Come On In, The Water’s Warm- Encouraging Social Media For HR

Yesterday I was fortunate to be asked to present ‘How to Apply Social Media for Human Resources’ at my firm with several of my colleagues.  While we have offered several sessions previously on how specific sites work, we had not taken the next step of demonstrating ways to use the sites in our day-to-day work.

Topics covered were:

• RSS– Why having a reader is a time saving method of finding news specifically tailored to the HR areas you want to know more about.
• Twitter– That it is not just about saying what you are doing at a given moment.  It’s about building community, *meeting* other HR professionals, sharing your ideas on human resources, asking other HR pros how they handle issues, learning best practices, posting jobs, finding candidates.  The list goes on and on.
• Blogs– How to use it initially as a method to put your ideas down in black and white.  How blogging can then move to the next step of interacting with readers through comments, finding new HR blogs you love, and ultimately meeting these bloggers via phone or in person.
• Facebook– Going beyond just a personal use of Facebook.  Creating event and fan pages for specific work events.  Also can be used to find and research candidates in the hiring process.
• Linkedin– Why it is an excellent tool for recruiters and how they can perform very specific searches for candidates.

My plan was to direct participants to my blog roll as a start so they can get some great HR and recruiting blogs in their readers.  This morning, I see that Steve Boese has given us an excellent post on how to share blog bundles using your reader.  I’d like to direct everyone to that post becuase he did a great job of listing the steps and making it a very easy process.

Is your company encouraging HR to use social media yet?  If not, think of ways to show how it can save time and add value to the day-to-day HR activities.