This is the third of fourth segment of social strategies for your Social HR initiative. Let’s discuss building strategy for the next two posts, irrespective if your Social HR initiative is internally or externally focused.
Creating Strategy
Just like building a company, you create your Social HR strategy by building from the ground up, breaking down your long-term goal into smaller, immediate goals.
If your long-term goal is to recruit on multiple platforms but this is your first time using social media for HR purposes, you should start with just one social network or micromedia website. As you begin attracting candidates and building relationships with them, and as you become more adept with social media, you can apply the same strategy to other social networks and begin incorporating forums, video distribution and other technology.
Just as you should start with one social media platform at a time, you should tackle one HR purpose at a time because building a successful strategy takes time and effort from your entire HR team. Overburdening them, and yourself, will only increase the likelihood of the strategy failing. If you plan on tackling recruitment first, don’t start a retention strategy until the frameworks of the recruitment strategy are in place and working well. Keep track of what works and what doesn’t so you can apply successful strategies to other social media platforms and HR goals.
External social strategy
Building an external social strategy can be daunting, especially as social media is constantly changing. But there are elements that will help ensure the strategy’s success and get support from the executive team.
Diversify
While it’s important to start with just one social media platform, as discussed earlier, your long-term strategy should be applicable to multiple platforms — those that already exist as well as potential new websites. Just like a financial portfolio should include multiple investments in case one tanks while another yields fantastic returns, your Social HR strategy should also contain several social media platforms. While Facebook will likely continue to be around for a long time to come, if you focus your strategy solely on this one social network, you’re exposing yourself and your organization to great risk if anything ever happens to the site. Luckily many current platforms like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube can be integrated with each other. Accounts can be co-ordinated so tweets are also posted as Facebook and LinkedIn status updates. Videos uploaded to YouTube can also be posted on the corporation’s Facebook and MySpace pages as well as embedded on the corporate website.
Stay up-to-date with current technology
Outdated websites or the use of older, less popular technology can give candidates and employees the impression your organization isn’t very innovative. Not exactly the image most organizations want to project. Candidates, especially Generation Y, will judge an organization based on its ability to adapt to social media. Are you incorporating videos into your career site or on LinkedIn to give candidates a clear picture of what it’s like to work at the organization? Are you building relationships with users on Facebook, which has more than 400 million unique visits, which is over one-third of all the Internet users, each month? Just posting jobs to an online job board isn’t enough. These job boards showcase openings to active jobseekers, but what are you doing to get in front of passive job candidates? The latest social media websites allows you to do this.
As I’ve mentioned earlier, one of the best ways to stay up-to-date with new technology is to talk to subscribe to blogs and HR analysts and read about what these sites are saying about trends.
Regularly monitor progress
To meet goals, and stay under budget, you need to regularly evaluate your strategy to see which initiatives are working and which aren’t. For example, you should know how many hires result from job board A compared to job board B compared to professional network C. After piloting a new technology or initiative, set up quarterly reviews to evaluate its effectiveness. If you don’t see the results you want in a specific time frame, it’s time to get rid of the technology or initiative and reallocate its budget to something new.
Measurable ROIs
It’s hard to build a business case for social media when the only metrics you can show the CFO or CEO is the number of visits your Facebook fan page gets each month or how many users accept your invitation to join your LinkedIn group. These metrics don’t show the value of social media for the organization.
So how can you solve this? Ask the companies that develop your applicant tracking system or human resources information system to build fields that track how candidates found you (through job boards, Facebook, LinkedIn or other sources). Now you have the ability to find out where successful and, just as importantly, unsuccessful candidates are coming from. In talking with vendors, they might be able to suggest other metrics to incorporate into your systems.