Thursday, January 21, 2010

How Governments should recruit new employees?

The answer is simple - through the Social Web.

Look what happened two weeks ago:

Our Ministry's Legal department published on the official website of the Ministry and on the site of Civil Service Commision an announcement about open tender for recrtuiting lawyers.

They had only 2 weeks deadline, and no option for newspaper ad. I suggested to publish the tender through social media, and they Oked. They had no choice...

Then it was just a matter of two hours effort. With the help of two of my colleagues who are, like me, fans of Web 2.0, we put the announcement on the forums and groups run by lawyers for lawyers - on Cafe the Marker, Nana 10, Tapuz, groups on facebook and LinkedIn. What took more time, were some groups that required approval for joining. But after the approval that took 3-4 days, the information was placed there as well.

In 10 days since we started this "web 2.0 recruitment campaign", we had hundreds of applicants, and were over-flooded with the phone calls and faxes.

Some Insights:

1. In order to make it fast, organizations must have a presence in the social media. The more networks you have - the better. It doesn't mean that an organization should open their pages/profiles on all networks, but it should encourage its employees to do that.

2. The power of the social networks is not just in the big numbers - but also in small groups. Because we were able to focus our outreach, we targeted specific group, and received only applications that were relevant.

3. The whole operation cost was zero.

4. The response of the applicants was immediate.

5. We posted the announcement on the social network pages of groups or organizations, for example Israel Bar Association on Linked-In. Organizations that don't have social media presence are loosing potential clients that need quick answers in no time. For the same reasons organizations that require approval before allowing to post on their pages, must approve quickly, otherwise they also become irrelevant.

Yaron

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