Peter Wilkinson Panther Social Media
There’s a sense in which social media uses itself to ensure employees have the best cultural fit. Because it’s an information sharing tool, social media makes it easier for companies to express their culture – which in turn means that employees who don’t endorse it or can’t “get with it” end up selecting themselves out of the business.
Your international social media consultant can show you various ways to make your culture felt using social media technology. Key to this is the concept of engagement. Team leaders and managers must be able to express corporate culture in their social media presence, to a degree whereby the atmosphere of company culture becomes a natural background to the interaction of every team and set of individuals in the business.
In the past it has been difficult for top management to instil company values across the board – simply because the bigger the company is the more fragmented it becomes. But when your international social media marketing consultant helps you develop internal social media networks, groups defined by teams or departments, all of which are linked to the top, then the company message can be expounded daily by the highest employees.
Obviously, in order for this to work those in positions of company power must be willing to spend time socialising with employees on the network. The core company values are diluted the longer it takes a key espouser of those values to interact with his or her employees. So follow the doctrine of your international social media consultant and maintain an active presence in the internal social networks.
And how does this all apply to recruitment? Simply enough – candidates using social media to apply for jobs internally will already be exposed to the company culture; and candidates coming in from outside can be made to be exposed to that same culture by ensuring the brand has a similar presence on external social media sites.
Again, this requires work on the part of high ranking employees, on the part of employees who have been nominated as official agents of company culture. It can benefit large companies to employ a full time international social media marketing consultant to develop cultural network presence both internally and externally so the message never runs a risk of serious dilution.
The basic measure of cultural fit is an observance of candidate’s interactions. Your international social media consultant will of course point out that there is no better way of observing interactions than on social media, which immortalises every action and interaction in a historical stream. So you can see how candidates react to each other, and to given situations, by holding informational interviews using your internal or external social media presence.
This is already being done every day on sites like LinkedIn. Time to take the advice of your international social media marketing consultant and join the party.