After reading today’s press releases and the flurry of tweets, I decided to visit what is being referred to as a world’s first. New Zealand bank, ASB has launched (on a trial basis) a virtual branch on Facebook. 

First up I visited ASB’s Facebook Page and clicked on the Virtual Branch tab, and was greeted by a slightly Max Headroom and Milli Vanilli-esque, lip syncing avatar. I wasn’t too bothered, as it reinforced the term “virtual” in my mind. 

To access the app I was greeted with this Request for permission: 

My first thought was that I want to access ASB’s “basic information” in return - you know quid pro quo and all. After some initial angst around privacy I clicked Allow. 

I then had a choice of who I wanted to chat to. I chose the woman on the top row - far right. 

Paula and I had a quick virtual chat. I did not ask about bank accounts, loans, interest rates or insurance. You know, I was just establishing rapport.

I think this initiative has legs. I’m not sure if I can order all services via this medium - will customers still need to go into a branch and fill out forms, meet with the bank manager etc.?

I congratulate ASB for trail blazing. Whether this is a success or not, ASB to me is definitely embracing the term “social” in social media.

It will be interesting to see how this is all perceived by the media. Will we see the end of bricks and mortar branches? Is this just the start of something really big?

This is a very belated post. Last month I dragged my exhausted jet-lagged ass to the Social Recruiting Summit in Minneapolis, USA. It took me 5 flights to get to Minneapolis and over 20 hours of flying time - it was partly my fault as I decided to travel the less direct route from New Zealand via Australia to the USA. I just want to confirm that NZ is nowhere near France or England or somewhere in the USA - I had to point this out to a few summit attendees. This is the third Social Recruiting Summit. I attended the first summit at the Googleplex in the Silicon Valley last year, which I thoroughly enjoyed.

The tweet-up prior to the conference took place at a bar / restaurant inside the crazily super-sized Mall of America - take a right past the indoor theme park, then a left past the wedding chapel, go up to the third floor, and then walk for a thousand miles to the meeting point. The night ended with beers, margaritas, and an array of Mexican fare at a Karaoke joint inside the Mall. I’m slowly recovering my hearing.

The next morning I shared a cab with the other foreign alien, UK’s Matt Alder to Best Buy’s corporate HQ.  For those of you outside of the US, Best Buy is a leading retailer of consumer electronics in North America, with a strong online presence. On entering the modern building I wondered if I had come to the wrong place. Was I on a university campus or at an airport? How many reception areas have a mobile popcorn stand?

We all congregated in the auditorium and the first session kicked off, not with a presentation, but with a 4-member, social media savvy panel from Best Buy. 

I picked up that Best Buy has a genuine interest in being “social” - they weren’t so bothered with the tools or the media, but with how to leverage the social web to engage with consumers and jobseekers. Best Buy has already done some interesting things in the social recruiting space (eg crowdsourcing job description design; webinars on their finance recruitment blog) and it was interesting to hear of some of their success stories and where they plan to take things. They are currently scoping up a job description for a store-level role titled Social Media Concierge. I’m picturing a future world of store-specific Twitter accounts, localized Facebook fan pages, and Foursquare customer loyalty campaigns.

Throughout the rest of the day I attended a variety of presentations, and had some great one-on-one chats between sessions, like with Richard Cho, lead recruiter at Facebook (who later gave a very insightful presentation). I also had an opportunity to mix with and learn from recruitment leaders from companies like AT&T, Microsoft, Google, Starbucks etc. I took heaps of notes during the day and hijacked my followers’ personal twitter streams with many sweet morsels. Below are some of the many quotes I scribbled down:

• “Don’t vomit your jobs all over the place” (referring mainly to Twitter)
• “Find a lawyer with a Twitter account to remove social media roadblocks”
• “Return on Emotion” (not used in a Daniel Pink or employer branding context, but certainly could be)
• “Why am I going to spend 55 minutes on a site, Facebook page etc?” (referring to increasing site / platform user stickiness)
• “We don’t buy friends with discounts, we buy friends with value”
• “Tell message to people who have the strongest influence”
• “Referrals to website increased by  910% in 2 months”
• “Facebook’s fastest growing demographic is female, 35 years and over” (must be all the addicted FarmVille players contributing to this me thinks).

Though the Americans are grappling with many of the same issues as we are in the Asia Pacific region, I get a sense that social recruiting is fast becoming mainstream in the US.  Some employers were reporting mind-blowing results. Listening to the discussions challenged my thinking around who should manage things like Facebook fan pages. I can sense there will be some very innovative and quite different approaches to social recruiting and employment branding, and how it is managed, in the not too distant future. Many of the small to medium businesses were definitely keen to follow the large corporates, but were hungry for guidance on how to best lobby internally. 

Though I gained lots from the summit, I felt the event could have been more cohesive overall. This may just be a personal preference, but some of the sessions seemed a bit out of place to me and were more about personal branding than social recruiting per se. I would have liked to have heard about topics such as social gaming and mobile recruiting, and some of the social media innovations outside of the recruitment industry and how these could be applied to recruitment. There still seems to be differing views on what social recruiting actually is, and I feel this needs to be sorted somewhat. We often hear the same messages coming from the same presenters, and I don’t know if that is necessarily a good thing for the recruitment industry. I feel some of the excitement and enthusiasm that I sensed at the initial summit at Google has faded. Many attendees have since been to numerous social recruiting related conferences and unconferences in their own city, state, or industry sector in which they recruit. Then there is the group of attendees who attend pretty much everything that’s on. With pretty much every conference and unconference touching on social recruiting, the Social Recruiting Summit could potentially lose its significance. I would have liked the summit to have painted more of a picture of the overall current state or landscape of social recruiting.

After the summit I played tourist and met up with some great people like Gerry Crispin in Hoboken, New Jersey. Gerry is passionate about HR and recruitment outside of the US and we came up with an idea around shared learning between NZ and the US - stay tuned for details. Now, see that cannon above? Gerry in his student days, with some of his uni mates, took this historically significant cannon at the Stevens Institute of Technology, on a sojourn to outside City Hall in Manhattan, across the Hudson River and all. Luckily Gerry escaped getting into trouble. What a legend though. The cannon is now cemented down. Love this man’s renegade roots.

I’m now back in a wintery NZ. Thankfully, I piled on an extra layer of insulating fat in the US, eating enormous portions. NB: a “short stack” of pancakes can feed a family. I enjoyed my trip to the US and have come back with some great ideas, some of which I’ve been putting into practice with clients.

Filmed using my flip cam. 

Filmed using my flip cam. 

Awesome news: My client, Deloitte New Zealand has received an international award for their social recruiting initiatives. The 2010 SOCRA award honors excellence in social media and recruiting. Deloitte NZ received over 500 votes from industry professionals, edging out North American heavyweights UPS / TMP with 275 votes and Sodexo with 201 votes. Richard Long, manager of talent acquisition at Deloitte NZ will accept the award at Recruitcamp in North Carolina USA on April 22. 

Deloitte NZ won the award for their Facebook page, which is geared towards graduate and intern recruitment. The company broke new ground by mashing live-streaming video with social networking, directly on their Facebook page. This ‘social videoing’ technique has been successfully used by celebrities like Shakira and Miley Cyrus to engage with their fan bases.

Since launching in late 2009, the page has hosted 10 live and interactive shows. Prospective recruits were able to watch and listen on Facebook as graduates from a range of teams and locations gave impromptu talks on their experiences and impressions. The shows involved both groups of graduates and individuals, and fans were able to type questions into the Facebook page and get answers during the course of each show. 

The shows are part of a wider strategy to humanize the Deloitte NZ brand, offer authentic experiences for prospective graduates, and differentiate the company from other firms. Other initiatives include graduates blogging about life at Deloitte NZ.

Deloitte NZ’s social recruiting initiatives have created greater awareness of the firm among propsective graduates. Richard Long reports that students attending careers and networking events appear to be better informed and more familiar with the company, and the opportunities available. Deloitte NZ are very happy with the quality and number of applications received this year.

To keep up to date with the evolution of this page, you can follow Deloitte NZ on Twitter (@deloittegradsnz).

Laurie Ruettimann’s (aka Punk Rock HR) cat Mister Scrubby is authentic and more connected than most HR / recruitment professionals.

I’ve been thinking a lot about this. What would happen if an A-list celebrity’s manager was hired to run a corporate recruitment function? Take a few minutes to think about this, then keep scrolling down …

I surmise employer branding would be high on the new manager’s agenda. They would try and communicate the company’s unique brand (think: Lady Gaga, Michael Jackson, or George Clooney). They would want their company to be a star. They would have visions of crazed jobseekers (fans) running towards the company (think: The Beatles arrive in the USA, Elvis). And they’d desire to reach and win over the hearts and minds of new fans (jobseekers) and continue to feed the connection (or addictions) of their current community of fans.

As they do a scan of the current state, they would likely note:

• the company logo appears to be the only real differentiator between their company and its competitors - similar look and messages, different logos.
• the employee value propositions and brand statements don’t connect emotionally with fans.
• lots of static content and little of anything that actually encourages social engagement with the brand.
• company employees, the corporate recruitment team and external recruitment partners do not appear to be fans of the company or the employment brand, let alone act as brand champions or motivated referral agents.
• fans are lost deep in the database and long ago drowned in the company’s talent pool.
• little initiatives have made it from the lengthy and outdated strategy documents to the pilot or implementation phase.

The manager wouldn’t muck around. They’d be action-oriented. They would likely block out the next day, and get all key parties and a cross-section of stakeholders together in one room (not necessarily at the same time) and start a process of discovery. There would be lots of questions and lots of follow-up probing. Some of the questions asked would be:

• Why would someone work here versus XYZ company? (probably asking some recently hired fans).
• Are we able to deliver on our brand promises? (NB, even stars have their flaws).
• What do our existing EVPs really mean? Does ‘teamwork’ for example really tap into our fans’ motivational drivers, or is there something deeper - like a sense of belonging, having fun with colleagues, the desire for creative expression involved in developing new ideas as a team?
• How do we communicate our aspirational story? Do we need to show this as lengthy written statements or bullet points? (think: Apple). What’s our one key message? (think: Coca Cola’s ‘Open happiness’). Should we be creating an experience - letting fans interact with our brand and culture, rather than us telling them about it?
• Who are our fans, what is their demographic? Where do they hang out? How do they like to communicate? How should we, as stars, communicate with them? (one-way? two-way? openly? authentically?)
• How are we going to grow our fan-base?
• Do our recruiters (let’s call them DJs) want to step into the limelight - are they ready for the star lifestyle and associated hard work and support required?
• How will we create a recruitment experience where fans (even our unsuccessful applicants) want to be brand advocates and enlist their colleagues as fans?

A week later, the new manager would likely launch a unique employer brand that fans go crazy for, and a series of gigs and appearances. We would also likely see a few real life examples of social recruiting. Miley Cryus and her live-streaming shows on Facebook were the inspiration for Deloitte New Zealand.

Could we, as HR / recruitment professionals, learn from the entertainment industry? What other industries could we learn from?

I’m pleased my client Deloitte New Zealand is receiving global recognition for their use of social video on their Facebook graduate fan page. Take a look at this - I’m grateful for the mention from my client. It is also great to watch the strategy develop. Check out the ((Faces)) tab. More initiatives / features will be coming soon.

I can relate to this, standing in line and checking-in on my iPhone. Who said men can’t multi-task!