systematicHR

We all know that the best way to find a job is by having great professional networks.  God, looking for a job through job boards is possible, but oh so difficult.  Shouldn’t the same go for internal staffing?  Rather than having internal job boards and postings, we should be deploying social medias to facilitate internal staffing transactions.  Here is the idea:

Employee plans around high potential employees, career paths, performance plans, and even succession plans should give us a pretty good view of what the possible next steps of each employee could be.  Rather than sitting around waiting for a position opening to pop up and hoping that the internal employee and the position opening get magically linked up, there are certainly ways to be much more proactive about this.

Often, employee job growth is a function of pure luck.  They either knew the right person and the hiring manager wanted to hire/transfer them, or HR stumbled upon someone and decided it was the right move the get them to the new department.  The science and predictability of moving people around the organization these days is more haphazard than science.

In the external market, people now join groups in social medias to acknowledge their interest in specific jobs or job families.  If you want to get into compensation, you can link up to people who are already in the compensation field.  If I’m an internal employee, why should I not have an internal social network of people who are in the compensation department?  I could connect to people, do informational interviews, ask questions about the skills needed, and understand the realities of working there.  Best yet, rather than hoping that magic occurs, I have a direct link to the people in the compensation department and when an opening actually happens, the probability that I’ll become aware of that opening grow significantly.  The hope is that someone in comp that I’m linked to is just going to let me know as soon as something happens, and not only am I linked and have some good awareness of the requirements, but I’ve also had time to prepare myself and develop the necessary skills.

Internal mobility is something that talent practices can execute within our HR organizations, but we can also put a lot of power in the hands of employees if we can correctly deploy social medias and have our employees adopt the idea that they can actively manage their own futures.  One of the key parts of the employee engagement equation is control.  Not only do employees need to love what they do, but they also need to feel some measure of control over their own destiny.  Deploying internal social medias in this way makes sense on so many levels, and HR really needs to get on the bandwagon of actually starting to deploy this stuff.