Gautam Ghosh

Interesting graphic via  PCRecruiter




Infographic by PC Recruiter – Original

Interesting research by IBM via Forbes:

CEOs are beginning to recognize that using email and the phone to get the message out isn’t sufficient anymore. The big takeaway: That using social technologies to engage with customers, suppliers and employees will enable the organization to be more adaptive and agile.

Simply put, CEOs and their executives set the cultural tone for an organization. Through participation, they implicitly promote the use of social technologies. That will make their organizations more competitive and better able to adapt to sudden market changes.

• Companies that outperform their peers are 30 percent more likely to identify openness – often characterized by a greater use of social media as a key enabler of collaboration and innovation – as a key influence on their organization. 
•  More than half of CEOs (53 percent) are planning to use technology to facilitate greater partnering and collaboration with outside organizations, while 52 percent are shifting their attention to promoting great internal collaboration. 

Partners, suppliers, employees and customers want CEOs to communicate with them on a personal level to build trust and to help align them to the organization’s strategy. There is a lot at stake here. And if CEOs continue to hide in their Ivory Towers under the guise of some old command and control mentality, the next chapter in their career might be written somewhere else.

Gravitational field lines and equipotentials (red) around the Earth. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The world is shifting. It is shifting slowly in some areas and disconcertingly fast in other areas. Information which used to get pushed is now being rejected. We have stopped paying attention to messages that interrupt us.

And yet, as people, managers, organizations we still need to communicate, to facilitate, to drive change. I have touched upon storytelling in the past as the vehicle. However, how do you get someone to even listen to your story, much before they even pay attention to you?

John Seely Brown and John Hagel have talked about The Power of Pull to make sense of much of today's world and how this shift is happening.

My hypothesis is to generate the power of pull, we've got to grow our own Gravitational field, or as I choose to call it - our Gravitational Quotient.

How does one build a Gravitational Quotient that pulls relevant information and people to reach out?

Read. Choose. Curate. Publish. Repeat.

Choose a space in which you want to create your gravity. Read content about it. Follow experts about it. Choose the best content and share it. Write your own take on it. Discover new fields that are developing at the edge of this area. Go there before the mainstream practitioners notice it. Find hybrid spaces, where spaces overlap and explore them.

You know your Gravitational Quotient is working when you start attracting like minded people who also start sharing relevant content with you and you move from content, to conversations to discovering a community. Relevance and context determine whether you attract the right kind of content or not, as automatic tools (like this and this) start tracking your pull and labeling it as "influence"

Image via CrunchBase

I know Shel from the time he started his blog to crowdsource his book on business blogging that he wrote with Robert Scoble - called Naked Conversations. I had left a few comments on his blog and was kicked to find out that my blog url was listed in the acknowledgements section.

Last year, I finally had a chance to meet Shel after knowing him online for 7 years, when he was invited by NASSCOM for the Product Conclave at Bangalore. I was a panelist in one of the sessions and finally met what is called IRL ("in real life")

Shel writes a column on Forbes called the "Social Beat" covering all the news in the social technology world, and in doing so he started a series called the Social Media Thought Leaders, where he covered practitioners like Scott Monty of Ford, Ekaterina Walter of Intel and Frank Eliason of Citi. So when he emailed me saying he would like to feature me in this column I was very surprised. But Shel was persistent and the result was this article he posted on 11th May. I'd like to highlight this bit:

Looking at the next three-to-five years, Ghosh sees the new professional classification of social recruiting, emerging in the enterprise by following the same migrations that marketing and communications professionals are following today. That means they will “move away from transactions to engage and build relationships and trust and engage with external talent to showcase the culture of the organization."

Ghosh believes that in the next 3-5 years, forward-thinking organizations will start becoming more open in engaging talent communities and giving to the community before they think of getting returns.

The Best Science Fiction Stories: 1950 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Every marketing campaign is built around a story. Often advertising professionals are actually only storytellers. Which is why examples of creative heads in advertising like Balki and Prasoon Joshi turn scriptwriters, lyricists and directors of movies.

Every statement you believe of yourself adds up to a story. And stories are power enough to become self fulfilling prophecies. Stories like "I am a fighter" or "I am a rebel" or "I am the follower of rules" are often derived from personal experiences and form patterns of behavior. So when you look at the hindsight they look similar.

Your stories are also shaped by what people tell you "You are a caring person" or "You are intellectual" are statements about your strengths that define how others see yourself and how you see yourself.

But the truest stories about you is what people tell others when you are not around. They are the ones that are trusted and passed around the most. "He's a creative guy but quite temperamental" or "He's very hard working but can't really think of options"

The same way there are stories being told about your organization's culture, processes, salaries, leadership vis-a-vis the competition. Some of it is online, and if you use online tools you can listen to what others are saying about you.

How do you negate a bad story? What the talented ex-employee tells his/her friends and peers?

Think how you can enable people who have positive stories about you as an employer to be able to share their stories.

Do remember, stories are powerful. Every story of being is also a statement about how you are not.
"This company has a free and open culture" will attract a certain kind of talent and put off others. "This company provides structured career growth with a mid-range salary" would similarly attract some and push away others.

So if you are thinking about employment branding think "What is the story about my company I want employees, alumni, candidates, partners, vendors to tell their friends and peers?"

This is the presentation I made this week at the India Social 2012 Summit yesterday

Feel free to download and share it

India Social, India's premier "social media" event returns this year with the theme "Social is Business" and I would be taking a session for an hour on "Social Recruiting" (and related themes like social learning and talent communities) on 4th April.



If you attend the talk it would focus on why HR people need to think like marketers, how  to identify the right employees as your advocates, and why communities of practice matter.

If you make it , you can get to hear an amazing group of people from the client, vendor and agency side. My talk, I think would be the only non-marketing talk.

Always have believed that social media externally or internally cannot be an add-on and that organizational culture should be internally open and transparent radically to face tough conversations.

Here's a report by Edelman that says that companies that search for online influence should focus on employees as their main influencers - as employees are trusted more and advises companies to connect them to employees.

Dachis Group tells companies that increasingly employees would be talking about their job experiences in social media and apart from ignoring it - savvy companies are reacting in two ways - either by radically making their organizations transparent or opening their organizations internally.

What will your organization do?

Thanks to the SHRM India HR Influencers list have been getting featured a little bit. First there was the Business Standard coverage and then in HT Shine.

However the biggest coverage was in India's leading business magazine, Business Today, who covered the list and called me a "poster boy of HR" which made me feel a little weird ;-)

Gautam Ghosh, third on the list, is the poster boy of the HR space. He is a social media expert who represents BraveNewTalent in India, which helps organisations create talent communities. In 2009, Ghosh himself found a job opening, thanks to Twitter. "I saw a tweet that 2020 Social was looking for people. I replied and the next thing I knew I was being interviewed for the job." "Those handling social media need training and must not be forced into such engagements," says BraveNewTalent's Ghosh. Ultimately, a company's culture becomes its brand on social media. "The first step is to cultivate a transparent culture internally," he adds.

we also decided to identify who all are creating or contributing to these HR conversations and thereby shaping the perceptions of the larger business community about the use of social media by the HR industry. If you are a contributor to social HR, then you can use this report to connect with these key conversationalists (i.e. the influencers) in the HR industry and build conversations with them on HR topics of their specialization/ liking. 

The other aspect of the list is that it uses only Twitter as a platform to gauge social media influence. They have justified only using Twitter by saying

given the fast paced nature of the medium, Twitter was selected as the platform of choice. Also as compared to other social media, Twitter is more real-time.
In addition, Twitter users are bloggers, vloggers, community members and active online participants in Internet culture

But in India that mostly isn't the case. Only a handful of these 20 people have a blog and participate in other online communities. And the metrics that got tracked leading to the "Influencer score" is number of retweets, number of tweets favorited, etc the focus is not really in being a "maven" (using terms from The Tipping Point) but being a "connector" - or as the YouTube Trends Manager said it - these are the "tastemakers"

What is however missing in such lists is "context" - are these tweets about HR issues? I have to admit most of my tweets are about social media and internet mostly.

What makes me happy is that this report will hopefully start a conversation about social media and HR - by the way, check out People Matters March issue on social media and HR too.

Image via Wikipedia

Yesterday I posted a Tweet that seemed to resonate a lot with people - There are two types of careers. One that you follow, another that you define.

The one that you follow is the path that has been traversed by others. You have role models close at hand. It probably pays a lot. It offers you work-life balance. It is a perfectly sane choice to make.

The career that you define, is the one for the outlier. There are few role models. It probably doesn't pay as much. It's on the edge (and there's often the danger of falling off). It doesn't offer you much work life balance. It is probably the crazy choice to make.

However, the first one is probably going to be redundant in five years. And the second one is the future.

What would you put your bets on?

Find out about emerging careers like Viral Marketing, Social Recruiting, Community Management at BraveNewTalent

So I blogged at Social Samosa this week on how you can use social media to learn and grow in your career. A key component of that is joining and contributing to skill communities.

There was an interesting article in Social Media Today about how online businesses are moving from social graphs to interest graphs.

Skill communities are another sort of interest graphs - connecting people across the world who share a desire to connect and share expertise to a specific skill area.

Oh, by the way, you can now follow me on BraveNewTalent too.

So I was interviewed by Mid-Day's journalist Yoshita on how I was hired by Gaurav Mishra into 2020 Social. Also was quoted on the growing trend of social media profiles acting as proxy resumes.

You can read the article here:

According to Ghosh, the HR/jobs market follows the path of the marketing market. Marketing has moved from a transaction mode to building relations and it is a similar case with the HR/jobs market. "Companies are realising the declining value of job portals. All a person on such sites needs to do is to tick a profile and send it to thousands of companies. Some of the CVs, which do turn out to be suitable, are kept in the database of the company but when firms try to get in touch with the applicants, their contact details are no longer current," Ghosh explains. Social media, he says, is much more alive, updated and immediate.

Image via Wikipedia

A lot of times people ask me why I blog, tweet, share stuff online. They think I am wasting my time. But its is because of such sharing that I have discovered and learned more than other people who look forward to learning as a formal "event" that they or their employer has to pay for.

Online sharing of ideas and opinions are like a dialog and often helps in helping you think about an issue in more clarity after the discussion than you had before. Connecting around learning online also leads you to discover content in various types from text, to documents, to slides and videos.

Hyperlinking makes online content dependent on what the user needs rather than what an author or trainer wants to convey. It gives the adult learners an option of going deep into a subject or to keep it at a surface level.

When you share your skill you also ensure that others look at you as an authority, if they find your content compelling. People can vote with their feet and leave when the value of that content falls, when better people start sharing their content too!

My colleague Charlie has shared a detailed list of 8 reasons to participate in Skill Communities at the BraveNewTalent Blog. Go read it, too

My latest posts on the Social Business News site is whether the time is right for Social HR? What do you think, folks?

On the Social Samosa site I deconstruct that thing called Enterprise Social Software (aka Enterprise 2.0)

Happy reading, folks and feel free to share, like, tweet and +1 the posts :D

Would love your comments too, either here or there :)

Image via Wikipedia

I'll be speaking at the World HRD Congress at Mumbai on 17th February on "Social Media and Recruitment". The venue is Taj Lands End, Bandra.

And I'll be there the whole duration of the conference from 16th to 18th. If you're there, do connect and say Hi :-) Even if you're not at the conference, but are based in Mumbai and want to meet, let me know!

Looking forward to listen and meet (for the first time) Dave Mendoza. And to reconnect with people like Ester Martinez, NS Rajan, SV Nathan, Judhajit Das and to meet lots of new people.  

This is a video of the talk that Lucian Tarnowski (CEO of BraveNewTalent) gave at the DLD Conference in January 2012, covering the skills gap and the role for organizations to leverage online communities to bridge that gap.
Hope you enjoy the video :)

Image via Wikipedia

Last year I blogged about how I believe Talent Communities are online spaces where people connect around a shared skill/practice areas to learn.

Last week my employer BraveNewTalent launched new features that enable creation of skill communities.

So now not only do Companies get people to follow them and their updates (and communicate directly with them) they can also enable their experts to engage in these skill communities and share their knowledge with community members.

The skills communities are of different types - from technical skills like PHP to softer skills like community management to HR Skills

So come on explore the skills communities you'd like to contribute to as well as learn in.

I recently presented to an executive search firm (one of the biggest in the world) on how Social Media is impacting the Recruiting process

So here's the presentation for your use too - feel free to download it and share it with friends and colleagues :)

Image via Wikipedia

I tweeted this WSJ article "No More Résumés, Say Some Firms" and got some interesting responses from folks. Yes for some jobs your "web presence" is becoming more and more important. And others require you to do online quizzes and solve problems before you can apply (therefore weeding out people who don't meet some requirement for the job)

One recruitment consultant replied that two of her clients ask her to send candidates' social network URLs to them. And one of them, a startup IT firm, insists that all the candidates should have tech blogs. (this is in India!)

However, the death of the resume is greatly exaggerated.For one, such roles and organizations are miniscule. The processes and systems of traditional organizations with its armies of sourcers and recruiters and technology like Applicant Tracking Systems understands the resume better. And while you might be fortunate to get interviewed by a company that can make a decision about your expertise using your social web presence -that will continue to be in the edge as that method is not scalable yet for large to medium organizations where the number of applicants per job vacancy go from 10 to 25.
 
 However, for key skills in certain roles focusing on social web presence is critical as external people often trust a regular employee over a financial or technical analyst and the CEO according to the Edelman Trust Barometer for 2012. So we will continue to see services like re.vu (you can find mine here) who aim to turn your resume into a visual story too. Looks kinda pretty, doesn't it? Then there's About.me (mine) and Flavors.me (mine) who all try to get to unify your social web presence.

Not to forget the 800 pound gorillas fighting to own your digital identity - Google (my Google profile is now Google+) and Facebook and Twitter (which adds a rel="me" tag to the URL you add to your website there)

So the moral of the story, keep your resume polished and keep the same information in the big profile pages too. And start writing a blog (specially if you're in technology!)

Fortune put out its list of 100 best companies to work for. But it also put up another list on which of the top 100 are leveraging social media and networks both externally and internally. I loved the list and thought I'd share some examples here:

Marriott : The longtime face of Marriott International, Bill Marriott, has operated a blog since 2007, and the company uses mainstream social media such as Facebook and Twitter extensively. the company ventures into new ground with its My Marriott Hotel social game. The game allows users to manage different elements of a Marriott hotel. Even with languages such as Arabic and Mandarin supported, it might come as a surprise that the city with the most players is Cairo, according to the company. Associates can post ideas for corporate changes to the "Did You Think of This" internal website, and several hundred entered a video contest submission through Marriott's jobs and careers pages on Facebook. The company also periodically has its officers hold question and answers sessions online, such as a human resources executive providing insight into the job search.

Google: Social media used: Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, YouTube, Google , Google+, Google Groups, Magnet (internal tool), internal and external blog
Google also uses social media heavily in its recruiting operation. In addition to a Google students page, the company posts live streams of Google+ Hangouts on Google provide applicants with feedback on the hiring process, such as what code languages to know at interviews.

SAS Institute: SAS offers substantial training in social media for its employees: its new education program, "Social Studies," provides workshops and training modules, while an optional responsible-use course had several thousand participants last year.

Intuit: Internally, Intuit has a news portal, SNAP, within its proprietary intranet. Employees can share news stories, discuss them, and even send pieces to friends and family. Internal blogs and Yammer also keep Intuit workers connected, through Yammer groups such as one for members of a "high potential" leadership program to connect outside their hands-on training.

Image by Esthr via Flickr

An interesting meeting I remember with an executive search firm was "We don't need to go social. Our ability to charge a higher search fee is based on senior exec people not being available"

Another exec search firm (one of the biggest in the world) has asked me to address their "researchers" in their Knowledge center.

So what do you think? Is the Exec Search firm a fundamentally different one that they inhabit?

If yes, how does it impact the profitability ?

From left: Lucian Tarnowski, Madan Padaki, Pratik Kumar and Krishna Prasad

As you know we had planned a gathering of business and HR folks in Bangalore on 6th January to have a conversation about Talent and Technology and specifically about the Future of Talent in India.

There were some fascinating points and experiences shared about what employability means, the future of training and teaching and how technology is transforming organizations.

Read the full report here

Members of the audience

Photos via Dheeraj Prasad