Perfect Labor Storm 2.0

Monster News for Recruiting: New Facebook App Rivals LinkedIN

Monster.com, the online career board, announced yesterday (June 26th) that they are set to launch a professional social networking rival to LinkedIn on Monday, June 27th, 2011. The new professional networking site is called BeKnown and will operate on Facebook’s platform. Click on the link to find out how the new service works.

What does launching of BeKnown mean to recruiters?

1. Larger and younger market. As most people in the talent acquisition industry know, LinkedIn has become a major force in the corporate recruiting market. The company’s stellar IPO and rapid growth as “the professional social network” has created a transformational platform for corporate recruiters and job seekers.  Corporate recruiting is LinkedIn’s fastest growing revenue stream, and the company is now aggressively building new tools and services.  Today the LinkedIn network has around 100 million users and is growing at a rate of nearly 3 million per month.

Facebook reportedly has over 700 million users and many of the users are not on LinkedIn yet. Facebook users keep in touch with friends, play games, share photos and family news, publish personal information, and often promote information about their children, pets, and local activities.  They even publish their location. And as the data below shows, they tend to be younger, of a lower household income, and of a slightly lower education level. And because of the way Facebook works, the information they share is not “sanitized” or “edited” for business purposes.

The following chart reveals the demographic differences between these networks. 
 
Fig 1:  Facebook vs. LinkedIn vs. Monster Networks (Comscore March, 2011)

So despite the LinkedIn’s rapid growth, there is a huge pool of young professionals on Facebook, who do not take an advantage of professional social networking. BeKnown has the potential to bring a professional social networking to this large Facebook audience without mixing the professional and social identities. Also, as we can see from the chart, Monster’s client base is very similar to the Facebook’s, which makes the Facebook platform an ideal place for launching BeKnown.

2. The Use of Social Networks for Corporate Recruiting. It turns out, as the LinkedIn financials show, that social networks are powerful recruiting and job seeking tools. The $120 billion corporate recruiting industry is being transformed (and upset) by LinkedIn because the system is such a powerful tool for recruiters to find passive candidates.  People in the LinkedIn network maintain their profile actively, giving recruiters a real-time, highly accurate database from which to search and contact candidates. Recruiting companies are losing the value of their networks. Large job boards like Monster.com, CareerBuilder, The Ladders, and others are seeing job seekers (and recruiters) move their dollars and energy toward LinkedIn. The launch of BeKnown is a major move to change these dynamics and give Monster a significant opportunity to play in the Facebook network of job seekers and recruitment needs.

3. BeKnown – professional social network on Facebook. BeKnown will appear as an application on Facebook, but after you join and create an account you begin managing your professional network outside of Facebook. Your professional network isn’t limited to your  Facebook friends. In fact, your Facebook friends are not being revealed on BeKnown.

Some other key features include:

• The ability to invite connections from both Facebook and your LinkedIn network, Gmail, Yahoo, and other email systems;
• The ability to share different information and photos professionally than you do in Facebook today (a major important feature);
• The ability to claim and manage company profiles;
• The ability to post and share jobs;
• The ability to earn “badges,” which are professional achievements (a form of game rewards) for having the most number of connections, a large number of connections at the executive level, helping and endorsing others, etc.;
• The ability to give references and focus these recommendations based on a friend’s competencies or capabilities;
• The ability to follow companies and view jobs from those companies, which are matched against your BeKnown profile (and your Monster.com profile);
• Support for 19 languages.

4. Jobs. Since Monster is a talent acquisition company, the system has some unique features to help businesses recruit people.  It will proactively display your jobs which can be recommended by the potential employee’s friends (creating a “JobVite”-like referral network).  This is a significant opportunity for job seekers - making it very easy for them to see a customized feed of jobs that fits their interests every time they log on. Monster is giving the ability for the recruiters to post a fee for referrals and reward users who brought the person to the job. BeKnown is also free to recruiters. Monster jobs are incorporated there, so any user will see a good amount of jobs beginning on day one.

The BeKnown system has the ability to become a major force in the professional social networking. BeKnown extends Facebook with features to make recruiting far easier.  Recruiters can easily set up company pages, post jobs, create referral networks, and leverage existing Monster job listings among the BeKnown network.  The system’s features for badging, job sharing, job referrals, and company pages should quickly create a “market for jobs” which builds upon Facebook’s reach, but bypasses Facebook’s more generalized advertising system.

High Unemployment: Slow job creation is just part of the problem

By most accounts, the nation has weathered the worst economic downtown since The Great Depression.  But mere survival just won't be good enough this time around to transform our workforce back to greatness.

It’s no secret that our recovery has been hampered by slow job growth.  Our economy thrives when we people have good jobs with good wages. These wages are used to buy more things which puts more people back to work. The more demand for products and services, the more jobs we create. The economy grows when we provide a world class education to the next generations of innovators and inventors, who then become entrepreneurs, artists, scientists and thinkers that create new jobs. The problem this time is that we haven’t created enough new jobs fast enough, at least jobs that are based in the U.S.

Slow job creation however is just part of the problem. A much more significant cause is a shift in the nature of work and type of jobs being created.  Even when jobs created in 2011 have the same title as those created in 1991, the skill requirements are drastically different.  According to consulting giant McKinsey & Co., nearly 85% of new jobs created between 1998 and 2006 involved complex "knowledge work" like problem-solving and sculpting corporate strategy. That scenario has scripted a dramatic gap in the workplace between candidates seeking jobs and their qualifications required to fill them.

To make my point, a friend of my wife recently lost her job.  She worked in banking and the mortgage business for nearly 30 years.  You couldn’t ask for a more conscientious, honest, hard-working person.  Her next employer would get an employee of the highest character, if that’s all the counted.  But Betty (not her real name) lacked the skills most employers require these days. Unfortunately Betty didn’t recognize the skill gap.  When I asked her to describe her computer skills, she proudly shared she was “really good with Quickbooks and email.” But when I asked her about her proficiency with Word and Excel, she responded, “I’m really just too old to learn that stuff. That’s for younger people.”

And that’s the problem.  Computer skills – which today accounts for so much more than checking email and typing letters – aren’t just skills you can pass off onto “young people.”  Every worker - regardless of age - needs them along with minimum levels of proficiency with software and Internet skills.  Employees also need the ability to adapt, collaborate, think critically, and even work virtually.  Unfortunately the labor pool is filled with a lot of job seekers named Betty.

To learn more about how this job restructuring is impacting our recovery and shaping the Future of Work,  let’s begin by describing a few terms associated with the nature of work:

Transformational: Jobs that involve the extraction of raw material and converting them into finished goods.  Examples of transformational jobs are mining coal, running heavy machinery, or production line workers.  Once the type of job that defined progress and a robust economy, only 15% of American workers took jobs in this category by the turn of the 21^st century.

Transactional: Jobs that involve routine interactions. Examples of transactional jobs would be cashiers, office and accounting clerks.  Most of these jobs have become commodities and if not already outsourced, they’ve become automated.

Tacit: Jobs that involve more complex interactions – knowledge jobs. Examples of jobs in this category would include Executive/Manager, Nurse, Salespeople, and Mediators.  Many experts would even include positions like customer service representatives. Today even the CSR requires a vast knowledge base and advanced skills to service a diverse population who present complex problems.

For many years, companies have followed the Alfred Sloan pyramid style of business: a limited amount of tacit type of workers at the top supported by a large base of transformational and transactional types of workers.  This organizational model just isn’t working anymore. A new global marketplace demands an increase in the tacit workforce. It demands a new way of thinking.  No one is going to pay workers anymore just to show up. 

Or as Edward Gordon, author of “Winning the Global Talent Showdown” explains it , “we only have 20% to 25% of the current workforce that fits into jobs that are in high demand right now…”  Gordon describes this as, “An abundance of labor, and poverty of talent.”  

In other words, despite high unemployment rates, the U.S. does not have enough people with the right skills to fill the jobs that are being created. We do however have an ample supply of people ready, willing, and able to fill jobs that are or should be obsolete. That gap between job openings and skilled workers will keep unemployment high even if job creation ramps up.

How To Recruit Millennials and Recent College Grads

Whether we like it or not, Baby Boomers are tapering off in the workforce. It’s leaving a skills and employee gap that needs to be filled. Millennials, also referred to as Generation Y, will help fill in the gap. They will also bring fresh ideas and an enthusiasm and motivation not seen in years. 

But recruiting and retaining these young workers won’t be a piece of cake. Many employers argue that young workers lack loyalty and have a poor work ethic.  That’s only one part of a bigger story.

But rather than debate the shortcomings of Generation Y or how business and economy have fallen short, let’s take a look at the solutions for the impending recruitment climate change employers face moving forward.

Millennials will take a job because they want to work there, not because they have to.  The decision to take a position or not involves many factors.  A good job is no longer defined by money alone.  A recent Corporate Executive Board study revealed that 80 percent of Millennials will stay with the organization if future career opportunities are available; 70 percent will stay for development opportunities.  Only 61 percent selected compensation as the most important factor.

In other words, what young people are looking for is making a difference in the world, or the company. “Millennials are far less likely than Boomers at the same age to agree with statements like “the most important things that happen in my life involve work,” and “life is worth living only when people get absorbed in work.” (Collegiate Employment Research Institute, 2007)

Success will come from differentiating your business from the rest of the competition. “Get them interested early on”, says Neil Howe bestselling author of Millennials in the Workplace.  Offering internship possibilities is a great way to catch their attention. That’s a good thing because according to NACE’s 2011 Internship & Co-op Survey, internships are an integral and ever-important part of the college recruiting scene. The survey finds that employers expect to increase internship hiring by about 7 percent this year and co-op positions by nearly 9 percent. Furthermore, they will draw approximately 40 percent of their new college hires for 2011 from their internship and co-op programs.

The Class of 2011 Study released by iloverewards.com states some of the best ideas as they come straight from the horse’s mouth: Millennials spoke out about will interest them in a particular company and how to keep them there:

• I’d like to hear more about corporate culture in job descriptions.
• I’d like to see companies recruit more via local job fairs at off-campus school locations, along with on-line virtual career fairs.
• If a company makes a recruit feel like they would be valued at the company, recruits would be more likely to work for them.
• If I were given the choice of picking my own employer, some of the things that I would consider would be how established the company has been over the course of its life, the moral values by which the company is guided and operates under and last but not least the work environment.

It is also well worth noting that 88% of new recruits will seek you out directly if your company branding strategy speaks to the values of Millennials. Seventy-two percent say they will use an on campus career service while more than one third will find their next employer through social media – (7% Facebook, 28% LinkedIn, and 2% Twitter.)  Only 28%, down 6% from the year prior, search for a job using newspaper ads.

The survey also revealed what terms young recruits use when searching for a job.  they use for seeking a job: 25% Position Title, 23% Entry level jobs, 19% Entry level careers, 15% Industry Title, and 18% Company Name.

It is also recognized that parents are well involved with their up and coming Millennials in searching for an employment opportunity.  The Collegiate Employment Research Institute reports that,
“Nearly a quarter of all employers have “sometimes” or “very often” seen parents involved in the recruitment and employment of recent college graduates. Forty percent of employers report that parents have called them requesting information about the company; 4 percent report parents actually attending the interview.

Although there is a fine line with this topic, Neil Howe recommends offering a constructive environment, rather than trying to block the parents.   “Keep the parents of young hires in the loop with parent newsletters or a parent section of your website. Allow them to engage personally with their children’s work environ¬ment through visiting days or special events.”

Read more: “6 Ways Parents Can Help Millennial Children Job Hunt.”

When all is said and done, Generation Y isn’t asking for things that are so different from any other generation: they want to be respected and recognized for their workplace contributions. They are however much more vocal about it.  And with social media forcing transparency and exposing deep dark secrets, companies need to take heed of the changing workforce climate. Understanding and being sensitive to the needs of Gen Y workers, as well as Gen X and Baby Boomers, will be the key factor in recruiting and retaining them. If you want employees to care about your company, show them that you care about them first.