HR 2.0

One of the Enterprise 2.0 communities we have identified is HR to include both both recruiting and retention. There are some interesting changes going on within Enterprise 2.0.

Job boards are everywhere and they range from barely useful to worthless. They are more like Friday night singles bars than business tools. Almost all of them are populated by jobs from recruiters who take job seekers' resumes, strip out the identifying information, and pass it on to their client. A resume is a good place to start, but most of us who have been around even a short while have other information posted on Linkedin (recommendations and groups), Facebook (comments and groups), Websites and blogs. A resume is like a quick conversation in a noisy bar, not much on which to base a future relationship.

How can a candidate learn more about a company? A recent example is Glassdoor.com. They invite employees to post sample of salaries and comment on the company as a place to work. Does that provide a "bitching place" for employees? The growing experience with Enterprise 2.0 suggests that there will be some bad apples but a large part of any community will respond responsibly. Cisco has 54 reviews and John T. Chambers, Chairman and CEO gave the site a 95% Approval Rating. Microsoft has 155 ratings, Steve Ballmer, Microsoft's CEO gave the site a 65% approval rating. They have ratings from a lot of companies you know including IBM, Deloitte, PricewaterhouseCoopers, Apple and maybe yours. This type of reporting is part of the transparency of Enterprise 2.0. It will upset the apple cart for those who insist on secrecy for salary ranges and make the marketplace more competitive. The job seekers in the HR community are changing the game.

How can you screen that huge stack of resumes? Talent Spring has created a ranking system using anonymous comparative rankings of resumes. Interesting concept but not well explained on their Web site. Instead go to The Chad.JobCentral.com for two very clear and clever visual presentations: "Employees benefit from Resume Scoring" and "Talent Spring's benefit to Employers." Basically, resume submitters rank others resumes, A is better B, and the best are sent to you for the next steps. Presumably people who submit a resume for a job know something about the job and can evaluate the buzzwords and specifics.

How can a candidate submit more than a resume, avoid buzzword bingo and get matched with the best jobs? Thar is what JobFox offers. An applicant defines their skills and experience by choosing and ranking the best words offered by JobFox to assure common terminology for applicants and employers. They diagram the applicant's work experience and offer a "psychological" test -- take it or choose not to. Specify locations, salary, etc. Add your resume and post the whole package on the JobFox site. Employers go through a similar process in defining the job map from one set of terms and to avoid buzzwords. JobFox immediately matches jobs to resumes on file and provides the employer a ranked list with matches including categories, e.g., salary, education, experience, etc. Applicants are notified that their resume has been considered and shown a comparable category match to the job. No more resumes that go down black holes.

How can a company improve its retention rate and succession planning? There are a lot of elements in this area that a common across multiple employers, there are regulatory requirements that are changing and must be met and there is value in being able to compare some information. A large and growing element of Enterprise 2.0 is SaaS -- Software as a Service. Basically, the computers, data and applications are housed in an off site utility. Cornerstoneondemand.com is an example of such a company. They provide learning (more than 30,000 training titles), performance evaluations, compensation, succession and compliance services online. Much of what they offer is in whole or in part delivered to employees desktops and appears as part of the employer's own Web site.

As we pointed out in an earlier post , this level of change needs to be strategic. You have to start at the shallow end of the pool. Pick a target need and start there.

We do not endorse any of these solutions. We present them just to give you some ideas about how the world of HR is changing in response to Enterprise 2.0. Comments, reactions, other changes we should know about? Please let us know by clicking "Post a Comment" below.