SOCIAL MEDIA AND HR Case Assignment After reading the required materials on social media found on the Background page for this module and your own library research, prepare a 4- to 5-page paper addressing the following: Discuss the influence social media has (or could have) on HRM success. What are the challenges of HRM professionals using social media to learn about current and potential employees? The Wright article talks about how Facebook recruits. Bring in three other real-life, private sector employers (by name from your readings/research) and discuss their approaches to social media in the HRM context. Use at least 5 sources from the Trident library. Assignment Expectations Demonstrate critical thinking and analysis of the relevant issues and HRM actions, drawing on your background reading and research. Information Literacy: Evaluate resources and select only library/Web-based resources that provide reliable, substantiated information. Give authors credit for their work. Cite sources of borrowed information in the body of your text as footnotes or numbered end notes, or use APA style of referencing. Prepare a paper that is professionally presented (including a cover page, a list of references, headings/subheadings, and a strong introduction and conclusion). Proofread carefully for grammar, spelling, and word-usage errors. Background Source #1 http://www.shrm.org/hrdisciplines/technology/articles/pages/how-facebook-recruits.aspx How Facebook Recruits World's largest social network leverages, among many platforms, social signals and predictive analytics to find talent By Aliah D. Wright 11/17/2014 Call it the \"Moneyball\" approach to finding talent. In the 2011 award-winning film, Brad Pitt starred as a baseball coach who relied on crunching data to find new players. Facebook is doing almost the same thing. The social networking giant uses recruiting software from Entelo, which analyzes \"social signals and predictive analytics\" to help companies find talent. \"We love data for recruiting, and finding the right talent at the right time to help us scale,\" said Facebook Recruiting Manager Tim Diss during Human Resource Executive magazine's 17th annual HR Technology Conference and Exposition. \"The more that we know about people on the front end, the more we can cut down time\" to hire. Entelo CEO Jon Bischke said, \"We can predict when people are coming to market,\" by indexing social data at massive scale. Entelo analysts then aggregate information to create what they call \"super profiles.\" They look at publically available information on social networks and blogs about potential candidates' professional lives and paint what they call \"a 360-degree view\" of an individual, Bischke said. \"In 10 minutes, our sourcing team saved hours and hours, so speed is inherent,\" Diss added. Entelo also uses predictive analytics to help customers identify which employees are most likely to leave their jobs, calling that data \"leading indicators of when a person is coming into the market,\" Bischke said. For example, are employees updating their LinkedIn profiles, connecting with recruiters and companies more often, tweeting more about jobs, answering questions on Quora? Are they making their social presence known by engaging in Twitter chat discussions? \"Everything they do publically on the social web can point to whether they are prime to move,\" Bischke said. The length of time in a present position can be an indicator as well. The prevailing wisdom, he said, used to be that people leave their jobs around the four-year mark. But that's \"completely wrong. We looked at millions and millions of resume data\" and discovered that \"people actually leave their jobs on calendar years, peaking at year one and declining every year after.\" Back to the Future \"We believe that over the next few years, HR systems will be looking at the future,\" Bischke said, pointing to another company at the forefront of workforce planning and predictive analytics: Evolv, which was acquired in October by Cornerstone OnDemand, a cloud-based software provider for businesses. Evolv also helps companies find workers. By leveraging data to determine the relative performance of individuals, it was able to determine that people who live closer to their office will perform better, Bischke said. It also discovered that people who apply for jobs with a nonstandard browser and people who have a felony conviction in their past performed better as well, he said, refuting \"some highly held myths.\" Diversity Recruiting As part of its commitment to diversity recruiting, Entelo launched Entelo Diversity, an algorithm to identify talented candidates from underrepresented groups. \"Recruiters have used data for years to source underrepresented groups,\" Bischke said, but Entelo goes beyond looking at photos, or whether or not someone attended a women's or historically black college, or if they're a member of an \"affinity group that singles out race or gender.\" The company \"analyzes millions of data points to efficiently source candidates from underrepresented groups,\" he said. Aliah D. Wright is an online editor and manager for SHRM. - See more at: http://www.shrm.org/hrdisciplines/technology/articles/pages/how-facebookrecruits.aspx#sthash.5xp4KBAZ.dpuf Background Source #2 Case study: social media engages employees Davenport, Thomas H (Apr 9, 2012). The story.EMC, a leader in the computer storage industry, needed to cut its costs during the financial crisis of 2008 and 2009. Although it traditionally had a hierarchical culture, it was beginning to look to its employees for ideas. Could the company's recently-adopted social media platform - an online discussion tool called EMC|One - be used to identify cost reduction opportunities? The challenge. EMC had risen to the top of the storage market, and had successfully acquired a number of companies to augment its offerings. But it was becoming clear in mid-2008 that the IT market was beginning to suffer. A global recession was under way, and customers were not buying EMC's products at the rate they had been. Could EMC avoid massive layoffs and plant closures by engaging its employees in the process of identifying and implementing cost reductions? EMC|One did not seem to be a likely vehicle for helping out, as it was used largely for discussing employee hobbies. The strategy. EMC, given its long heritage of senior management decision-making, was initially focused on a top-down approach to cost reduction. Executives established a cost transformation programme. Several company-wide task forces, led by programme managers from the company's finance, IT, and other business divisions, examined people costs, indirect costs and product costs. One of the first steps was a change to EMC's holiday policy. It specified that employees with leftover leave time in one year had to use it by March of the following year. The employee response. Discussions on EMC|One quickly shifted from hobbies to the fairness of the new holiday policy. Some complained that they would have to cancel long-planned holidays. Others had particular work-related situations that would make it difficult to use the leave days. The tone of the hundreds of online comments was largely negative, and there were more than 10,000 views of the discussion thread. Some posts raised fears of massive layoffs. Several employees tried to make more constructive comments, including Michelle Lavoie, a training manager in EMC's services business. She posted a contribution on EMC|One under the heading of "Constructive Ideas to Save Money". It suggested several possibilities, including incentives for early retirement, unpaid holiday week shutdowns, pay freezes and four-day weeks. She asked others to contribute ideas, and that discussion took off. It lasted almost two years, and generated 364 ideas, with more than 26,000 page views. Senior executives joined the discussion, and members of the cost transformation task force also participated. Did it work? In April 2008, EMC announced a 5 per cent pay cut for all employees, along with the addition of five days of paid holiday for the year. The responses on EMC|One were almost uniformly positive. Ms Lavoie noted, "A lot of people understood that they made a difference, and that the discussions were being heard." EMC saved millions of dollars through the ideas. David Goulden, the company's chief financial officer, said: "Ultimately we distilled about 200 different ideas coming from employees on EMC|One. There was nothing huge that hadn't been discussed in the cost transformation project teams. But it's clear that the feeling of participation and morale issues were the most important contribution from EMC|One. People had a sense of being part of the process, as opposed to receiving memos about it." Key lessons. EMC no longer has a culture in which a solitary CEO can make pronouncements from on high without comment or involvement from 49,000 employees. The EMC experience shows that a previously top-down and buttoned-up culture can begin to accommodate new voices and influences in its organisational judgment. Thomas H. Davenport is a professor at Babson College. He is the author, with Brook Manville, of 'Judgment Calls: Twelve Stories of Big Decisions and the Teams that Got Them Right' Credit: By Thomas H. Davenport Word count: 631 Background Source #3 Facebook, Blogs & the Boss: The intersection of social media & the workplace. (2013). Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PRrJ9eINYZI Background Source #4 Balance Risks of Screening Social Media Activity Wilkie, Dana; Wright, Aliah. HRMagazine 59.5 (May 2014): 14. "Like" it or not, social media is reshaping the world of work, and HR professionals can't afford to turn a blind eye. "To ignore social media today is like ignoring e-mail 20 years ago," says employment law attorney Jonathan Segal. "Social media is no longer cutting-edge; it is now mainstream." Segal joined four other attorneys to testify before the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in March about how social media use in the workplace is affecting the enforcement of equal employment opportunity laws. He also spoke about social media and legal risk at the Society for Human Resource Management's 2014 Employment Law & Legislative Conference in late March. Segal, a partner in the Philadelphia office of Duane Morris LLP, says an employer's decision about whether to use Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn or other sites to screen applicants is not about avoiding risk-since there are risks associated with both using and not using social media-but rather about balancing it. Key questions to consider include when such screening should be done, what is looked at, who should do the looking, and which factors should and should not be considered in the decisionmaking process. Here are the best practices Segal offered at the conference: * Never ask for someone's social media password. Twelve states now have laws forbidding this request, and the Federal Stored Communications Act may prohibit it in remaining states. * Make sure all your social media sites include notices that your company complies with federal equal employment opportunity laws. * Review your company's policy to ensure that it applies to "social media platforms now or to be developed." The wording is important because social media changes quickly. * Make sure to keep any job ads that were placed on social media sites when retaining documents after hiring someone. * Have employees who endorse, promote or advertise the company or its products and services on social media disclose their affiliation with the organization. * Never recommend or require that employees "like" or promote your company offduty on social media. Make this activity a designated part of work time. * Make clear to employees that the company owns the content on its social media sites-no matter who posts on them. -Dana Wilkie and Aliah Wright Word count: 373 Background Source #5 Managing and leveraging workplace use of social media (Dec., 2012). Retrieved from http://www.shrm.org/templatestools/toolkits/pages/managingsocialmedia.aspx