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#TChat Preview: We’re Going To Recruit Like It’s 1999

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The TalentCulture #TChat Show is back live on Wednesday, February 18, 2015, from 7-8 pm ET (4-5 pm PT). The #TChat radio portion runs the first 30 minutes from 7-7:30 pm ET, followed by the #TChat Twitter chat from 7:30-8 pm ET.

Last week we talked about how to become workplace fascinating.

This week we’re going to talk about how 2015 will be the best year for recruiting since 1999.

Consider this: more jobs were created in 2014 than in any other year since 1999. According to a recent New York Times article, employers have hired more than one million people since November 1, 2014.

However, it’s not all “Happy New Year” champagne and caviar; there is still an end-of-times dirge bemoaning that upwards of 30 million Americans are either out of work or severely underemployed.

Either way, company culture and transparent relationships will be the primary drivers for successfully recruiting and retaining employees in 2015. The talent acquisition teams that get this will facilitate winning.

Join TalentCulture #TChat Show co-creators and hosts Meghan M. Biro and Kevin W. Grossman as we learn about how 2015 will be the best year for recruiting since 1999 with this week’s guest: Will Thomson, Global Sales Recruiter for Rosetta Stone and the Founder of Bulls Eye Recruiting.

Sneak Peek:

We hope you’ll join the #TChat conversation this week and share your questions, opinions and ideas with our guests and the TalentCulture Community.

#TChat Events: We’re Going To Recruit Like It’s 1999

TChatRadio_logo_020813#TChat Radio — Wed, February 18th — 7 pm ET / 4 pm PT Tune in to the #TChat Radio show with our hosts, Meghan M. Biro and Kevin W. Grossman, as they talk with our guest: Will Thomson.

Tune in LIVE online Wednesday, February 18th!

#TChat Twitter Chat — Wed, February 18th — 7:30 pm ET / 4:30 pm PT Immediately following the radio show, Meghan, Kevin and Will will move to the #TChat Twitter stream, where we’ll continue the discussion with the entire TalentCulture community. Everyone with a Twitter account is invited to participate, as we gather for a dynamic live chat, focused on these related questions:

Q1: What should job seekers, employees focus on in today’s economy? #TChat (Tweet this Question)

Q2: How does company culture differ from employer brand? #TChat (Tweet this Question)

Q3: What relationship-marketing activities should brands engage in? #TChat (Tweet this Question)

Until the show, we’ll keep the discussion going on the #TChat Twitter feed, our TalentCulture World of Work Community LinkedIn group, and in our new TalentCulture G+ community. So feel free to drop by anytime and share your questions, ideas and opinions. See you there!!

photo credit: SYD NYE 2012 via photopin (license)

Will The Real You Please Stand Up? #TChat Recap

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“Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.” -Oscar Wilde

Looking for yet another staggering social era statistic? Try this from personal branding tools provider, Brand Yourself:

Google processes more than 80 million “people” searches each day. Yep. 80 million. Chances are someone will be searching for you soon. So ask yourself this — if someone “Googled” your name right now, would the results do you justice?

Brand Positioning: It’s All About The “C” Words

As a marketing and communications professional, I’ve spent years persuading business organizations to mind their messaging, so the world will understand their brand promise. I preach the “5 C’s” of brand positioning: Clarity, Completeness, Cohesion, Credibility and Consistency. And now, after a week of “brand you” discussions with the TalentCulture community, I see how those very same concepts can be an equally powerful force in our professional lives.

Turns out, I’m not the only one who likes “C” words! Earlier this year, after #TChat conversations about how professional recommendations influence personal brands, our very own Kevin W. Grossman offered some handy “C” advice of his own on the Reach-West blog:

“…Ensure your online profiles are as consistent and accurate as possible across all social points of presence. In other words, whomever you say you are, and whatever you say you’re doing (and have done) is close (if not the same) on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, G+ and the many other industry and association niche networks and communities where you’re visible.

Consistency and accuracy are critical keys, because those searching for you and reviewing your profiles will be looking for anomalies that don’t add up — and you want everything to add up. You want to stand out, but you want to add up — and for goodness sake you want to be accurate and truthful about everything. That includes your recommendations and endorsements. Never over-spin, or allow others to go there. Not only that, but at the very least once a quarter review and update your online profiles, and kill those you no longer want to maintain, even if you’re not looking for work.

Why? Because you never know when that great new opportunity will be looking for you to add up. It’s your personal employment brand. Take care of it.”

DIY Brand Makeover

Reinventing You

Learn more about “Reinventing You”5 C’s of Brand Positioning

Hmm. I guess I’d better spend the dog days of summer cleaning my personal brand “house.” How about you? From what I saw on the #TChat stream yesterday, few of us would disagree with the importance of proactively managing an online persona. But for some people, focusing on themselves is almost as enjoyable as flossing their teeth.

That’s why we asked a fearless brand management expert to lead the way this week — Dorie Clark, author of Reinventing You. Dorie clearly understands the issues that hold people back from “owning” their brand identity, and she offers practical tools to make it work.

Below, we’ve captured the week’s highlights — including a tweet-by-tweet Storify slideshow from #TChat Twitter, and other resource links.

We hope this sparks a desire to start your own brand makeover. Let us know about your progress…here or on the stream. The TalentCulture community, is always open and ready to offer ideas and support. Rock that brand!

#TChat Week in Review: Reinventing Your Personal Brand

SAT 7/13

DorieClark

Watch the G+ Hangout with Dorie Clark

#TChat Preview: Our Community Manager, Tim McDonald, outlined the week’s topic in a post that features a great “sneak peek” G+ Hangout with Dorie. See “You 2.0: Reinventing a Personal Brand.”

SUN 7/14

Forbes.com Post: TalentCulture CEO, Meghan M. Biro, offered 5 ways to tap into your true professional identity. Read “Rethink Brand You: Find Your Authentic Self.”

TUE 7/16

Related Post: For people who need clarification to redefine themselves, Dorie explained how to gather actionable input from a full-circle brand review. Read “Considering a Career Change? Take a 360 Snapshot.”

WED 7/17

TChatRadio_logo_020813

Listen to the #TChat Radio show

#TChat Radio: To kick-off this week’s #TChat double-header, Dorie spoke with Meghan M. Biro and Kevin W. Grossman about the power of proactively managing your brand. Even if you’re not in the market for a new position, you’ll hear ideas you can use. Listen now to the recording.

#TChat Twitter: As the radio show concluded, we fired-up the Twitter chat engines for a dynamic, community conversation about the role of personal branding in our professional lives. As always, the crowdsourcing energy was breathtaking. Thanks to everyone who contributed! To review highlights, see the slideshow below:

#TChat Twitter Highlights: “Reinventing a Personal Brand”

[javascript src=”//storify.com/TalentCulture/tchat-insights-reinventing-a-personal-brand.js?template=slideshow”]

Closing Notes & What’s Ahead

GRATITUDE: Thanks again to Dorie Clark for helping our community think more intelligently about the “why” and “how” of personal brand management. You inspire us to reach higher!

NOTE TO BLOGGERS: Did this week’s events prompt you to write about work/life integration issues? We’d love to share your thoughts. Post a link on Twitter (include #TChat or @TalentCulture), or insert a comment below, and we’ll pass it along.

WHAT’S AHEAD: Next week at #TChat events, we’ll continue our summer “professional restart” series with a special crowdsourcing forum. Check for details in a preview post this weekend.

In the meantime, the World of Work conversation continues each day. So join us on the #TChat Twitter stream, or on our new LinkedIn discussion group. And feel free to explore other areas of our redesigned website. The gears are always turning at TalentCulture, and your ideas and opinions are always welcome.

See you on the stream!

Image Credit: Stock.xchng

 

 

 

Collaborative Community Results for NPR & HRevolution

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“So, I really liked Kevin’s definition of talent communities from last week’s #TChat Radio Show. Kevin, why don’t you share that?”

Stammer. Stutter. I have no idea.

Here we were yesterday in our packed HRevolution session on building and maintaining talent communities, me in one of three groups we had broken up in to, and after all the research, writing and talking about it to date, I couldn’t define it on the spot if my life depended on it.

Thankfully it didn’t, but still.

My point being it continues to be a much larger multifaceted conversation with a moving-target definition depending on context — and for us yesterday the context was social recruiting and employment branding.

You can review the premise of our HRevolution Talent Communities & Company Culture session, but simply put it included some of the best and brightest minds in talent acquisition and social media (and I’m not talking about mine) and our case study partner, Lars Schmidt, director of talent acquisition at National Public Radio (NPR).

The idea was to break up our session into three consulting groups vying for NPR’s business, and for each group to come up with and present a business case – and strategy – for developing and sustaining talent communities for sourcing, recruiting and employment branding.

But right from the beginning, the consensus question was, what’s a talent community?

So hey, I wasn’t the only one.

And then there was, why does it have to be called that anyway and why do we insist on the continued use of gobbledygook like engagement, transactional, pipelines, empowerment and the like?

Alas, supposedly smart spin-speak can force all the breathable atmosphere from a room (and we’re going to see a lot more of that this week at the HR Technology Conference & Exposition too).

That said, Lars from NPR found our session to be a very smart success, although he didn’t pick my group as a winner. That’s all right, as long as I get to meet the Planet Money news team someday.

Again, there are two things that differentiate true talent communities from talent pipelines and resume databases of old. The quality of interactions, not the quantity, make the community. And members are members, from outside the organization and from within as current employees — not applicants — at least until they apply for a new job. These were universally agreed on in all three groups.

But the collaborative results from each of our “community” neighborhoods were as diverse as the neighborhoods themselves.

Funny how that works. Here were all our brief ideas in schematic as written on our paper “white board” pages that forced the air back in our room. My brain doesn’t have a recordable microchip, so use your professional imaginations to fill in between the answers.

Team 1:

  • Create a curated sourcing channel that includes the target audience.
  • Add in influencers to engage with the target audience (yikes, engage).
  • Develop selective engagement events.
  • Create a Twitter dedicated hashtag.
  • Develop an influencer analysis tool to understand impact on target audience.

Team 2 (The Winner!):

  • Use the NPR Facebook page as the sourcing hub — leverage the current consumer page to tap into the 2MM fans/likes.
  • Solicit content from fans to contribute to NPR.
  • Use Facebook analytics to track traffic.
  • Utilize free solutions such as BeKnown and BraveNewTalent and integrate jobs tab on NPR page.
  • Leverage Twitter and career page traffic.
  • Add a Facebook “Like” button across all properties.
  • Leverage open graph.
  • Develop hashtag to create content.
  • Include Klout scores of fans and visitors.

Team 3 (my team — thank you to Sean Sheppard from TalentCircles for being our presenter):

  • Map and analyze the 30MM unique NPR monthly visitors.
  • Develop participation strategy to motivate super fans.
  • Interact with super fans around digital content and other activities.
  • Cherry pick and career pitch the best of the super fans.

So there you have it. Hopefully the first of many interactive learning sessions about building and sustaining (talent) communities.

A special thank you to all our smart participants as well as my #TChat co-hosts Meghan M. Biro and Matt Charney, and of course of guest of honor Lars Schmidt, director of talent acquisition at National Public Radio (NPR).

And a very special thank you to the HRevolution organizers for yet another amazing event. To date I’ve never attended an event so immersed in the collaborative moment. For me, the online social chatter slows to a stop when I participate in a true community like HRevolution.

Now it’s time for HR Tech!