Integrating social media with HR initiatives to foster recruitment, engagement & retention
I have written many articles on how to use social media to generate business, to recruit talent and to create organization brand awareness. I believe it’s high time that organizations start thinking of integrating social media to strengthen their HR initiatives.
In a global and connected economy where the workplace extends beyond the boundaries of a cubicle or office building, human interaction is the key building block in the workforce of the future. Imagine One happy employee who blogs or tweets about her experience can, in turn, inspire others to change their jobs or their companies, and one workplace at a time, the most valuable assets of future economic development will change the way we do business and by extension the world around them.
The big question is 
- Are you ready for this world?
- Do you know how to compete in it? Are you part of the conversation?
Points to be considered while integrating social media with HR initiatives
- Turn your employees into brand ambassadors, it’s very important to treat the brand internally and externally in the same way.
- Encourage transparent communication internally. Position social media as a tool for connecting people and thereby foster exchange of cross functional interactions.
- Be judicious with social media policies. Your policy should be focused more on empowering your employees than on restricting them.
- Be involved, be a part of the conversation that is the basics of having a PR activity via social media and be ready to respond if your employment brand is not communicated in the right manner.
- Use social media to share important information, but make sure that communication is two-way and takes advantage of the capabilities of the medium.
- Use social media to hunt passive talent, that’s finding people who are not actively looking for a change but might be the perfect fit for your organization.
- Maintain an effective employee alumni network with social media. Welcome someone back to the organization who might have left to pursue an opportunity with another organization, leveraging the diversity of experience that may have led to significant growth in that individual.
- Redefine learning and development within your organization using social media to create a more collaborative learning environment.
- Cultivate collaboration across divisions and management levels within your organization by empowering employees to form groups and open discussions on social networking platforms that focus on solving specific problems or experimenting with new ideas.
Open letter to Indian government on hosting Common wealth games 2010 in Delhi
I feel proud that my country will be hosting the common wealth games this year. It’s a matter of pride and honour for the country to host a sporting event of such big magnitude. A warm welcome to athletes from world over and I am sure it would be a wonderful event. You can get detailed information about the games here.
Only after I learnt that an estimated Rs 27000 Crores will be spent directly or indirectly to manage this event my personal views have changed. According to me we are a little too early to host common wealth games as a nation. I would like to ask the Indian government if hosting CWG 2010 is best in the interest of the nation in terms of utilizing time, effort, money, resources and focus as compared to other areas which are far basic and critical for progress of the country.
Two major areas of impact that I would use the funds for:
Infrastructure in other cities:
When you think of this huge a budget there are so many thoughts cross your mind where these funds can be utilized. I am not expert to decide where the funds could be used alternatively but spend will result into a great infrastructure of one place – Delhi. Minus the CWG these funds could be used to improve infrastructure in many other cities and that would result into far greater employment and for long term.
Sporting facility across the country:
Since this budget is going to be used for a sporting event, I am forced to draw a parallel on the sporting infrastructure we have in the nation. There is news in the press every now and then on how even the best of the athletes do not have proper training facility, grounds to practice, access to high quality coaches and technology.
There are a zillion other areas where this fund could have been used specially in the areas where it pains the most but the government has decided to host the common wealth games. Since we are going to host the games we have an opportunity to show the world our capability in terms of managing such a large event and let the world experience Indian hospitality.
I am sure the games will be a huge success.
Useful Links:
- Official common wealth games 2010 website
- Common wealth games 2010 competition schedule
- Buy tickets for common wealth games in Delhi
Fix for WordPress sites and blogs hosted on Godaddy infected by holasionweb virus
I have been running this blog since 2 years now and have never encountered a situation where my blog has been hacked or been infected by a virus or malicious software. I am sure that there would be people like me who would be suffering from the same problem and would be trying hard to find a solution. There is nothing worst then seeing your site/blog down because of virus and it’s a painful process to start searching for a solution.
Especially when Godaddy announced that this mass infection of virus was a problem at their end. I realised that the problem is widespread and serious. I would sincerely like to thank these guys in helping lesser mortals like us (read non technie) to find an easy fix to holasionweb virus on Godaddy hosted sites.
The solution can be found here:
- Tintation
- Daniel Ansari’s blog
- DLOCC – This has personally worked for me in fixing holasionweb Trojan virus on my wordpress blog hosted on godaddy.
I hope this helps.
steve jobs on flash and apple’s relation with adobe
Most of us are curious on what is going to be the outcome on the battle between Apple and Adobe. Recently the news has it that Apple will not be using Adobe Flash on their mobile OS for any of its products like Iphone, Ipod, Ipad and other I’s to follow in the mobile space.
To end the speculation Steve Jobs has decided to clarify Apple’s stand on Adobe Flash products. The following content has been directly replicated from the Apple website for the benefit of my our readers.
Thoughts on Flash:
Apple has a long relationship with Adobe. In fact, we met Adobe’s founders when they were in their proverbial garage. Apple was their first big customer, adopting their Postscript 
language for our new Laserwriter printer. Apple invested in Adobe and owned around 20% of the company for many years. The two companies worked closely together to pioneer desktop publishing and there were many good times. Since that golden era, the companies have grown apart. Apple went through its near death experience, and Adobe was drawn to the corporate market with their Acrobat products. Today the two companies still work together to serve their joint creative customers – Mac users buy around half of Adobe’s Creative Suite products – but beyond that there are few joint interests.
I wanted to jot down some of our thoughts on Adobe’s Flash products so that customers and critics may better understand why we do not allow Flash on iPhones, iPods and iPads. Adobe has characterized our decision as being primarily business driven – they say we want to protect our App Store – but in reality it is based on technology issues. Adobe claims that we are a closed system, and that Flash is open, but in fact the opposite is true. Let me explain.
First, there’s “Open”.
Adobe’s Flash products are 100% proprietary. They are only available from Adobe, and Adobe has sole authority as to their future enhancement, pricing, etc. While Adobe’s Flash products are widely available, this does not mean they are open, since they are controlled entirely by Adobe and available only from Adobe. By almost any definition, Flash is a closed system.
Apple has many proprietary products too. Though the operating system for the iPhone, iPod and iPad is proprietary, we strongly believe that all standards pertaining to the web should be open. Rather than use Flash, Apple has adopted HTML5, CSS and JavaScript – all open standards. Apple’s mobile devices all ship with high performance, low power implementations of these open standards. HTML5, the new web standard that has been adopted by Apple, Google and many others, lets web developers create advanced graphics, typography, animations and transitions without relying on third party browser plug-ins (like Flash). HTML5 is completely open and controlled by a standards committee, of which Apple is a member.
Apple even creates open standards for the web. For example, Apple began with a small open source project and created WebKit, a complete open-source HTML5 rendering engine that is the heart of the Safari web browser used in all our products. WebKit has been widely adopted. Google uses it for Android’s browser, Palm uses it, Nokia uses it, and RIM (Blackberry) has announced they will use it too. Almost every smartphone web browser other than Microsoft’s uses WebKit. By making its WebKit technology open, Apple has set the standard for mobile web browsers.
Hubspot – Measure effectiveness of your online initiatives
In today’s day and age we are surrounded by the web world and most of our time due to work or personal reasons is spent online. For most of us Internet has become our lifeline and increasingly people are looking at creating digital assets of their own on the World Wide Web. I have created my own Synergy Technology Services | SynergyHr | GigaThoughts and I am sure you might be managing websites, blogs, micro sites and other social media for personal or professional use directly or indirectly. We put in a lot of effort to make sure we create good user experience for our visitors. At the same time we keep hearing how important it is to implement these terms SEO, Social Media marketing, online marketing, LinkedIn, Facebook and the list is endless.
Again I am sure everyone is aware that enhancing web presence is an ongoing activity and it needs constant evaluation and measurement of its effectiveness to go on and make it even better. Over time I have been a victim of this funda that once we implement something new, we ask our immediate network and take feedback. We measure it for a while and then assume that the changes we implemented are showing results and leave it there.
The purpose of the article to share awesome tools that I have used to measure and improve online effectiveness and it can be useful to beginners and experienced people as well. There is a company called hubspot they provide software as a service to improve inbound marketing for your organization. In addition to their inbound marketing software they have developed some really handy measurement tools that can be useful and individuals alike.
Website Grader: This tool evaluates effectiveness of your website from an SEO perspective. This is one tool that gives me a detailed analysis on how my blog is performing. You will see a badge that displays website grader rank it’s 98 out of 100 for GigaThoughts
Twitter Grader: Evaluates your twitter account by giving an overall rank and also gives ranks for your followers and the ones you are following. Grade for GigaThoughts is 82 out of 100
Gartner predictions for 2010
Gartner has always been on the forefront of conducting strong research on analyzing sectors across industries at a global level. Every year they come up with predictions on how various sectors are going to perform in near future. Gartner research and analysis has always been very helpful in gaining valuable insights that can help companies plan their strategy better. I have been sent the summary report and i would like to share it with my readers.
Summary of Gartner Top End User Predictions for 2010:
- By 2012, 20% of businesses will own no IT assets.
- By 2012, India-centric IT service companies will represent 20% of the leading cloud aggregators in the market.
- By 2012, Facebook will become the hub for social networks integration and Web socialization.
- By 2014, most IT business cases will include carbon remediation costs.
- In 2012, 60% of a new PC’s total life greenhouse gas emissions will have occurred before the user first turns the machine on.
- Internet marketing will be regulated by 2015, controlling more than $250 billion in Internet marketing spending worldwide.
- By 2014, more than three billion of the world’s adult population will be able to transact electronically via mobile and Internet technology.
- By 2015, context will be as influential to mobile consumer services and relationships as search engines are to the Web.
- By 2013, mobile phones will overtake PCs as the most common Web access device worldwide.
This is a summary review of Gartner’s Predicts 2010 Special Report, which focuses on the new balance emerging in IT as organizations worldwide shift from a cost containment mode and prepare for a return to economic growth. Previous assumptions about revenue flows and ownership will continue to be challenged as a new balance between supply, consumer demand and regulation emerges. (Source Gartner Report 2010)
TweetDeck + TwitterJobSearch = JobDeck – helps you find your next job.
Every now and then there comes a disruptive technology that changes the rule of the game. My initial analysis of using this application makes me believe that such mashups will play vital role as far as job search is concerned. Applications like JobDeck will provide an alternate channel for employers to scout for new talent and at the same time give multiple opportunities to the jobseeker.
TweetDeck and TwitJobSearch have teamed up to provide you with a dedicated JobDeck. This makes it even easier to search for jobs, as well as staying in touch with what’s happening now, and connecting you with your contacts across Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and more. Source: TweetDeck.
The Hiring ecosystem:
Since I run an HR services company and a social media enthusiast I am in a position to analyze the tool both from the employer and employee perspective. My analysis of the positioning of JobDeck is given below in the table.
Internet usage Statistics in 2009
All of us surf the web on a daily basis and for most of us we are always online. While reading various feeds in my Google Reader I came across this interesting post and I would like to share the details with the readers of this blog. This post provides statistical information on internet usage in 2009 things like
- How many websites were added
- How many emails were sent
- How many internet users surfed the web
- Web servers in use
- Information of domain names
- Social media statistics
- Information on images
- Information on web browsers
- Information on malicious software
The content below is replicated from the original post on www.entireweb.com
Email usage statistics in 2009
- 90 trillion – The number of emails sent on the Internet in 2009.
- 247 billion – Average number of email messages per day.
- 1.4 billion – The number of email users worldwide.
- 100 million – New email users since the year before.
- 81% – The percentage of emails that were spam.
- 92% – Peak spam levels late in the year.
- 24% – Increase in spam since last year.
- 200 billion – The number of spam emails per day (assuming 81% are spam).
Recruitment applications on iphone
We all know how big the market is for iphone applications and there are brilliant applications on iTunes which are broadly categorized into utilities, games, entertainment being the most sought after. Apple Inc had officially released iphone SDK in March 2008 and since then the mobile development community has been busy dishing out awesome applications. Smart organizations capitalized on the first mover advantage and developed an iphone app to promote/market their products and services. I have been using iphone and now am on 3GS and am involved in recruitment business I am eagerly waiting for companies to develop customized iphone apps to provide/ facilitate recruitment services.
I would like to see companies provide iphone application which caters to varied interest level of internal employees, candidates/ consultants and clients.
Features that I would like to see in an iphone app by category
Candidates:
- Resumes submission
- Push notifications for jobs of their interest
- Search for jobs
- Contact details of recruiters
- Applications status
- Job referrals
Google Labs introduces browser size tool to visually evaluate your site content
Google’s latest browser sizing tool will help developers and website owners to evaluate the amount of content viewed by their users. The tool loads your webpage behind a colour full matrix which indicates the % of people who can see specific point on your webpage. By adding this tool Google has further strengthen its offerings in the web analytics space. I constantly use Google Analytics to monitor my blog traffic and have been using various webmaster tools to optimize the blog. A new tool from Google is always welcome and not loosing much time I evaluated my own blog to check if it was useful only to developers or also to site owners and publishers like me.
Visual evaluation of my blog:
Analysis of my blog:
- 30% of my visitors will not be able to see my banner ad which says advertise for free. If even you can’t then you can check this link here
- 40% of my visitors will not be able to see connect to Facebook icon on my blog
- 20% of my visitors will not be able to see the submit button to my RSS feed
- 20% of my visitors will not be able to see the following:
- Team behind this blog
- What we recommend
- Our rankings across prominent sites – like blogged
- Most importantly the second post on the blog
I plan to make certain changes and conduct a test run
