A guest post by Jim Milton, Senior Principal Product Manager, Oracle Applications
There are a billion consumers connected to one another via social
networks. One billion of us! That’s a lot of eyeballs and a lot of
opportunity for marketers to reach us online. They can choose to
interrupt our conversations with low-performing display ads, or become
the topic of conversation so that we spread the word more naturally
through trusted recommendations and referrals. Marketers are
increasingly choosing the latter because of its effectiveness. And
employers have caught on to the concept with an eye toward driving
talent referrals and job sharing.
It makes intuitive sense. We pay close attention to what our peers,
family members and colleagues are telling us, while we tune out banner
ads and telemarketers. On the flip side, when we’re happy with a product
or service, we often refer our friends to brands without realizing
we’re doing it – by passively sharing, “tweeting,” and “liking”
brand-content into the newsfeed. The impact of our new recommendation
habit is enormous, given that the Facebook newsfeed, for example, has
become the most trafficked page on the most trafficked Website in the
world. We call these endorsements “Referrals 2.0.” and harnessing them
is now central to brand and product marketing strategy. Case in point:
Groupon’s entire business is built on this concept.
So, Where’s The Connection to HCM and Jobs?
Until just a few years ago, HR decision makers were not ready to do what
today seems almost obvious. Now they see the benefits of connecting
their high-performing Employee Referral Programs to the world of online
recommendations and social sharing. Since every employee is connected to
their friends on social networks, it is relatively easy to make every
employee a “social recruiter,” given the right technology.
The truth is that at first, most HR departments adapted to the rise of
social networks by treating them as just another place to advertise –
missing the concept of Referrals 2.0. As job seekers, we began to see
HR’s old-school, post-and-advertise approach in action. Most of us
became accustomed to seeing jobs advertised on LinkedIn, or to being
contacted directly by strangers (i.e., recruiters), inviting us to
consider opportunities that we may or may not have been interested in.
Like telemarketing, this experience felt disruptive at its worst. Then,
something happened.
A few innovative employers began promoting jobs through their employees,
tapping employees’ social networks. Employees were systematically
prompted to share jobs in a targeted way, and job seekers from China to
Canada to Brazil started receiving relevant recommendations from their
friends: “McGraw-Hill is a great place to work – you should check out
this IT Manager position.”
Happily employed workers – looking to help their friends get jobs and to
earn a referral bonus – routed hundreds, then thousands, then hundreds
of thousands of e-mails, LinkedIn messages, tweets, and Facebook posts
(similar to the one above) to their passive and active job-seeking
friends online. Hundreds of thousands of job seekers began “bumping”
into and applying to job opportunities that they might not have
discovered had it not been for a friend sharing a job with them. And
unlike the case of a stranger reaching out via LinkedIn, the recipients
of these job posts viewed the employer endorsements from their trusted
friends with open eyes and open ears.
Many hundreds of hires and happy talent acquisition leaders later, the
concept of Referrals 2.0 was validated as a force-multiplying,
transformative approach to sourcing quality talent. Yours truly, along
with my team members from SelectMinds, were brought into the Oracle
family to become a strategic piece of talent sourcing machinery for
Oracle’s existing and future clients. If you haven’t heard about it, our
product module is called Oracle Taleo Social Sourcing.
After talking with dozens of Oracle sales people, clients, and
prospects, I can report that the excitement for our product and the
Referrals 2.0 approach is palpable. For me personally, the real proof of
concept came just the other day. A friend of mine shared a link to a
product manager job using Oracle Taleo Social Sourcing – just after
sharing a Groupon deal for a new, local restaurant and liking a new
healthy fruit juice drink that I’m in love with. There, in my Facebook
feed, the world of social brand marketing had crossed paths with
recruitment — proof that times have changed for HCM indeed.