by Kevin Kernan

Search and Social Media: What Has Changed?
The short answer is “everything.” For those of us in the search business, we realize that our industry is changing in ways we couldn’t see or even imagine 3 or 4 years ago. For boards and hiring executives who haven’t yet incorporated their personal experiences and company positions on the use of social media into their talent development and hiring processes, you will limit your ability to attract the best talent until you do so, and worse, your best people are looking at companies who have already done so. For candidates seeking new employment, it can be a slippery slope if you’re not careful. You need to do two things: polish the story on how you’ve effectively used social media platforms to develop relationships with your customers…not your customers’ employer, but your customer – the individual and/or groups of individuals who buy and use your products or services. Secondly, you need to show how you have successfully communicated in realtime on topics of interest thru your social media network: customers, suppliers, partners, and even competitors – and be specific about what the business benefits or lessons learned were.

You might say that you are in an industry – financial services, healthcare, or avionics – which is highly regulated and limits use of or access to social media platforms (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc). My only question is whether or not you employ anybody under the age of 30? Because if you do, you have a social media presence, you just might not control it, or even know what it is. This doesn’t suggest your employees are tweeting about company confidential data or violating PCI requirements, but when your employees have a social media presence, this says something about you as their employer since after all, you hired them.

Anybody reading this article has the ability to find any company’s social media presence in minutes provided you have internet access and can spell…well, you don’t even need to spell well. The point here is ‘get ahead of the curve and drive your social media presence.’ Step up and engage in the dialogue which is on-going and defining your company. Recognize that your high impact marketing messages are not likely created by you. As Barry Libert (author of Social Nation: How to Harness the Power of Social Media to Attract Customers, Motivate Employees, and Grow Your Business) says repeatedly in his book, most companies are not even involved in the conversations that their customers are conducting on these new platforms. David Meerman Scott (author of Online Marketing & PR) conducted a survey of the Fortune 100 to determine which have a “social media signature” and engage in realtime conversations using social media platforms. Interestingly, the 28% who responded positively (yes, in realtime), have seen an increase in share value over the last 36 months, and those who do not have a presence and/or didn’t respond at all, have seen a decline in share value over the same period. I don’t think any shareholder is expecting the creation of a Facebook page to immediately increase the dividend performance and change the overall financial profile of any company – but the data is interesting…and accurate!

So, what does this have to do with search, or more specifically, hiring top talent? It’s easy, there is a rapidly expanding cadre of top execs who not only “get it,” but they have the experience, the results, and creativity to succeed with the new platform. Every search firm, employer, and job seeker can talk about their social media presence at some level, but understanding how this has created differentiable competitive advantage and most importantly, quantifiable results, is absolutely critical. Look at companies like TriNet, Vocus, Zuora, & Xactly, and the people they hire – the difference is obvious.