Social capital - recruitment and retention

 

   In my Knowledge Infusion webinar, I talked about the increasing importance of social capital.  In Kennedy's webinar, I talked about some activities HR can take to develop it.

For example, in recruitment, HR can

• Develop their Employee Value Proposition / Employer Brand to focus on the sort of people who value relationships
• Look for people who understand the need to build their connections and relationships, for example through their use of social networking sites to increase the size of their network etc
• Look for people who have a high level of social intelligence
• Tap friends and contacts of existing employees through the use of referral schemes
• Let team members recruit new members of the team.

 

And when thinking about retention, HR can:

• Ensure teams actually do team – personally as well as professionally (ie that they really do work as teams rather than as groups)
• Articulate the benefits of working in the team (for example, by including this in a review of how an agreed EVP has ben delivered, going beyond a statement of benefits in a Total Reward Statement) so that this becomes a basis for rational as well as emotional engagement and therefore supports intention to stay
• If relevant, use contracts / retention bonuses to retain the team
• When people do think about leaving, encourage them to move into a customer or partner organisation, which can actually enhance rather than detract from social capital.

 

And, of course, HR can also ensure that that social capital is enhanced through ongoing management activities, whether these are face-to-face, or aided by technology (particularly web 2.0).

I think that as teams and social capital become increasingly important, these activities could increasingly act as differentiators and opportunities for competitive advantage.

And I think that they are are all particularly relevant at the moment, given the present economic and business conditions.  Many organisations are now paying increased attention to retaining human capital when they undertake restructuring and downsizing but very few organisations (none of the employers of the participants on the webinar!) are yet thinking about retaining social capital when they undertake these sorts of changes.

It would be god to hear from you if your organisation IS paying attention to maintaining or even developing its social capital at the moment, or if you'd like to talk about how you might be able to do this.

 

Technorati Tags: Kennedy Information,webinar,social capital,recruitment,retention

Recruitment 2.0: Head farming vs head hunting / Heidrick & Struggles

Another thing that came up in both Singapore and Dubai was head farming. I've already posted on this briefly, but develop on the idea here (it also explained further in my book, with a case study from Ernst & Young).

Basically, instead of waiting for a particular vacancy to arise, and then needing to find a particular individual who might fit (as in traditional head hunting), search firms and employers can work out who it is they want, establish relationships with these people, and then wait for the right opportunity (based upon particular business needs - but also the career needs of the individuals concerned) for the person to join the organisation.

The approach is about moving from a reactive to a proactive approach that will provide the very best talent rather than simply the pretty good (the very best is unlikely to be available in the market at the time a particular vacancy occurs).

It's also a good example of seeing people as providers of human capital, rather than as human resources, and is very much a modern equivalent of the original movement in pre-history from hunting to farming, which brought in major changes in the way societies were able to work. This is about a major change in the way that businesses work too.

There's also an interesting article on this (in a search firm context), showing how the approach is supported by social media (and therefore, referred to as 'Recruitment 2.0'), in this month's Talent Management magazine:

"Executive search firm Heidrick & Struggles is developing a private, invitation-only social networking site for high-level job candidates. The company hopes the ability to communicate electronically and share videos, photos and other media with candidates all around the world will speed up the recruitment process and enhance its traditional face-to-face business.

"The original impetus for us was that what we are, at heart, a relationship business," said Tashi Lassalle, vice president of strategic development at Heidrick & Struggles. "We're seeing more and more ways that individuals connect with one another, and we wanted to be on the front foot of that, rather than on the back foot."

"For us, this isn't about a numbers game any more than it is when we do our classic executive search," Lassalle said. "What it really is about is handpicking individuals in the markets we feel have most relevance to our clients, and then taking that exclusivity and bringing it online."

Users on the site are anonymous to each other but communicate directly and openly with their personal Heidrick & Struggles recruiters. Users can, however, converse with each other in the site's discussion forums, and if they choose to do so, they can mutually disclose their identities, Lassalle said.

"Something we've tried very hard to balance is the privacy element because, of course, in executive search you're talking to people who wouldn't normally talk to people, and you're basically working on jobs that wouldn't be advertised," she said. "So we want to try to keep that discretion, that really personal part, but we also know that individuals like to connect with one another."

That said, Heidrick & Struggles recognizes the concept of a private social networking site for executives is new and might take some getting used to, Lassalle said.

"It's like [Alexander] Graham Bell inventing the telephone and nobody being quite sure what it was going to be used for," she said. "We're still in the exploring phase. It's about what the [candidate] community chooses to do, and we'll respond to that and accommodate it. At this moment it's very much a supplement to our core business, which is brick-and-mortar and face-to-face."