Don
Schmitz /Human Resource Staffing
On
October 21st, I was fortunate to attend the Social Networking
sponsored by by HRP-MN. The conference was entitled Social
Networking for HR; What is it? How do we use it? How we all
can benefit?
The conference on Social Networking, gathered a great deal
of interest as evidenced by the record attendance and company
representation from the entire Twin Cities Area. This statement
made by Lisa Rosendahl summarized the day-long conference;
Social Media is here to stay.
The
following is a summary of the conference.
Speakers
included Paul DeBettignies (Managing Partner of Nerd Search,
LLC), Anne Pryor (Career Partners International), Craig Butas
(LinkedIn), Lisa Arnold (Ameriprise Financial) and Scott Litman
(Magnet 360). A question & answer session followed the
presentations. Panel members included; Sheila Krejci (Sheila
K. Training), Dennis Merley (Felhaber, Larson, Fenlon &
Vogt), Lisa Rosendahl (VA Medical Center) & Grace Post
(a marketing strategy consultant).
The
primary social networking sites discussed specifically included;
LinkedIn, Facebook & Twitter.
LinkedIn
is the most widely used social network used by HR professionals.
LinkedIn is used by more than 50 million users in almost 200
countries, reported Craig Buttas. Paul uses Linkedin to gather
background information on his candidates before he meets with
them. He attempts to create two-way conversations and discover
competitive intelligence to add to his brand. Anne likes to
use keyword searches to find specific skills of candidates.
Lisa finds it helpful to compare the results on LinkedIn to
the results she obtains from Checkster.
Not
all companies allow their employees to use social networks.
Lisa reported, at Ameriprise, they have limited access to
LinkedIn and are not allowed to use other social media websites.
She stated the company made this decision because of the concern
of employees wasting time, the need to mitigate risk and concern
for viruses.
Many
HR attendees came to the conference to gather information
on creating a social media policy for their companies. Paul
suggested the following (tongue-in-cheek) guidelines for creating
policy; 1. Don't be stupid. 2. Don't be an idiot. 3. Nothing
is posted after beer number two. Dennis suggested a guideline
to use in creating a social media policy would be to think
about what was done before we had social networks…the same
rules still follow. We all need to remember what guided our
behavior before we had social networking sites…common sense.
Scott
likes Twitter and uses TweetDeck to keep up to date on who
and what is being people are saying about his company. He
believes social networking is the fastest means of gathering
news and a tool for marketing. As far as development of social
media, Scott compared it to the email when he stated, “Social
Media is now in the same place email was in 1997.”
Most
of the attendees agreed they need to go back and look at social
networks as a valuable tool for HR and recognize the fact
that social media is here to stay. Try as we may, we can't
turn back the clock.
Back
to the library
Reproduction
of this article cannot be accomplished without the expressed
consent of Human Resource Staffing. Don Schmitz is a popular
speaker and writer on all aspects of HR and CEO of Human Resource
Staffing. Don holds graduate degrees in Education, Administration
and Human Development.
Contact Don@HumanResourceStaffingInc.com
952 854 6040
