4 Nifty Steps to Improving Your HR Skills

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 Step 1: Use your social like you mean it.

You already use social media for recruiting purposes from employer branding to cultivating company culture. High five! You’re doing your job, now be an innovator. Recruiters have mastered their presence on sites like Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter, but what about the rest of the world? What about the niche markets, and what about furthering your company reach? Social media is still relatively new to the majority of us, but this train isn’t slowing down any time soon.

With any new technology, there is always room for growth; and with social media that is a serious understatement. The nooks and crannies of the internet where talent meet, collaborate and share is growing on the daily and it’s time to play a little catch-up.

Try new sites. Have you incorporated FourSquare, Instagram or Vine to your social media repertoire? You should. LinkedIn was handed over to us on a silver platter. The transition from a professional networking hub to a recruiter’s dream was pretty seamless. The trick here is to utilize the littler known social media networks in a way that is beneficial for the company. Branding clips on Vine, Mayorship incentives on FourSquare for employees or the picture of the day from Instagram on your company site…the possibilities are endless. And these aren’t the only ones out there. Have you checked out Dribble or Github? Educate yourself.

Step 2: Honey, when are you going to get engaged?

Employee engagement has been the bird’s word for a hot minute now, but have you done anything about its advancement? Since this is the quick and easy guide to stepping up your HR game in four easy steps, we’ll give it to you straight. Perceived job importance is the number one driver of employee engagement.

Today’s workers are pleading for a sense of purpose. So give it to them already! Communication and crystal clear expectations go a long way in getting employees engaged. We aren’t talking incentive packages, paid lunches or oodles of time off. Your employees simple want to be in the loop. Take a step back and realize just how easy that would be. Feedback, constructive criticism and dialogue are key. A job well done should never go unnoticed, and on the flip side, accountability is equally prized by employees.

Step 3: Count your chickens and know when they will hatch.

Taking stock in what you have in your talent arsenal and seeing the value in it will make life a whole lot easier for everyone in the near and distant future. Only after you identify your top talent can you work at retaining them.

Find out who needs to stay, and see to it that they do. Tap into their needs and find a compromise suitable to what they bring to the table. This is done through engagement, perks and incentive that don’t necessarily need to be monetary. You should also be aware of where that talent came from, where the next crop is coming from, where they hang out and what their expectations are. And this happens through step 4.

4: Clean data is happy data.

The amount of information that it took to complete a candidate profile 10 years ago is nothing compared to the data we have to keep track of today. The data keeps coming and unless your HR department has a way to sort, store and access that data in an efficient way, it’s useless.

In the spirit of the “4 easy steps”, check out this white paper by Dave Mendoza including 7 (semi-easy) steps to cleaning up your data and creating a more functional HR department. Streamlining the entire life-cycle of the hiring process and creating fully functional customer relationship management systems doesn’t happen overnight, but it needs to happen.

photo credit: ultracuerpo via photopin cc 

By Maren Hogan