Why does HR have so much say when it comes to communications.

The best way to get a good candidate is to have a well written job description. Yet very few organizations are in fact using the hiring process as a time to solicit good candidates and are posting poorly written job descriptions with a byzantine hiring process that it becomes virtually impossible to find good candidates and the few good ones who do respond are lost in the combination of technology and human disinterest.

I was at a luncheon and sat at a table with a sales rep from a mid-sized company who helps in the hiring process. She told those of us at the table that her company is proud of the fact that her company can scan resume and eliminate candidates based on words in their resume and thus send on to HR only candidates who supposedly match the job description. One person at the table, OK it was me, asked if they ever ran checks to make sure that the rejects deserved to be rejected. I could tell I hit a nerve and was told that for the HR people the results were negligible. A nice way of being told to shut up.

I asked another HR person I know who writes the job description in her organization. She told me that HR has to write them with some input from the hiring manager. Some input means that they write them and the hiring manager later tells them to change this and change that. Very little input basically. Another one told me that screening candidates is the worst part of her job and she would give it up in a second.

So that beggars the question of why are they even in the field of communicating with external audiences? For one thing, most HR people when asked will tell you they are there to keep the wrong people out, not to find the best possible people. I can also tell from most job descriptions that very little care goes into what is being put into them. It is not uncommon now to see a laundry list of skills and experience an organization wishes to see and then they claim they only want 2 years or so of experience. A nice code for wanting the $5 Fillet Mignon.

Some may argue that the current job market means that there is no need to be civil or offer any words of encouragement to candidates. Others may believe that the pool is so deep that any treatment of potential is fine and cite that everyone is overworked, understaffed and so on.

Let me make it perfectly clear. This logic is insanity pure and simple. If one of your key public facing arms is handling a potential client base and source of revenue for the organization rudely and abruptly there should be zero tolerance for that. Why not hold them to the same standards sales is held too? Would you ever not return a sales customers call after a meeting? Would you be brusk and rude to a sales customer? Would you treat a sales lead as a waste of time? Of course not!

But the same thing goes on within a number of organizations nearly every day. Individuals who can help bring the organization to the next level of success are treated as necessary evils. As the great unwashed masses. It is hardly news that no one likes to deliver bad news but shirking the duty and hoping the issue will go away does not lead to a resolution to the problem. There is an old military term called an attitude correction. In this case the HR arm of many organizations need what I will term a communication correction. Hopefully they will get it before they lose out on hiring some very talented people.

Why do so many companies not get social media?

A curious question was posed to me recently by an organization who was asking for my help regarding their social media marketing and communications programs. I was asked if I used Facebook to which I replied yes. The next question surprised me, I was asked how many friends I had on there and while I knew the answer, it was about 180 or so at the time, I could see a deep frown on the interviewers face and was asked, "how come you have so few?"

I think that mentality sums up many organizations approach to marketing via social media. They believe it's best to plunge in without knowing the depth or temperature of the water. The important thing is to not miss out on getting wet. Forgive me for using more swimming analogies but they run the huge risks of jumping into shallow water , freezing water or water full of sharks.

Social media marketing can only succeed if we proceed with the due diligence we would in other marketing or public relations forums. We can't use some shotgun style approach while blindfolded and hope we hit the target. We need to use social media strategically and with a mental image of the beginning middle and end of the social media program.

The great risk we run here is that organizations may use the same approach to social media that was used to the web when that first emerged in the mid-to-late 1990's. That was a time of instant experts and throwing money at a problem and the immediate assumption that the old rules no longer apply. Hard lessons taught organizations that was not so but here we are facing one more time the assumption that the old rules no longer apply.

Let me close out with what I told the person I was meeting with. When asked why I had so few friends on Facebook, their interpretation not mine, I responded very simply. I asked about their client base and asked how intimately they knew them. I didn't really want an answer but could see I hit a nerve because they didn't know their client base that well. I then threw down the gauntlet and after bringing up my friend list offered them the chance to pick any one at random and I would tell them 3 things about them. The point being social media should help you broaden and strengthen you presence in the market and should not be just some fast and easy way to help yourself sleep better at night.