Recruitment Marketing With Jobs2Web

I have been in presentations where customers made a decision to buy Jobs2Web recruitment marketing in 15 minutes. It has saved customers millions of dollars in recruitment marketing expenses. Hands down the most impressive and innovative product in the Recruitment execution suite.

SAP Jam Can Help Retain Talent In Your Organization

When my colleagues and I were designing Career OnDemand we spoke to close to hundred recruiters around the world. We asked them about the places they go to for talent. Most of them said that they go outside the company to professional networking sites such as LinkedIn and other interest specific professional networking sites such as Stack Overflow for engineers or Behance for designers. Not a single one of them said that they look internally. I asked them why and they said that there are places and tools to look outside while there are no places or tools to look for a people inside a company.

I realized that in almost all companies internal candidates were being overlooked, partly because they could not be found. Most internal candidates in such organizations either look for a job outside or become disengaged. This is not only unfair to internal candidates but also a huge drain on the recruiting dollars and talent management investment in a company.

I am pleased to say that SAP Jam has taken steady and significant steps to address the root cause of that problem. First, SAP Jam creates auto groups for employees based on the organizational chart and enables teams to collaborate and be found with a simple search. Second, employees can create topic specific groups to exchange information and knowledge about specific topics to get work done, which surfaces experts on the topic.  Third, administrators can identify experts in every group and make them featured members, even if they are not very active in internal social networks. By making useful tools for people to get their work done, Jam enables internal employees become find-able.

The video above talks about employees finding experts. However, what is not obvious is that this rich pool of information is a great place for a recruiter or hiring manager to look for talent. 

There are three ways a recruiter might go about finding the right internal candidate for a job.

1. Recruiters can do a simple people search using key words and identify people based on their titles, the work they have done and the conversations they have had. They can filter the results by date range and sort the results by relevance. Recruiters already do this in LinkedIn and know the value of search.

2. Recruiters can join the top groups focusing on the topic and notify everyone in that group about new jobs in that area. Even in a large company such as SAP the popular groups for every topic can be easily identified with a simple search. This is significantly better than email blasts to the entire company or location, which is what most companies do to find internal candidates.

3. Proactive recruiters can join groups focusing on specific topics. They can then use the “Track a Term” feature to ask Jam to periodically email them a list of people who are actively discussing topics. This feature works like Google Alerts for talent. A mobility recruiter for example can join groups related to mobility and track terms such as iOS, Android, Windows8 and so on and SAP Jam will keep her posted about the people who are discussing those topics the most. Since this list will reside in the recruiter’s email folder, he or she can search for internal people right within the email client.

We have a long way to go before this problem is addressed efficiently. For example, we could have custom apps for recruiters to search for talent within a company. SAP Jam has made a very good start. If you are interested in talent retention by enabling recruiters and hiring managers to look internally, consider SAP Jam.

From Productivity Improvement To Performance Improvement

The SAP SuccessFactors Hybrid HCM model was an overwhelming success in 2012. SAP customers embraced SuccessFactors with open hands and my colleagues and I had a busy year. This year we wanted to scale the expertise from a handful of product managers to over 200 field colleagues.

A couple of weeks back my colleagues and I started the process and trained 88 solution consultants on the SAP and SuccessFactors Hybrid HCM integration strategy and road map so that we can scale our work this year to support up to 1000 pursuits.

I wanted to share some info about how we used SAP Jam to support this training and enable not only the productivity of these colleagues, but also the performance of these colleagues. This is what we did. After the training, we shared all the content and associated resources with the 88 colleagues via SAP HCM Exchange,  a private Jam group for product management and field colleagues. Our community manager, Stephanie Morgan, then looked at the consumption of content using the standard reporting functionality in Jam and gave us information about the rate of consumption of the content.

Since we can track the consumption of every asset and every colleague, we were able to tailor email campaigns to highlight the value of the content in context for the specific set of colleagues.

Such campaigns were very effective because they were timely and they took our colleagues to relevant content with one click. While they are viewing the content, our colleagues could also see the list of related documents based on actual behavior by people like them. Such campaigns and tools significantly increased the consumption of training content and the subsequent performance of these colleagues in customer pursuits.

Features such as views and likes give us insight into consumption and quality of content

Based on the consumption of the content, we were able to tell with remarkable accuracy how many colleagues are ready to help customers and how many need more help. We can highlight the importance of the content to  those colleagues who have not looked at the content. More importantly, managers can make resourcing decisions on every sales pursuit based on empirical evidence.

Such real time insight from SAP Jam is enabling us to proactively support our colleagues and take critical business decisions based on evidence.While many social collaboration tools talks about increasing the productivity of employees, we are using SAP Jam to improve the performance of our colleagues.

If you are looking for a tool that can make a difference in the performance of your employees, consider SAP Jam.

Iron Railings On The Banks of The Vltava River

Iron railings on the banks of the Vltava river with Prague castle in the background. I shared this one with my friends and many of them liked it. I did not think that this was one of the good ones from my Prague drawings. But something in here appealed to people. Not sure what. May be the locks and the story behind them were the reason.

Iron railings on the banks of the Vltava river with Prague castle in the background

Chinese and Native American Art

A few weeks back I paid close attention to Chinese drawings on vases and Native American drawings on pottery. They are fascinating. I learned a few things about their style when I drew these. Each culture has its own signature style. I realized that once you understand the basic patterns, it is quite easy to draw them. The patterns tend to repeat. In the Chinese vases for example, there are two patterns. The orchids and the vines.

Chinese Vases

Native American Pottery, Colorado