Last week I was at my client’s site walking back from the cafeteria when I was stopped by one of the SVP’s of technology. During the course of our conversation we started to discuss the transition of employees from technologies that they were most familiar with to those they were not familiar with.
He felt that this effort was turning in to a failure and his reasoning behind it brought out a very curious point. His analogy was based on himself as he proceeded to tell me that he wouldn’t have the ability to remove himself from the type of software he currently develops to developing software for Facebook.
At first I nodded in agreement but as I walked away I said why not. Is it impossible to say that those of us who were not raised in the generation of social media cannot become as intelligent about it as those who created it? Funny enough as I read through Edelman’s Digital I found that Vint Cerf Google’s chief internet evangelist turns 68 this year. How is that for being a dinosaur? In fact as you read through the article, you will find that in 2011 social networking among the 50 and over set has almost doubled to 42% and they make up nearly 16 million profiles on Facebook.
Smartphones are finally breaking into the older adult market. Numbers vary, but as many as 15% of people aged 55 and older are using smartphones, according to data from Nielsen. So with all this information I decided to give those dinosaurs an idea of what is out there and what they need to know:
Facebook is a social networking service and website launched in February 2004, operated and privately owned by Facebook Inc. As of February 2012, Facebook has more than 845 million active users. Users must register before using the site, after which they may create a personal profile, add other users as friends, and exchange messages, including automatic notifications when they update their profile. Additionally, users may join common-interest user groups, organized by workplace, school or college, or other characteristics, and categorize their friends into lists such as "People From Work" or "Close Friends." The name of the service stems from the colloquial name for the book given to students at the start of the academic year by some university administrations in the United States to help students get to know each other. Facebook allows any users who declare themselves to be at least 13 years old to become registered users of the site.
Twitter
Twitter is an online social networking service and microblogging service that enables its users to send and read text-based posts of up to 140 characters, known as "tweets." It was created in March 2006 by Jack Dorsey and launched that July. The service rapidly gained worldwide popularity, with over 300 million users as of 2011 and and has added 11 new account per second. Twitter is generating over 300 million tweets and handling over 1.6 billion search queries per day.[3] [8] [9] It has been described as "the SMS of the Internet."
LinkedIn is a business-related social networking site. Founded in December 2002 and launched in May 2003, it is mainly used for professional networking. As of 3 February 2012, LinkedIn reports more than 150 million registered users in more than 200 countries and territories. The site is available in English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, Romanian, Russian, Turkish and Japanese. Quantcast reports LinkedIn has 21.4 million monthly unique U.S. visitors and 47.6 million globally.In June 2011, LinkedIn had 33.9 million unique visitors, up 63 percent from a year earlier and surpassing MySpace.
I certainly learned more than expected while researching the top three social networking sites. It is not as difficult to understand what they do and more and more of the baby boomers, or as my client aptly put it dinosaurs are not only using them in their everyday lives but creating and advancing these tools so they have become a part of the very fabric of being no matter what the generation.
Over the past few weeks we have seen many images that have brought us back to that day 10 years ago that will be etched in our minds forever. September 11, 2001 was not only a day that changed the way we look at the world and our own security as Americans but it changed the face of industry as we knew it. So I thought it might be interesting to take a look back at where we were, what we have become and where we are headed in the future. You may say what does this have to do with recruiting; well we no longer think in terms of recruiting but today it is about Human Capital, partnerships and outsourcing. The change in how we think about the workplace may be directly attributed to things that have taken place over the last ten years - the growth of technology, the arrival of a remote workforce and the disappearance of some of the major players in the financial industry. So let’s take a look at where we were and where we are today and see what the future holds.
Barely a day went by without news of one dotcom company or another going bust. Closure happening at the rate of more than one every 24 hours. The dotcom crash was well documented in magazines like the Industry Standard. We all would witness the phenomenon of the pink slip party. Apple, which had been in the doldrums for some time, started finding its way out of the woods once it announced the launch of Mac OSX early in the year. And how the company needed it: US sales had already fallen by 40% and the late Steve Jobs was struggling to make profit with its iMac and Cube computers. Today Apple holds the lion’s share of online music, phone and tablet equipment with the inception of the iPod, iPhone and iPad. These tools are now a part of our everyday life and no recruitment team would be complete without it. Blackberries were thought of as a fruit and the dialup modem was a part of everyone’s household. Today we have high speed and wireless internet and are connected to our businesses no matter where we are. We have become a society of 24/7 virtual workforce that can be connected from anywhere in the world.
The changes that have accord in staffing are almost as dramatic as those of technology since technology has become such an integral part of the recruiters’ arsenal. Today, instead of searching resumes through Monster or CareerBuilder, we are now using tools like LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter to provide the candidate base we need to be successful. There are about 200 million people on the professional networking site LinkedIn, estimates Mark Weinstein, executive VP of Atlanta-based firstPRO. "If it was a country, it would be the sixth-largest country in the world," he says. Professional and social networking has now taken the place of career fairs and golf courses as we strive for faster and more direct ways to find talent. Candidate interviewing, testing, training and hiring have moved to the internet with tools such as, Montage, HireVue, Green Interview Jobs and Interview Stream. Off shoring and contingent workforces have become a staple of the global economy as companies fight to keep their cost down and become as adaptive as the world around them.
Now that we have seen what the last ten years have brought our industry, what will the future hold? Well many analysts believe that the use of contingent labor will continue to grow as companies shift with the ebb and flow of our economy. Baby Boomers will retire and the workforce shortage will continue to grow. Social networking with become more predominant with the usage of tools like Find.ly and other social media tools. Diversity will play a huge part of every recruiter's sourcing strategy as OFCCP and EEOC regulations become more a part of our vocabulary. Finally the day of the applicant tracking system will be replaced by Total Talent Management which will ensure our partnership with the rest of the HR community. It has been a wild ten years and we should all be sitting down as the next ten years will define what our industry will become for decades to come.