Some Facebook Strategies to Consider

Harting says Accenture has 30 career pages on Facebook, all of which both promote the company as a nice place to work and list specific job postings. Many people share job postings with friends they feel would be interested in them, he says, adding that referrals from Facebook friends tend to be highly trusted. "Things tend to move along more smoothly when the referrer and candidate can do everything without leaving Facebook," Harting says.

Vineland, N.J.-based Louis P. Kadetsky, managing director of KGTiger, which provides services to help corporate recruiters, describes three levels of involvement in Facebook that corporations can engage in.

The first is simple brand identity. Create a Facebook "work for us" company page that describes, in general, the benefits of working for the company and the types of positions the company is looking to fill.

While this may closely resemble similar pages on the corporate website, when Facebook users "Like" the site, any new material will appear on their newsfeed and be visible to their friends. "You get the advantage of spreading your brand well beyond the person who landed on your page. And because the person 'Liked' your page, you get the benefit of an implicit recommendation," says Kadetsky.

The second level is to post specific jobs on Facebook. To ease the burden of posting and updating many listings, he says, most companies opt to only post jobs that are either difficult to fill or will most likely appeal to Facebook's younger demographic. New Facebook apps that automate the process of posting jobs, however, are beginning to encourage companies to post more of their jobs -- sometimes all of them -- on Facebook.

The third level is to target specific types of people by joining Facebook groups. This allows recruiters to engage directly with people who have the needed skills. Kadetsky points out that participating in group discussions is much more efficient than one-on-one telephone calls. "Recruiters can reach a lot of people in a single posting," he says.

One potential advantage of Facebook over corporate career websites is that visitors may not only communicate with corporate recruiters but also with current employees, who tend to be more trusted resources.

Kevin Wheeler, president of The Future of Talent Institute acknowledges that security-conscious organizations may limit employee access to social media in order to prevent possible leakage of sensitive information. "Companies naturally want control over what their employees say on Facebook. But if you have too much control -- if there are no even-slightly-negative comments from employees -- Facebook users won't trust them," Wheeler says.

Finally, he says, prospective applicants should "have a realistic picture of what it's like to work at your company." For example, if programmers sometimes work 10 hours a day when a new system is installed or may be called in at 3 a.m. to fix bugs, those are not things you'd want to hide from candidates.

While Facebook may not be completely ready for prime time when it comes to job postings and recruitment features, a number of companies are developing add-on applications aimed at improving Facebook recruitment functionality.

What about LinkedIn?

According to its website, LinkedIn has 120 million users, which makes it the largest professional network on the web. And while its membership is only one-sixth that of Facebook, virtually all its members are there to publicize their professional and academic information for the purpose of advancing their careers, so LinkedIn profiles very often have much more comprehensive job and educational histories than do Facebook profiles.

For recruiters looking for a specific, hard-to-find skill, a LinkedIn search is likely to be more fruitful than a Facebook one. And people are more amenable to being contacted about a job on LinkedIn than they are on Facebook.

There is also a bit of a generational gap between LinkedIn and Facebook. Harting and others find that, for high-level executive positions -- those that tend to be filled with people over 40 years old -- LinkedIn is better. On the other hand, he says, many college students or recent graduates on Facebook are either not on LinkedIn or have virtually no information there that they do not also have on Facebook.

Kadetsky believes Facebook has the potential to become a more powerful recruiting tool than LinkedIn primarily because of its numerical advantage, but also because of what he calls its "warm and fuzzy atmosphere."

"People," he says, "are much more willing to discuss things informally on Facebook. A recruiter who contacts someone at a Facebook group can have a light discussion about the company and suggest a visit to the company's career site. Discussions initiated through LinkedIn tend to be more formal. So unless someone is actively looking for a job, [he or she] may not want to pursue the discussion there," he says.

"We see value to utilizing both as part of our employer brand and recruitment strategy," says Jenny DeVaughn, manager of social media and employment branding at Houston-based Waste Management Inc. More people who visit her company's career website, she says, got there through the company's Facebook page(s) rather than through LinkedIn.

January 4 – Pop Music Chart Day, Trivia Day, & World Hypnotism Day

January 5 – Bird Day

January 7 – National Tempura Day & I’m Not Going to Take It Anymore Day

January 8 – Argyle Day (At least wear the socks!), Bubble Bath Day, & National English Toffee Day

January 9 - Dance Day & National Clean Off Your Desk Day

January 10 - United Nations Day & National Cut Your Energy Costs Day

January 11 – Cigarettes Are Hazardous to Your Health Day

January 13 – Friday the 13^th, Rubber Duckie Day, Blame Someone Else Day

January 14 - Dress Up Your Pet Day

January 15 - Martin Luther King, Jr. Day & Strawberry Ice Cream Day

January 16 – Appreciate A Dragon Day & Robert E. Lee Day (Not saying anything about ole General Lee…)

January 17 – Rid the World of Fad Diets & Gimmicks Day

January 18 – Winnie the Pooh Day (Oh, bother!)

January 19 - National Popcorn Day

January 20 - Cheese Day & Penguin Awareness Day (Watch “Happy Feet”.)

January 21 - National Hugging Day & Squirrel Appreciation Day (…so…hug a squirrel…?)

January 22 - Celebration of Life Day

January 23 - Measure Your Feet Day (Why!?)& Pie Day (Not to be confused with Pi Day in March.)

January 24 - Compliment Day & Peanut Butter Day (My, your peanut butter is delicious!)

January 25 - Opposite Day (I love this day . . . or do I?)

January 26 - Fun at Work Day

January 27 - Chocolate Cake Day & Punch the Clock Day

January 28 - Blueberry Pancake Day & International Make Your Point Day

January 29 - Puzzle Day

January 30 - National Inane Answering Message Day (Now, this sounds like FUN!)

SunTrust Banks Chief Learning Officer Mary Slaughter helped guide the company out of the financial meltdown with a better sense of itself and its industry.

"We've been, as an industry, swimming in a sea of ambiguity and uncertainty, unbelievable levels of public and regulatory scrutiny, and some fundamentally bad press where the image of the industry is not positive," Slaughter said. "The impact that that has on leaders is unbelievable."

SunTrust’s response to this crisis has been a renewed push toward leadership development centered on gaining an outside perspective on the nature of such a challenging situation. "We’ll bring in analysts from Goldman Sachs to talk to us about how we are viewed [and] how our competitors are viewed, to have some financial sense of that from an analyst’s perspective," Slaughter said. "We’ll bring large clients in to have conversations with us. We’ll bring CEOs of other companies in to talk to our leadership team about when they’ve found themselves dealing with really challenging times, where perhaps public confidence has been shaken."

SunTrust also has reviewed its learning and development efforts related to risk and credit. According to Slaughter, SunTrust as an institution has always prided itself on being conservative relative to credit risk, managing its portfolio closely. But faced with a whole new definition of risk and how to mitigate and manage it, the bank has revisited its competency models, best practices and compensation plans on risk management processes such as evaluating creditworthiness and underwriting. "[It’s] helping people really understand [risk management] at a level that we thought we were already good at, but the market dynamics have forced us to be even better and smarter and ask ourselves what were we not doing that we should have been doing," she said.

And Slaughter arrived in the midst of financial meltdown. In her first 100 days she assessed the state of learning in the company and reported on it to the company’s president and CEO. She told them: "It’s as if someone put a pause button on learning and development in the corporation for the last eight to 10 years. If this had been 10 years ago and you had asked me to come in and assess where you are, I would tell you [that] you were going great guns. But what’s happened is the marketplace had moved on, best practices have moved on, and you have not."

SunTrust’s senior leadership was determined to increase its L&D efforts. William H. Rogers Jr., president of SunTrust Banks Inc. said, "SunTrust has made investment in learning and development a business imperative," Rogers said. "The past few years have brought unprecedented change to our industry, and we are positioned to take advantage of some of the most exciting and challenging opportunities that I’ve seen in my career — all of which require a focus on preparing our teammates to be better than the competition."

So what has SunTrust done toward that end? 
1st - it's selected a new LMS supplier, with plans to roll this out in 2011, increasing the technology-based learning delivery choices available to SunTrust University.

2nd - it's revisited its client-facing curriculum. "We’ve done it in a way that for the first time ever in the history of the company, it was actually a decision process that crossed over multiple business units," Slaughter said, explaining that in the past, retail banking, commercial banking, and private wealth and mortgage management training within the company were handled separately. "So as a client, you might go in and experience a certain style, flavor, methodology or approach in one line of business but feel something entirely different in another. The whole sales enablement in aligning our behaviors with what we want to demonstrate in the marketplace was huge for us."

3rd - SunTrust revamped its leadership development. "All ships rise at high tide," Slaughter said. "When you’re doing really well, you have the sense that your leadership is probably doing really well, too. We needed to stop and think about how we were enabling leaders in the company." SunTrust did just that, quadrupling its investment in leadership development, partnering with Emory University to launch a three-week program for the top 150 leaders in the company.

4th - SunTrust reapproached employee engagement, in particular looking at tuition assistance as a way to accomplish this. "We had tuition reminbursement but it wasn't part of a strategy, ie 'why do we have that, what does that mean for us, and what are we enabling?’. So we’re re-engineering that under the umbrella of teammate engagement."

Next step - will be tackling best practices within SunTrust, with a mind toward getting business leaders involved in the process. "Right now, I do a lot of that work myself and then bring things forward to people," she said. "That’s OK, because the business is so focused on restoring itself in the marketplace. But one of the bigger issues for me is to engage the leadership in the best-practices thinking so that they can help me formulate strategies. That’s where we’re going to start having conversations about things like mobile learning or around what we want to do in terms of our approach to social networking. I would rather do things with the leadership of the company [than] to the leadership of the company. I actually want to get them further upstream in helping me define the priorities and requirements for the business in a much more strategic way."

excerpted from Profile article "Risky Business" by Daniel Margolis, September 2010

(Put these all together, bet they’d make an interesting stew!)

What is the one tool that is likely to change how we approach HR and OD strategy in the future? I believe it is likely to be Social Capital Analysis. By focusing on the trust connections within organizations, HR and OD professionals can improve outcomes of their initiatives in such areas as succession planning/leadership development, onboarding, change management, employee engagement, and mergers and acquisitions, just to name a few.

I know that this is late notice for a rather high-ticket training opportunity, but if you are interested in cutting-edge tools, have some extra dollars in your training budget, and are open Dec 5 – 7 in Louisville, KY or Dec 7 – 9 in Lexington, KY, this could be the most important opportunity of your career!

If you’re not familiar with Dr. Karen Stephenson’s work - here are the highlights from a SHRM retreat and article on how Social Capital Analysis has helped organizations in aligning their HR and OD strategies to move organizations forward.