors. “They say it’s because they’re told they need to stay removed and keep a screen in place between themselves and their employees,” said Venkat. In other words, there’s a seeming danger for HR in embracing the real-time, interpersonal transparency that collaboration affords.

“This obviously needs to simply evolve as a mind-set,” said Venkat. “It’s truly an issue of gradual trust.” In fact, for her, it has already meant sneaking visits with vice presidents of HR to encourage them to “like” something a daring employee has ventured to share, “to encourage [that employee], but also to spread the word throughout the business that this really is OK.”

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The social networking sphere is supposed to be the domain of the young, right?

It’s fair to say that Generations Y and Z have led the way in making new verbs like “Facebook me” and “tweeting” a part of our everyday language. But, there’s no shortage of data showing that older generations—particularly baby boomers—have begun to plug into the social network as well.

And, boomers are doing much more than posting pictures and sharing mundane details of their daily routines, according to a recent poll conducted by Millennial Branding, a Boston-based research and consulting firm, and Beyond.com.

The survey of 5,268 job seekers actually found that more baby boomers (29 percent) report using social networks as part of their job search than members of both Generation X (27 percent) and Generation Y (23 percent).

If that statistic surprises you, you’re not alone.

“I was very surprised, for the obvious reasons,” says Dan Schawbel, founder and managing partner of Millennial Branding. “It’s interesting. A lot of people would suspect that it would be a very small number of boomers using social networking.”

A key contributing factor, says Schawbel, could be the large numbers of older job seekers using LinkedIn, the well-known networking site for people in professional occupations.

“For boomers, [LinkedIn] is just easier for them to use. All their connections are using it.”

Indeed, studies put the average LinkedIn user age in the mid-40s, with a mean salary in the six-figure range, he says. “So [many of these users] hold, or are looking for, executive- and director-level jobs.”

So, while most large companies already use social networking for recruiting purposes, this knowledge may help HR professionals make more efficient use of their time when recruiting for the types of top positions typically filled by boomer-age candidates, says Schawbel.

The reality is, if you’re an employer, you have to use all the top social networks. You can’t avoid Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook. But this finding shows you that you may use most of your time on LinkedIn for executive recruiting. Recruiters have less and less time these days. So this report tells them where they should spend their time and how.”

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All eyes have been on the reports and memos emanating from the National Labor Relations Board’s general counsel concerning social-media use and policies in the workplace, but this legal alert from Ballard Spahr points to the fact that the board’s Sept. 7 decision in Costco Wholesale Corp. is its first-ever official ruling in this area.

And employers should take heed and be careful and cautious in its wake, the alert says.

In its ruling, the NLRB invalidated Costco’s electronic posting rule that prohibited employees from making statements that “damage the company … or damage any person’s reputation.” The board found the policy overly broad, concluding that it could reasonably be interpreted to “chill” employee exercise of the right to engage in protected, concerted (union) activity.

The alert says the board applied much of the legal reasoning outlined in the three prior general counsel reports to reach this first-ever social-media-policy decision. (Here is my most recent blog post outlining those earlier general counsel reports.)

Although the ruling is extensive and thorough (see my link above), Ballard Spahr’s alert claims it, ”like the reports … uses case law developed outside the social-media context in the form of more traditional workplace rules and applies those principles to electronic forms of communication.”

“Much to the chagrin of many in the business community,” the alert states, “Costco does not develop any social media-specific guidance or appear to recognize the very different potential impact on an employer’s operations of a disparaging statement made on the Internet as opposed to one made at the workplace water cooler.”

It’s final warning gets to the heart of my reason for sharing:

In light of the decision, employers can expect the board to be critical of social-media policies that contain broad prohibitions on actions or statements about workplace concerns that do not include examples of the postings the employer may permissibly target. Such examples include defamatory or sexually harassing comments, or the disclosure of an employer’s trade secrets.”

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Here’s another wrinkle in the quest toward that perfect marriage between social media and recruiting. Consider it a sign that we still have a long way to go.

Seems an executive recruiter by the name of Tal Newhart, owner of ScreeningInterviews.com, was recently forced to terminate his candidate-profiling service, FacebookComparator.com, because the HR departments and independent recruiters using it weren’t doing so in the way he had envisioned.

“We were informed the Comparator was being used to ‘prevent the hiring of members,’ ” he says in this release. “I can certainly see that.”

The online service, with customers in the United States and Europe, analyzed a job applicant’s self-reporting on large social networks to predict a candidate’s hirability and anticipated job performance. Newhart says ScreeningInterviews will continue using the Comparator technology in its retained assignments and as part of its interviewing services, “but it’s dead as a stand-alone recruiting support service.”

“Too bad,” he says, “since it was a robust performance and retention predictor. I guess too good.”

The problem, in a nutshell, Newhart told me when I called him about this, comes down to the difference between using such a service in a positive way, i.e., the way it was constructed to be used — “to match corporate cultures with candidates” — or using it a negative way, ”to screen out candidates.”

Essentially, members of “a large social-media site were being informed by the network that they were being denied positions because of what was being found on FacebookComparator.com,” he told me. HR leaders, hiring managers and recruiters “were using it to knock people out, not make the match culturally.” (He declined to name or confirm the site, despite the product’s name.)

This hurdle aside, Newhart says, there will be a “place in the future for companies to come in [to such a site] and create a full profile, based on all of their cultural aspects, business goals, philosophies, etc. etc. [and then correlate that] with a job candidate’s social-media presence” to see if there is a match there, if that person will do well there, succeed there, stay there.

That will take a new way of looking at such a service by HR professionals and recruiters, he says. It will require a more positive approach, rather than looking at this type of tool as simply good at finding questionable behavior, beliefs or politics on someone’s Facebook page so they can rule them out based on that.

In the same token, says Newhart, “job seekers need to understand the majority of companies are using social self-reporting, and what you say and show about yourself online is being used to evaluate who you are. … What people don’t understand is that [sharing anything on a social-media site] is self-reporting, and it’s very difficult to ‘game.’ ”

In this news analysis I wrote earlier this year, Don Kluemper, a professor of management who specializes in human resources at Northern Illinois University’s College of Business, provided first-ever academic proof, through his research, that Facebook can yield valuable personality and job-performance information — not just clues as to whether someone parties too hard or has alarming alliances. He did indicate then that the eventual practice was far from perfect.

Just as cognitive-ability tests were first doubted, but then thoroughly tested and vetted for any adverse-impact, “so, too,” said Kluemper, “would social-media profiles as job predictors need to be studied [and vetted] … .”

Newhart would take that a step further:

In the future we’ll see job/candidate matching engines that combine and optimize the individual company and candidate matrices. The result will be dramatically shorter unemployment periods. The underlying technology exists today. It will just be very complicated to get the cloud-based pieces to play together. When done, though, the social impact will be enormous. But for now, just look closely at a candidate’s self-reporting. Everything is right there.”

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