I was speaking with a CEO the other day and he said his number one issue was ...... retention.

While he was based in Seattle, it wasn't "too bad" he told of a friend of his in California that started the week with 10 developers and ended with the week with two.

The company in California provided table football, a ping pong table, gave them three meals a day, jelly beans and bean bags.  The question from the Californian CEO was "I give people all this stuff, but I still cannot keep them".

I asked had they thought about social HR - social human resources?

Social human resources is not employee advocacy.  Employee advocacy is where marketing, on realising that advertising, email marketing and cold calling no longer works, that they try and "stuff" corporate content, that nobody is interested in through employees social media channels.

It's often called corporate spam.

So Social HR is not that.

Social HR is empowering your HR team to be on social.  So what?

This is about getting your HR team to have personal brands, to have strong networks (current employees, future employees, alumni, graduates, etc, etc) and sharing content (how great it is to work here, the importance of purpose in a company, our culture, etc etc).

What this will do is for any recruit, they will look at your company and want to work there.  This means you will get more people wanting to be interviewed.  As we know the more meetings you have, when it comes to talent, the better.

One of the other issues is that all the good people are happy in their work.  Traditionally the only way to get them is to use expensive recruitment consultants.  If you empower your HR team on social, then this talent pool will see how cool you are and it will "turn heads".

If you get these people approaching you, there are no cost of job ads or cost of recruitment consultants.  There is no "on cost" of having to pay people above market rate to get them to come on board. 

Having your HR team on social, will make you look cool.  In fact the more people, right across the business you get on social, the more cool you look.

Our advice is to get as many people as you can; Finance, procurement, marketing, sales, customer service, etc.  As the more people you empower, the more people in those departments will want to work for you.  Need people in Finance, if your people are cool, this will attract people in finance to work for you.

These means you get access to the cool talent before anybody else.  It also means you will retain people as you are the cool place to work.

So in summary, you strip out cost in human resources, you become more efficient (do more for less) and you get access to the best talent.  You might even be the employer of choice in your industry.  

This isn't some expensive tool or piece of software, this is empowering your people (so giving them a new life skill) and doing things they already do (being on social) but in a more programmatic way!