Lots of excitement about another cool social media tool on the block…Pinterest. The link here from businessinsider shows some great creative uses but I think there’s an awful lot more to come here particularly for the creative industries….looking forward to it!
Wonderfully creative CV using QR codes
Next week it’s #trulondon and I’m very excited to be sharing and learning with so many amazingly talented recruitment/HR/people types from around the world
I’m particularly buzzed to be leading a track on employee blogging with Michael Long @theredrecruiter. We’ll be hosting a conversation about engaging employees in blogging about their business and hence creating a vivid and candid picture of their organisation and it’s culture
Michael will be sharing insights from his experience globally at Rackspace on RackerTalent.com and I’ll be talking about my work in the UK for T.G.I. Fridays www.fridoids.co.uk and globally with Fitness First www.fitnessfirsters.com.
But most importantly we’ll all be learning from everyones experiences
If you’ve never been to an unconference before then I strongly recommend dipping your toe - because unconferences aren’t about sitting and listening they are about mixing, connecting, discussing and engaging…bring it on.
If #trulondon is sold out already or you can’t make it then consider #connectingHR in london in May. Broader HR scope but the same great experience of mixing, connecting, discussing and engaging with people who share your passions.
Hope to see you soon!
Fitness First is the largest gym, health and fitness club group in the world with more than 1.4 million Fitness First members in more than 540 clubs in 17 countries.
Strategically Fitness First understand that having high calibre, engaged teams who are passionate about fitness is central to their ability to achieve their business goals and to deliver against their mission to make the world a fitter place.
The challenge facing their HR team was how to bring their employer value proposition to life globally in order to attract the very best talent and to engage existing team members while also ensuring that the candidate experience supported the delivery of the brand.
The first task was to get a handle on the employer value proposition (EVP) of Fitness First – why do people work there and what is it that attracts people to careers in the fitness industry and Fitness First in particular.
The key insight gained from the EVP work was the opportunity for team members to help make a difference to peoples lives. Helping people to: recover from accidents; deal with major illnesses; reduce disability; lose weight; and regain self-esteem are just some of the themes of the great stories that employees can tell about the purpose of their work.
The solution to bringing this proposition to life was to make sure that team members could tell their stories about what they do at work – the serious stuff and the fun stuff.
These stories had to be easy to capture and easy to share and 
find. And so work began to develop recruitment websites and employee blogs that celebrate the amazing people who work together to help make a difference to peoples lives at Fitness First. The sites have now been launched in local language for Australia, Spain, Italy and the UK. You can find links to them at www.fitnessfirsters.com
The sites have the standard recruitment material you would expect e.g. details of benefits. However, the lions share of space is devoted to the stories, pictures and videos that the employees have blogged themselves. This blogged material is then distributed via social media including a You Tube channel and Facebook page. All stories blogged and jobs opened up are also tweeted to Twitter to draw additional audience
Because the content is the employees’ own stories, pictures and videos they also distribute the material to their friends and contacts through their own social networks and activities. We call this ‘micro employee referral’ – while it’s not an employee referring someone to work at Fitness First they are sending positive messages to their networks about what it’s like to work there.
Blogged material can be curated into a narrative of the EVP via newsletters, adverts, video etc as per the example below as well as being used to support consumer facing social media activity.
The recruitment processes, systems and teams were also overhauled to ensure the delivery of global candidate experience standards in each market. Improvements included the establishment of central recruiting teams, deploying new applicant tracking systems (PeopleClick in Europe and Springboard in Australia) and the development of tools to support the clubs handling of a candidate when they arrive for interview.
It is too early to declare success but initial levels of interest and engagement in the blogs from team members, the growing fan and follower bases on social media and resultant traffic to the recruitment websites are promising.
We’ll keep you posted on how the story unfolds….
Need someone to blame? Blame communication. In every survey, HR investigation and consultants report you will find someone pointing a finger at communication. If you see an employee with a disengaged glazed stare it is probably to do with communication.
After years of knowing that…
(Source: Yackstar.com)
I love this interactive video CV - great use of YouTube annotations and links to create a video CV where you can navigate the various sections
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=9EzNll1U2N8
This approach ended up with Graeme landing a role with FrankPR in London.
I love stories like Graeme’s but not because this is some new and exciting thing. Rather I see this as an age old technique of demonstrating your capabilities by transparently deploying those same capabilities in your job hunt.
For me this is a mechanism underutilised by HR professionals in establishing recruitment processes. Far too much recruitment is about talking and answering questions - whereas I find very few jobs require someone who is good at being interviewed.
The more we as HR professionals focus on how we audition talent rather than interviewing it, establishing recruitment processes where the process enables the right talent to shine then the sooner we will build the highly talented teams we’re all looking for. Another bonus of this approach is that it can help to cut out alot of the bias and prejudice that often dog selection processes.
For example - a clothes retailer is hiring a junior merchandiser. Why not open up a competition for all employees to submit pictures of themselves in outfits they have created from the current range. This would unearth real talent.
Most talent strategies are like a zoo: capturing animals and then locking them up in a cage.
When I first took on a HR leadership role I wanted to create something different, more like a wetland than a zoo. At a wetland there are no cages or nets to retain the birds but rather a concerted effort from everyone to create the right environment for the birds you’re after…knowing full well that they can and should come and go with the seasons
I felt that wetland centres were places of awe and wonder…whereas zoos just had too many scabby specimens to really get me excited.
Deploying the wetland model has borne a number of advantages, including:
* helping to break down the them and us between leaders, managers and team members. Under a wetland model it is clearer that everyone is accountable for the environment in which everyone works
* celebrating the freedom of people to leave, providing an open context for conversations about when someone might want to leave and when they should leave
As i look at the challenges facing HR today I think the wetland thinking is more powerful than ever.
For example….if you think wetland then having your employees profiles on linkedin makes sense: showcasing the talent in your business, enabling the organisation to leverage the compound networks of it’s individuals etc etc. If you think like a zoo then it doesn’t make sense as it will just encourage poaching of the good ones.
So, how do you know if your organisation is a wetland or a zoo?
Just answer this simple question…
A talented employee leaves, do you
(a) celebrate their achievements and openly talk about why they have left
(b) pretent they are in the toilet.
The word culture is overused. It has become synonymous with words such as teamwork, innovation, collaboration and integrity. They are words that were made up by excellent Org consultants that know cool stuff and you know the drill. These words look very good on posters.
The truth is culture is…
Excellent short video animating the key messages from the great book Drive by Dan Pink.
What really motivates us? autonomy, mastery and purpose…enjoy
I think this is my favourite creative job hunting story…spending $6 on google adwords and getting 2 job offers from top NYC creative directors.
In the job hunters own words…
THE GOAL Get a job working for a top creative director in New York. THE SOLUTION When Scott Vitrone, Ian Reichenthal, Gerry Graf, Tony Granger, or David Droga Googled themselves, they saw a personalized message asking for a job. The message linked to an online portfolio. THE OUTCOME : interviews with David Droga, Gerry Graf, Ian Reichenthal and Scott Vitrone. Scott and Ian offered the job. Currently working at Y&R. The total cost was approximately $6
Brilliant example of ingenuity in finding a job.
Kyle has constructed a campaign to get companies to make bids for him to work for them - http://employkyle.com/
Kyle has received 14 job offers and is now about to decide. Not many other grads in that position today.
Brilliant - Yes.
New - No.
People have been creative in demonstrating their skills to get work since time began - I’m sure cavemen got hunting gigs by bringing meat into the selection process.
What is new is that more and more people get to see what Kyle has done……because of the fundamental shift in power from the organisation to the individual that has occurred in the last decade.
Great video showing people doing amazing things.
If you tried to construct a traditional training programme to replicate this you would fail.
But what if you created an environment where your employees could demonstrate their mastery of the skills and knowledge that you employ them for and enabled them to earn status and kudos from the world as a consequence. Now that would be interesting.
The role that social media can play in accelerating learning and development has really caught my imagination now and I’ve dug out a TED talk that provides a possible framework with which to explore and experiment in this area
The talk is by TED’s Chris Anderson and in it he says the rise of web video is driving a worldwide phenomenon he calls Crowd Accelerated Innovation — a self-fueling cycle of learning that could be as significant as the invention of print — the video above is a 2 min example of this at play in the world of bartending
Chris spells out three key ingredients to create crowd accelerated innovation and learning - a Crowd, Light and Desire
Crowd - this is where the potential innovators/standard setters will come from, but also the people who will: emulate; share stories; critique developments; and celebrate achievements
Light - to give a clear and open view of what the best people in that crowd are capable of
Desire - learning and innovating is hard work, without the desire to succeed the hours wont get put in. Here Chris talks of social status within the crowd being a major driver.
How do you put this to play in your organisation? The crowd can be the employee base or a particular community of interest, social media can provide the light (clearly external will be brighter!) and a competition would be a simple overlay to amplify desire and target learning/innovation
Have you seen this at play? would love to see any and all examples
Check out Chris’s TED talk in full at http://www.ted.com/talks/chris_anderson_how_web_video_powers_global_innovation.html
Following a fabulous day at CHRU yesterday surrounded by very honest, open, friendly, knowledgeable, free thinking and collaborative people and a box of Stella Artois I woke up this morning wondering whether social media will ultimately deliver more value to HR through learning and development than recruitment.
Why? because social media makes networks visible and efficient to manage and grow, making more talent visible to each of us, enabling us to learn from those people, for their thinking to stimulate our own and for them to inspire our greater efforts.
Add video to the piece and this enables us to see with our own eyes what the very best in our chosen field can do - reframing what we may previously have thought possible and altering our expectations forever.
Surely this is potentially worth more to an organisation than saving a couple of placement fees by hiring through Linkedin?
In preparation for lots of good conversation about employee blogging at #trulondon here’s the story of how this started for me while I was HRD at TGI Fridays…
Bellagio hotel, loud music, flashing lights, tequila, nachos, bottles of spirits flying through the air, Union Jack hats, shrill whistles, TV cameras - I knew a HR career would be diverse but am I really at work? Indeed I am, it’s February 2008 and I am at the TGI Friday’s world bartending championships in Las Vegas, Nevada and the UKs very own Tony Adams has just lifted the title of the Worlds Best Bartender.
A couple of days later I’m at my desk in Luton…just a slight come down….back to being just another HRD with a challenge. The business had recently been bought out of Whitbread and we’d set up new payroll and HR infrastructure to support the circa 50 restaurants and 3,000 employees but how were we going to bring the magic back to Fridays? how were we going to reinvigorate the brand?
From a HR perspective the first step was to ensure that we had the right talent joining the business and that we engaged the talent that were already with us.
From an employer value proposition perspective the key differentiators were emotional. We didn’t pay more than anyone else nor did we have some fancy benefits package - what we had was the opportunity to be yourself at work - no need to check your personality at the door - we wanted people to bring their personalities to work.
How could we bring this to life? how could we prove that we really did want people to bring their personalities to work? By creating a blog in celebration of the great people in the business where they could post their stories, pictures and videos which would in turn be used to drive recruitment.
And so www.fridoids.co.uk was born - a hybrid between an employee blog and a recruitment website.
One year on and the stats were impressive:
Despite the success as an employer branding and recruitment tool the business was seeing even greater value in the impact on employee engagement. Fridoids created an opportunity for front line employees to: demonstrate pride in their workplace; develop relationships across the business; share their successes; and get recognised.
The out of restaurant team also enjoyed the ability to research a unit and it’s stories and characters before a visit - helping them to make a real connection on those visits.
Three years after the initial idea the blog is still going strong - checkout www.fridoids.co.uk - and if you’re interested in knowing more then check out our sessions at #trulondon in person or via the stream. Any and all queries throw them into the pot…got your own story or perspective? would love to hear it.
I'm an HR, OD and Change consultant and interim.
Businesses engage me to shape and land strategic people initiatives – from a few days framing strategy to leading HR for months.
My work has been recognised at the HR Excellence Awards 2009 and 2010 and the NORAs 2010.
Social media doesn’t excite me…but the opportunities it presents for employer branding, recruitment, employee engagement, L&D, reward and communications do.
This place is my online scrapbook for great thinking, insight, products, approaches, ideas and things that just make me laugh. I also use this space to hone my own thinking by writing my ideas down.
