Most HR professionals are swamped right now. The new COBRA rules are a mess. Lawyers say you better plan your union avoidance strategy now before the EFCA bogeyman gets you … and of course you heard that from your lawyer recently because you had to call them after one of your managers botched a termination. Yeah, business is great lately … for employment attorneys.
Oh, and don’t forget, benefit plans should be cut or kept the same or changed or something depending on your finances or your strategy or something.
And oh yeah, your employee morale is tanking as your employees trade rumors and worry about losing their jobs instead of working full throttle to keep them.
So in the echo chamber of the social media crowd, everyone asks why you don’t waste spend more time on social media. Heck, even Oprah is now on Twitter … but wait, didn’t some clever soul poke fun at TV news people, calling Twitter a “gateway drug to full-blown media narcissism? Yup.
But so far, I found a couple of hundred people around the world who inspire me, who challenge my thinking, who share smart strategies to thrive in the recession, and answer questions. I’ve followed hundreds of links to great articles and resources – more than I can keep up with – an astonishing flow of information. In fact, I started a job seeker blog just to share all the good ideas I’ve seen. . . on Twitter.
Twitter has grown explosively to about 4 million users in the US – but, as Steve Boese astutely points out, that’s only about 3% of of the people employed in the US, so you are not too far behind the curve … yet. Hey, I sometimes feel twidiotic even mentioning tweets, and the lingo some tweeps use to talk about Twitter can be twidiculous -really twagic. And Facebook also has it’s own language, as does LinkedIn and bloggers. It’s like you need to be a rookie many times over, but you’ll soon learn the rules and norms and etiquette for each.
And yet, and yet, and yet, busy overworked HR pros … engage you must - and begin to learn the social conventions of social media or you will surely become just like the last person posting ads in print newspapers 5 years after the job boards came out. You’ll be the last person to type your resume on a typewriter instead of a word processor. And you’ll be using that resume when you are the last person in line for your next job, but of course you won’t even be in the line because you submitted your resume by mail instead of online, and you heard about it too late because you never set up a news feed for jobs. And you never used an insider connection to get an interview, because you never built your LinkedIn connections. And if your future employer did happen to check you out, a quick Google search would reveal no online references or profile, so it was assumed that you were not a leader in your field anyway. And that’s a twagedy you can avoid.
HR pros, on top of all your other work – your employees and your future employees will all expect you to understand social media. I don’t know if Twitter or Facebook or LinkedIn will even exist in 5 years, but something like them surely will. The rules are new, you cannot learn it all in a weekend, it takes time to build, and the people who are engaging right now will have a HUGE advantage over you if you wait to get started. And if you don’t learn the game soon, you really will look like a twidiot - an unemployable twidiot.
At the Staffing Alliance of Maryland Employers – Project SAME - I’ve been running meetings all year long on how HR can use Social Media. We’ve already drawn standing room only crowds for Kelly Dingee and Jessica Lee. In May and June we’ll have Mark Stelzner and Ben Gotkin coming to speak. I’m on a mission to raise awareness of how much more effectively you can do your job if you learn these tools.
Not to worry, if you try, you’ll catch on, just like you learned how to use Careerbuilder, Google, Outlook and MS-Word. Soon this will be just another tool in your toolkit. By the way, Jennifer McClure did a fine job providing a social media starter kit in a recent presentation/blog post “Social Media for HR Professionals Beyond LinkedIn.” Be sure to check it out.
04/22/2009 at 8:05 pm
Excellent post and advice Bob. Thanks for mentioning my little post about the ‘other’ 97%, although I suspect since the post was written pre-Oprah, I will bet the new figure is closer to 90% today.
More HR folks are getting on board, via the efforts of your Project SAME, speaking engagements like Jennifer does, blog posts, and even my small efforts trying to educate on these topics in my class. And I think you are absolutely correct to caution organizations that if they don’t get started soon, they will be the last ones left at the station.
04/22/2009 at 9:12 pm
I went to the Project SAVE meeting today and I heard one of the members said that social media is too much time consuming.
I think this is more about schedule and pace than denying that Social Media exists. I really do think if they have the time, HR would appreciate it more. As a Gen Y person, I was skeptical of Twitter, but when I see you can get breaking news and real advice, I was hooked.
I do agree oranizations need to be on the ball now before it’s too late, but we all can’t solve every organization’s problems, unless they ask.
04/22/2009 at 11:46 pm
The biggest reason that HR professionals need to come up to speed on social media is because employees already are — and they are doing so during the workday.
It’s our job in HR to make sure the people side of the business runs smoothly and efficiently. If employees are spending x number of workday hours on social media — we need to not only be aware of what it’s all about but also help direct that toward positive uses. (And minimize risky uses.)