B2B recruitment is an area where it is easy to forget the importance of branding and corporate communication.  Nowadays you can find out loads about what it’s like working for a company online – and mostly through non-official sites.

I was really pleased to read this post from Jeffrey L. Cohen in which he interviews Laurie Ruettimann, an HR Consultant and blogger, about how she would advise an organisation to use social media for recruitment.

If you don’t have time to hear the full 8 minute interview, here are the notes I took from it.

• The biggest single thing to do is to align HR with marketing and sales – your products and services brand should have the same messaging as the HR brand
• Internal social media is also important – have a look at the Sodexo careers – a hub to develop relationships.  It includes a neat job search desktop widget
• Outsourcing has crossed over with technology – Many companies outsource reference checking and use social media and telephone to speak to reference-givers.
• HR is ahead of accounting and finance, and ahead of some marketing and sales depts especially in managing relationships and candidate databases
• “‘Social recruiting’ – the new term for using social media in HR.
• Should I get social media skills?  Everyone benefits with higher skills.  US workers are bifurcating – knowledge class and working class.  Chasm between the two.

• More social media skills are needed in softer ways.  richer and deeper relationships and thoughtful understanding of the world with broader communication skills.  An organisation can then use you in different ways.
• Do companies need a social media director or community manager?  Some firms are hiring them.  It’s a position of luxury now – often they fall under marketing and sales and existing job titles.   The companies of the future are creating these roles and investing in them.

• TIPS:
  • Go on Google and understand what people see when they google you.
  • Grab your name on Twitter and you’ll be ahead of the game.
  • Companies are looking for competency and people who won’t cause law suits (!).

Social Media Changes in B2B HR and Recruiting from Jeffrey L. Cohen on Vimeo.

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Outsourcing has been a hot topic for many years as the slide away from UK / US locations for low cost services continues.  But for an organisation / agency there's an issue much closer to home.  When should my business development be a service provided by an external supplier and when should it be part of my employed / in-house team?

Jason Kurto started this thought process when he asked a question in the LinkedIn group Business Development Connect 

now he has a clear motivation here – he wants a job.  Let's see if we can help him out.

My first instincts are that specialist services are linked to the age  and lifestage of an agency.  When you're a small start-up you do everything internally and you do it yourself.  You can't afford anything else.  

As you grow to becoming a medium-sized agency wtih say a dozen to thirty people you realise that you can't do it all yourself and at this time hiring specialist external suppliers can make sense as they report directly to the MD but do a clearly demarked job with clear objectives.  But it's not yet a full time job because the agency can't afford it and can';t handle dozens of new approaches per month.

Growing still larger, it makes sense then to bring the function in-house because a senior member of the team can oversee the biz dev role and a (cheaper?) junior or middle-management hire can be directed by the senior team member and can be kept busy 5 days a week.

But the fact is that for every rule there are exceptions.

Here is a simple decision matrix.  Two dimensions:

Existing business processes versus New business processes

Core business process versus non-core business process

Set this into a two-by-two matrix and it quickly becomes clear.

Outsourcing anything is fine for Existing business processes that are non-core to the survival of your agency.

[IMO biz dev is not "non-core"]

If you need something to happen relentlessly and without fail in order to stay in business, don't outsource it.  Keep it close.

PS Jason I hope you get that job!

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