Finding roles for social‐media tools in HR
| Pages | 3-3 |
| Date | 01 January 2007 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/14754390780000942 |
| Published date | 01 January 2007 |
| Author | Bruce Tulgan |
| Subject Matter | HR & organizational behaviour |
3
Volume 6 Issue 2 January/February 2007
STRATEGIC COMMENTARY
,
Thought leaders share their views on the HR profession and
its direction for the future
DEPARTMENTS AT A GLANCE
STRATEGIC COMMENTARY
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Q&A
,
HOW TO…
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PRACTITIONER PROFILE
METRICS
HR AT WORK
REWARDS
,
RESEARCH AND RESULTS
,
,
,
,
G
eneration Y expects to be able to
share content easily and
immediately, whereas many older
people don’t yet use new social-media
tools – Really Simple Syndication (RSS),
wikis, blogs, podcasts and vlogs – or even
know what they are.
How can social media help HR?
For those committed to improving HR,
there’s a lot to love about social media.
Blogs offer text, images, audio, video and
links for interactive communication.
RSS is a family of web-feed formats
used to publish frequently updated pages
and which allows readers immediate, easy
access to new content from hundreds of
different web feeds. A wiki allows visitors
to add, delete or change the available
content on a site. This makes a wiki a very
effective tool for collaborative authoring.
For HR practitioners, using social-media
tools is a great way to respond to
Generation Y’s needs in particular, and
potentially revolutionize HR practices.
Why not conduct an audit of your HR
priorities to see where new social-media
tools can add value at your organization?
Here’s nine suggestions for how HR can
harness social media tools.
1. Supporting managers
Using social media can help manage
employees in remote locations, enabling
managers to provide greater direction,
supervision and faster communication.
2. Staffing strategy
Your talent supply chain might include
former applicants, internal job searchers,
candidates from employee referrals and
former employees who departed on good
terms. Social-media tools help stay in
touch with these people, get them on
board and up to speed.
3. Employer branding
Develop a strong, positive presence in the
web communities from which you hope
to draw talent in the future – for
example, by providing comments on
relevant blog sites.
4. Recruiting
Access and research the large potential-
employee pools by tapping into your
industry’s active blogs and web
communities in order to attract
candidates for hard-to-fill positions.
5. Onboarding
Is there a gap between the date you hire
employees and the date they start work?
Engage new hires in that intervening
period using all social-media tools. Record
podcasts with existing employees about
their onboarding process so the new hires
know what to expect when they arrive.
6. Training and development
You can’t anticipate all the learning needs
that may arise, but providing information
in a range of different media (such as a
podcast and a wiki page) gives
employees more control and choice over
how they learn.
7. Career mapping
Employees can use social-media tools to
make connections between the tasks,
responsibilities and roles they want and
the skills, experience and contacts that
lead to future career opportunities.
8. Rewards
Could you highlight the rewards options
available to your employees by providing
this information using a wiki page on
your company intranet?
9. Flexibility
Ask how your company can use such a
social-media tool to address increasing
demand for work-life balance options.
For example, an HR meeting or other
function’s meeting could be recorded as
a podcast and uploaded onto the
company intranet to help flexible
workers remain updated on the latest
discussions. An internal blog can also
provide ways for simple, fast, widespread
information-sharing and encourages a
sense of community.
Ultimately, widespread deployment of
social media will transform your
organization’s culture, as using social
media allows everyone to leverage
information resources as part of the
regular process of accomplishing tasks.
Finding roles for social-
media tools in HR
Bruce Tulgan suggests nine ways in which HR can connect with the
business using new social-media tools such as podcasts, wikis and blogs.
Bruce Tulgan
is the founder of
RainmakerThinking and
the author of numerous books including
Managing Generation X and the forthcoming
It’s okay to be the boss.
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