It's high noon for Singapore firms to give recruitment a makeover

Against the backdrop of compressed and volatile economic cycles, organisations know they have to have the best available talent to gain and maintain competitive edge.

They also know the challenges do not end at finding, attracting and hiring the required talent out there. There are other hurdles such as assessing jobseekers vis-à-vis the company's corporate culture, matching candidates' skills to appropriate job roles, and helping new hires become productive contributors as fast as possible.

Simply put, businesses must increase the effectiveness of their on-boarding processes to swiftly get new hires acclimated and productive.

The good news is there are social technologies and social business practices organisations can turn to. A social business is an organisation which culture and systems encourage networks of people to create business value. This means individuals within and outside an organisation are not just connected – they are engaged.

Information, knowledge and ideas are shared rapidly thanks to conversations and posting informal content on various channels. All these social content, along with structured data, are analysed to reveal insights from both external and internal stakeholders.

When this happens, innovation and business execution rates increase, better decisions are made, and customers and employees are more engaged and satisfied.

These benefits aside, why social business transformation would appeal at all to organisations is due to the relative ease and manageable costs of becoming a social business as compared to, say, changing the ERP (enterprise resource planning) and CRM (customer relationship management) systems.

Naturally, the more sceptical among leaders will first question whether social business actually has a direct or dramatic impact on the bottom line.

These concerns can be addressed by what is called "social business patterns". These are similar in concept to business process flows, in that each pattern represents a repeatable, proven set of actions that produce meaningful value.

Think of them as recipes on how to apply social tools and practices on specific business processes, such as recruiting and on-boarding within human resources.

Steps associated with the social business pattern to improve recruiting and on-boarding include:

- Using externally- and internally-facing social capabilities to connect HR staff, hiring managers and candidates in the recruiting process
- Harnessing social capabilities to connect new recruits with HR staff, direct supervisors, team members, and other new hires during the on-boarding process
- Leveraging social capabilities to connect new hires with team members and other relevant sources for expertise to quickly develop productivity

It is clear the common thread from these actions is harnessing the power of communities and connections between new hires and their prospective and new employers and colleagues.

"Much of what it really takes to get up the learning curve doesn't come from some dusty old policy and procedural manual. It comes from what you learn from the people around you. It's about what they share when you're social with them: the secret handshake, the unwritten rules, skeletons in the closet, and the sacred cows," Charlie Judy once wrote in his blog HR Fishbowl¹.

The impact of socially enabling recruitment and on-boarding processes can be seen in various ways. Candidate assessment and hiring processes get streamlined, new hires are better engaged and retained, and their productivity goes up faster thanks to contextually recommended expertise.

Social transformation tears down siloes, reduces document duplication and ultimately streamlines recruitment and on-boarding processes. TD Bank Group², for instance, shaved two days from its employee on-boarding processes.

This is a big plus at an enterprise where business units may hire up to 800 people in a week, according to Wendy Arnott, its vice president of social media and digital communications.

At AMC Theatres, a new applicant tracking system helped the company find candidates who could thrive in its culture. The result was theatres led by managers who were most closely aligned with the company's "fit" strategy which increased profits per customer by 1.2 percent. That translated to millions of extra dollars in net income.

As organisations all around the world go about finding their right size and balance in a choppy economy, they understand how important it is to enable and empower more productivity for every worker, including new hires. This entails getting new recruits trained faster, engaged quicker and able to positively impact the business from the day they arrive.

With so much focus on mobile technology and the impact of social graphs – which certainly enable many of the benefits – it is often forgotten that these technologies and techniques are really about helping employees make a difference.

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¹https://hrfishbowl.com/2012/10/empower-employees-for-success-social-onboarding/
²https://www-01.ibm.com/software/success/cssdb.nsf/CS/RNAE-92XGP8