Social Media in the HR Mix

Every organization wants to be an employer of choice.

It's not going to get easier as time goes by however, for the prepared, it won't be all that hard either, if you can carefully and effectively navigate the social media platforms out there.

Consider this, one website that claims to be an expert recruiter predicts that in the US alone there will be the shortfall due to boomer retirement, a growing economy and fewer qualified workers will be 10 million in 2010, and up to 35 million shortage by 2035.

I've seen those or similar statistics before this year. What does this have to do with social media?

A lot actually.

Foremost is the fact that while many companies will push hard to retain a large chunk of these boomers in order to fill the gaps in the workplace, the others who don't plan to stay on will be replaced and that upward movement will oil the revolving door and in will come Generation Y.

Also known as the 'Millenials', Gen Y will come programed with social media. These people born after 1981 will opt to work in organization that are more social media friendly.

Currently many companies ban things like Facebook, MSN messenger and even Hotmail in some instances and you can't blame them because some employees use these tools to do the most non-productive things like send forwards, carry on explicit conversations and in some instances maybe even give away company secrets. Not good.

However, there was similar opposition to computers and subsequently email when they first came on stream. Now they have been incorporated as legitimate aspects of efficient businesses today.

I believe that companies need to encourage responsible use of these tools.

In today's world corporations can no longer rely on one-way communication strategies. I was reading only last night about a Watson-Wyatt survey done a few years ago that said that top performing companies usually had high levels of two-way communication, including horizontal collaboration (i.e. blogs, wikis).

Wisdom of Crowds - there goes that book again, always popping up at the right time. Over 15 Million people on Facebook - argues that in social media it is almost a cardinal rule, if you want the best idea you have to let it go viral and let the crowds mold it to perfection.

Technology companies have been doing a great job at this by allowing third party entities access to their online platforms. Yahoo did it the other day and my email got hijacked for a few days but its back to normal now and I imagine that eventually their open source software will evolve to greater levels than if they had relied on their own internal staff.

Generation Y is going to become a significant demographic within the organizations of tomorrow and with so many boomers set to retire, and so little well qualified Millenials coming in to fill their place, competition for good employees is about to get heated.

These new employees are not going to view your organization as 'an employer of choice' if they have to fight to get access to this communication or if your corporate communication style is seen as coming Jurassic Park.



For more read Lisa Orrell's generation relations blog.