How A Corporate Recruiter Uses Facebook for Onboarding and Offboarding

In my regular chat with Emma we talked about social networking (again – is that all I think about?!).  Sky’s recruitment policy is to not use Facebook directly as a recruitment tool (especially not to search for information on potential candidates after the stuff she learned at the conference a couple of weeks ago).  Where Emma thinks the value lies is in the use they can make of it for on boarding and induction.   Quite often graduates get job offers a few months before they are due to start.  Sky can set-up a Facebook group for all these new staff (eg, Sky Graduates 2007) and then invite all these new starters to join.  They get a few current graduates in the group to “chat” with them too.  These new grads can ask questions of their peers that they might not ask wish to formally ask line management (what’s the dress policy, can I car share, where can I park my bike, etc). Of course this is created as a closed group and monitored to ensure there’s nothing negative going on - you don't want the current staff scaring off the newbie's before they've even joined!

Another project (but more for LinkedIn) is around their “exit” policy (the offboarding of the title to this blog).  In the exit interview staff that they would like to consider getting back into the business at some point are asked questions around if they would ever consider returning to Sky, if they want to stay in touch, etc.  Those that would/do can be added to a LinkedIn group for Sky Alumni.  This works especially well for the more senior personnel.  Through the group these individuals can be keep in touch with the Sky environment, Sky can track their careers and use LinkedIn to re-establish contact further down the line.  Of course they can also be contacted as referrals to other potential candidates.   

So, just because you don’t want to search for dodgy photos of potential candidates it doesn’t mean you can’t use Facebook in a corporate environment, and LinkedIn isn’t all about building massive networks of contacts (although I think that helps!).  More on how a corporate recruiter uses LinkedIn next week...

Comments

[Peter Gold]

I think the concept of groups is spot on but in the same way we have social networks, there will be the demand for business networks to be used as described.

Cisco have an internal global social network and we will see more!