This week my blog comes from Employee Benefits Live – that wonderful, frenetic two-day event where over 2,000 employee benefits professionals come together to learn, gossip (er.. network) and catch up on all things benefits and reward.
I always come away with dozens of new ideas, insights and friends in the industry.
This year I took a particular interest in the conference talks on social media for HR.
I am not only referring to LinkedIn (a great favourite of HR folk including myself), but of the other channels such as Facebook (yes, it is a huge tool for HR), Instagram, Pinterest and Twitter. (But not necessarily Tinder, as one cheeky HR professional suggested!).
The vast majority of employees now communicate via social media, so if HR and their organisations aren’t making the most of this they are missing a trick.
This Wednesday we heard how Maersk Drilling uses Facebook to recruit engineers to its drilling platforms. It seems counterintuitive until you realise that engineers away from home for weeks at a time spend lots of time on social media. It was simply a case of going to where staff and potential employees are and communicating with them to promote Maersk’s employee value proposition.
I have always thought of social media channels as being little villages where people wandering through stop to chat to each other. If you don’t go down into this village you will not know what everyone is talking about.
I would highly recommend that HR and benefits people get to grips with social media. It is an amazing tool that is hugely underused. Not using social media is a bigger risk to organisations than using it and making the odd error (which you can delete).
At the very least, make sure you know about Glassdoor (download the app for free) so you know what people are saying about your organisation online.
And make sure that the benefits and reward section of your organisation’s website is up to date (that is the first place prospective employees go to research your organisation).
See you on Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+…. and search #EBLive2014 on Twitter to see all the goings on at Employee Benefits Live this year.
Debi O’Donovan
Editor
Employee Benefits
Twitter: @DebiODonovan