Recruitment
Recruitment . . . it’s needless to say that this is a vitally important issue for many companies.
But I guess I just said it anyway, so what does that tell us? Maybe that it’s so important that one has to resort to repetition to ram home the point. Who knows? Perhaps.
Moving swiftly on . . . recently I’ve been holding seminars with customers to discuss the potential business value of social media.
Denmark - and for that matter Europe in general - is really lagging behind the States in this area.
There, many companies are busy experimenting and finding real value with some or all of the many social media tools - blogging, video, micro-blogging, wikis, forums, networking sites etc.
As with many trends that originate across the Atlantic, the trickle-down effect is slow. But this one is rapidly gaining momentum.
Have you noticed the creep of articles about blogging in your newspapers? Berlingske recently launched an impressive network of 10 blogs, while more and more companies are dipping their toes into the blogging waters.
What has all this got to do with recruitment, I hear you bellow.
Well, my point is simple. The generation graduating from university live in a networked world. They are smart enough to see through glossy corporate spin. In fact they are bored of it. And it is from within this generation that you must recruit your future workforce.
These people pull the messages they want and reject anything too forcefully pushed at them.
Marketing guru Seth Godin explains the impact of this particularly well:
“The new reality of the marketplace is that consumers have a choice. They can ignore you. They can ignore your ads, your letters, you web banners, and your salespeople. As a result, you and every other marketer face a choice: You can make something worth talking about or you can become invisible.”
For marketing and communications professionals, this means it is no longer possible to control your brand in the way you are used to.
If a new flavour of Coke is particularly terrible, that message will spread through the blogosphere, across YouTube, MySpace, Facebook, via SMSs, and instant messaging quicker than you can imagine.
This is how this generation communicate. It’s where they go for ‘buzz’ about the latest tech products, TV shows, music and pretty much everything else you can imagine.
And this generation - switched-on, in demand, web-savvy - will be researching your company, way before you can research them.
So what will they think when they look at your homepage and they see a company that is not blogging, that is not engaging with its customers in any kind of two-way conversation, that is not using video to showcase its offices and employees?
They will think that that company has not moved with the times and they will take their hard-won expertise and their first-hand knowledge of the new marketplace to a rival.
Pure and simple.
