Employers – Not Just Job Hunters – Need Good Online Profiles
A bad online reputation is strongly going to harm a company’s appeal to future employees, according to a study by Spherion Staffing Services. The company surveyed 225 human resource managers and 2,035 employed adults.
“One of the greatest disconnects unveiled in the study centers around the role of social media in the workplace, the importance of a company’s online reputation and the clarity of its mission. According to the Emerging Workforce Study, nearly half (47 percent) of workers strongly agree/agree that when they consider new employment, a company’s online reputation will be equally as important as the offer they are given,” according to a press release from the company.
Jeanne Meister, a contributor to Forbes.com, says, “2014 is the year HR departments must start creating “social media playbooks” to determine their game plans.” She says there are seven social media trends employers need to embrace for a successful online existence.
- Big data lets new jobs find you before you even know you’re looking. This approach to recruitment is creating a new technical world order where job applicants are found and evaluated by their merits and contributions, rather than by how well they sell themselves in an interview, Meister says.
- Mobile apps are the new job-search frontier, Meisner puts forth, “yet only 20 percent of Fortune 500 companies have a mobile-optimized career site. The rest of the 80% of companies are missing the fact that tablet and smartphone users expect to see job listings and information in a visual way, one that reflects the visual approach they bring to their personal lives on the Web.”
- Companies use gamification in the workplace (and that doesn’t mean allowing time to fill out NCAA bracket pools). Meisner says, “The strategy is about truly understanding who you are trying to engage, what motivates them, and how gamification can change the way they work, communicate and innovate with peers and customers.”
- Re-think the performance review. As Meisner points out, “The annual performance review is dead. When 750 senior level HR professionals were recently asked to grade their current performance management system, 60% gave it a grade of C or below.”
- Learning will be social and happen anywhere and anytime. “Nationwide Insurance, for example, now has nearly all of its 36,000 employees active on its internal social platform, making it far easier for employees to find subject experts and solve business problems in one fell swoop, rather than sending copious emails or searching through hard drives,” Meisner says.
- MOOC’s will revolutionize corporate learning & development. MOOCs, otherwise known as massively open online courses, “most important legacy may in fact be its impact on the world of corporate training – a $150 billion industry,” Meisner has found out from research. “Rather than search for job candidates based upon the spec’s given to them by their clients, Aquent [a staffing firm with over 8,000 employees] flipped the process, instead creating a brand of MOOCs to help candidates develop the skills Aquent’s clients will seek.”
- Capture your organizational Klout. Klout is an online tool for measuring individual’s social media influence. “In the year ahead, the focus will also be on Klout for Business. That’s because in June of 2013, Yammer and Klout announced a partnership that allows Klout to factor Yammer users’ data and activity into its social ranking algorithm, and also lets Yammer users display their Klout scores on their Yammer profiles,” Meisner reports.