By Michelle Boyde
Do you offer your employees a bonus for referring a friend or acquaintance for an open position? You probably do. Many companies offer these incentives to find people that match their culture. Human beings like and trust what they know.
This is also true of young graduate talent: 29 per cent of UK students use friends and family for information about employers. This trend is prevalent throughout the world: 25 per in Germany, 28 per cent in the US and 27 per cent in Brazil. They may not know you – the employer – but they are ready to believe the experiences of the people they do know. But, for a generation of Facebook users, who “you know” has shifted; they certainly use the word ‘friend’ more loosely than their parents did.
Furthermore, 78% of internet users trust peer recommendations.
If you are not yet listening to the chatter in social networks, then you really should be. It’s an ideal way of seeing yourself through the eyes of talent.
Your employer brand is global and just like the game Chinese Whispers, everyone who comes into contact with it tells it in their own way – do you know what they are saying?
By Michelle Boyde
If your head is still firmly in the sand, it’s time to pull it out. Competition to hire the best people is stronger than ever. Whatever the unemployment figures tell us, getting those top 5 per cent of talented young things to sign on your dotted line is getting harder still. Just because you can fill your positions today does not mean you always will.
Today Skype announced it plans to hire 400 new employees, almost doubling its headcount. CEO, Mr Bates, explains that Skype’s weakness is a shortage of product engineers capable of pushing out new products. Their lack of revenue growth is directly related to their lack of talented people.
If you weren’t convinced that employer branding has a direct affect on the bottom line, keep an eye on Skype. If he can find those 400 people, with exactly the right skills, the correct experience and of course cultural fit and then get them to work for Skype, we might see something exciting happening. That’s tough anyway, but even tougher when competing against Google and lets know forget the new kid on the block: Facebook.
By Michelle Boyde
This week, my local paper reports that over Easter the local Trinity Methodist Church will offer a messaging service: text with a prayer and somebody will pray for you. Even God is now connected 24 hours a day, which means we must accept that students, and in turn recruiters, must embrace social media and the continuous connectivity and instant feedback it fosters.
Also this week, a career service contact told me that LinkedIn, usually the reserve of professionals, is used to connect students and employers for interviews by the career service – no more emails, just LinkedIn. However, Facebook continues to be the platform of choice of today’s students. On April 15th, Sedef M Buyukataman, university relations manager European & emerging markets from Cisco will share how they have used Facebook as the corner stone of their graduate recruitment strategy at the Universum Awards. All employers need to know how to utilize social media channels. If you have not yet signed up to Sedef’s seminar, you can at www.universumawards.com.
Happy Easter!
Just recently in the McKinsey Quarterly there was a piece entitled, “When job seekers invade Facebook”. It was about how many corporate managers, with the so-called “job jitters”, are rushing to join online social networks in order to build their social capital during these tough economic times. Read the rest of this entry »
