The social recruiting start-up wars heat up

Jessica Stillman — Tue, 26 Jun 2012 20:22:23 +0000

With Microsoft’s billion-dollar acquisition of Yammer, it’s clear that even the stodgiest corners of the business world are starting to come to terms with the idea that social has arrived and organizations need to find ways to leverage personal networks in innovative ways. And apparently what goes for internal communication goes for recruiting as well.

On Forbes recently Josh Bersin, president and CEO of HR consultancy Bersin & Associates, laid out the feverish start-up scene in the realm of social recruiting, ticking off an impressively long list of young companies hoping to leverage our social graphs “to make the ‘job matching game’ easier for job-seekers and recruiters.” Here’s a small fraction of the companies Bersin mentions:

Path.to and Bright: These companies try to mine your social graph and “find jobs” for you. So far they’re just getting started so the matching isn’t very good yet, but the potential is big. Think e-harmony for the job seeker.

TalentBin: Gives recruiters an intelligent tool to find people through their social graph. Kind of the opposite of Path.to and Bright.

Jobvite: A fast-growing company which delivers referral recruiting tools, applicant tracking, and advertisement management tools for recruiters. Gooodjob is a startup building a similar offering.

Bullhorn: one of the biggest end-to-end social talent acquisition solutions (recently acquired by Vista Equity).

For the rest of the extensive list, check out the complete article. Why such a wild frenzy of activity in the space? American corporations spend $140 billion a year on recruiting, Bersin points out, and 40 million of us change jobs each year regardless of how lousy the economy might be. Add to this the huge amounts of data available through the Facebook and LinkedIn APIs and that’s rich pickings for startups who are bringing a wide array of approaches to bear on the challenge of applying social to recruiting. These include “recruitment advertising, job boards, candidate relationship management, assessment, interview automation, applicant tracking, recruitment analytics, and job-seeker services and tools,” according to Bersin.

Which approach (or approaches) are you betting will emerge victorious from the social recruiting start-up wars?

Image courtesy of Flickr user Daniel Paquet.

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The problem with virtual training: instructional design, not distance

Jessica Stillman — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 14:01:20 +0000

Training at a distance is more hassle than it’s worth, several CEOs have warned. But when we recently reported their cautions against onboarding new employees virtually, a senior analyst at training consultancy Bersin & Associates named Janet Clarey took exception with their point of view in the comments. Not that training at a distance isn’t without its pitfalls, she wrote, but:

I talk to organizations (Fortune 100s, 500s, SMBs) every day that ‘train at a distance’ and many are seeing excellent, real results both in terms of effectiveness and cost. Those that don’t do it (orientation or other) well tend to not do it well face-to-face either.

So what sets those organizations that struggle with remote training apart from those who do it well? We called up Clarey to find out, and she boiled down the distinction between the two groups to one main difference: appropriate instructional design. Those that struggle with onboarding and developing talent at a distance, she explained,

Oftentimes try to take something that has already existed that they’ve taught in a face-to-face classroom and simply put it online, not understanding that it’s an entirely different way of teaching. You don’t have body language. You can’t tell what people are actually doing. Are you reaching people? So a lot of times organizations fall down and that really points to not approaching it with any sort of sound instructional design process.

And while a bevy of new e-learning tools make it easier than ever before for non-training pros to share their skills and knowledge at a distance, this very simplicity of use sometimes contributes to the lack of carefully designed materials, says Clarey.

The tools have become easier to use, and that’s a good thing in that you can have someone who’s not in a training role that’s still able to create content. But with that trade-off of simplicity comes perhaps some problems in how content is delivered. People who don’t have any sort of instructional design experience don’t understand how adults learn, and you can run into some very bad e-learning that way.

There is a middle way, Clarey goes on to explain, where area specialists create content and learning specialists support them and vet the materials they produce. “Typically, the companies that are doing better with supplying e-learning authoring tools to people right in the field are able to give them direction, to serve in a supervisory role, giving them the tools they need to properly deliver the training,” she says.

What else are companies that have success with training at a distance doing differently? Employing “blended learning solutions,” according to Clarey:

So let’s say it’s for orientation. Today it would include something like a community or expertise matching, some way a remote employee can stay connected. It might also involve some instructor-led training. It might involve some self-paced e-learning that you complete on your own, so usually where it’s very successful is when it’s part of an integrated program.

There have been a couple of organizations who have taken some of the more mature technologies that have a lot of advanced features that might mimic the classroom a bit more, like break-out rooms, and have done some incredible things with those. But still there’s always some other form of connection with others involved.

Do you agree that the trouble with training at a distance isn’t the distance itself but the lack of thought that is sometimes put into how content is delivered?

Image courtesy of Flickr user Hermes

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The social recruiting start-up wars heat up

The problem with virtual training: instructional design, not distance