Peter Wilkinson | Social Media Consultant | International speaker
Strategising social media involvement for external HR is becoming (slowly!) second nature to the HR world. The average HR consultant is now social media savvy as well, understanding the ability of social media to create a pre-existing community of potential candidates for jobs or for joining specific departments within the organisation.
In the same way, with the help of a social media marketing consultant they can now define the internal job market of an organisation. Here’s a look at how the social media consultant is potentially able to open up new avenues for internal recruitment.
To understand the possibilities that social media technology, and most importantly social media behaviour, open up for the HR department, you first have to understand how that technology works and what that behaviour is.
The average employee is well aware that he or she can use external social media groups and sites to position himself or herself for future roles – even where those roles are not directly in line with his or her current career. By joining social media groups linked to roles within a perceived future career, the potential candidate is able to gather information about what he or she needs to do to move into this kind of role – and the position himself or herself correctly.
The international social media marketing consultant is now identifying a potential for the same behaviour to be harnessed internally – making the matching of existing organisation employees with new roles less of a matter of chance. By targeting promising individuals to future roles, even where those roles are in departments not immediately obviously connected to their current position, the HR department can create a strong future workforce – and deliver a higher likelihood of employee satisfaction at the same time.
The social media consultant may recommend developing an internal version of something like LinkedIn, or using an existing platform like LinkedIn to create internal groups. Employees are then able to use those groups to connect with potential sources of information in the departments they want to work in – and to prepare themselves with the skills required to make the change.
From the HR point of view, this kind of behaviour allows human resources departments to get a better measure of the desires of a company’s employees as well as their current potentials. With the adage that a happy workforce is a productive workforce as true as it ever was, it seems likely that this kind of advice, given by the social media marketing consultant, can pave the way for HR departments to facilitate a smaller staff turnover and a higher level of apparent satisfaction.
The knowledge and skills drain experienced by a department losing an employee to another department is, over the mid to long term, offset by the higher degree of long term employees working where they truly want to be.