Human Resources

Social Maturity: the Future of Social HR

Social media spawned after the dot-com boom and has grown in ways nobody could predict. What first kept touch with high school peers turned into a tool connecting colleagues and companies. Today it has grown across the personal and the professional sphere, displaying content ranging from wedding pictures to job postings, playing a real role in the decisions we make everyday. Social media no longer has a hand in only our time at home. It’s in the workplace, and it’s bound to grow. 91 percent of recruiters use social media in their recruitment strategy, making this the start of social media’s life as a Human Resources tool, restructuring the way we think about and navigate the workplace.

Social HR: Recruitment in its Infancy

Although nearly every recruiter uses social media to seek out new talent, 75 percent of leads in human resources and talent management believe their companies are behind the curve regarding both internal and external social networking. Even when social media turned into a cultural mainstay, HR software like Talent Management with social media tools is only in its infancy.

To make the problem worse, half of US employees carry some restriction of their social networking during work. This creates a resistance between the talent managers and the talent itself, stifling the benefits social networks bring to employers, such as boosting employee morale, company reputation, and communication between colleagues.

The Importance of Social Tools in HR Software

All of Human Resources–hiring managers and recruiters–need to take advantage of tools found in social media and incorporate them into HR software. Social media benefits HR for two reasons: it helps scout new employees and it lengthens the commitment of current employees.

HR’s goal is to increase employer branding by attracting the best talent while continuing to engage employees, creating loyalty for the company that is self-sufficient in maintaining a work environment. In a world where one in three employees want to look for a new job within the next year, employers are motivated to keep their employees as well as find new ones. Employees should move up rather than move out.

HR Trends Toward a New Recruiting Culture

Pressures from social recruiting strategies require job seekers to spend more time actively networking than sending out resumes. In fact, Forbes.com predicts that 2013 is the beginning of the resume’s decline to extinction. With social networking and the ability develop searches for specific types of professionals, recruiters are at a great advantage in seeking and scouting the people they need. And they don’t scout only those who seek work–they recruit those who are happily in work. Recruitment is escalating while the need for professionals to proactively search is declining.

In order for the workforce to respond to the recruitment advantage, professionals develop a need to improve their personal branding on the internet. SEO’s outreach has expanded. It no longer covers general web content, but average professionals work to bring themselves into the search results, making networking all the more important to successfully navigate opportunities.

The way businesses measure talent is changing before our eyes. Companies will value who we know rather than what we know, and businesses like SalesForce already strive to measure this. On a recent job posting, SalesForce listed a Klout score of over 35 as one of its skill qualifications. A Klout score represents an individual’s influence in social media through Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and other social media. A person’s ability to skillfully navigate networks in the social web sphere serves useful for recruiters. They are not only able to measure skills in communication and charisma, but interests and personality.

As social media seeps into our daily lives and employers discover the value of providing access during work-hours, social tools will become a prominent mainstay in HR software. We are moving toward a new, very different way to find and maintain employees. The saying rings more true than ever: it’s not about what you know, but who you know. And social HR is soon to pave the way to a future much different than years passed.

Want more information on the top HR software solutions? We’ve compiled helpful product reviews, blog posts and premium content on our human resources research center. To compare the top HR software products by pricing and key features, download one of our Top 10 Human Resources Software reports.