Perceptive HR Technology

I have two snipets about Web 2.0 that I found interesting this week.  One had some work relevance, the other didn’t (but I ended up finding some anyway).  Here it goes:

First 
Great article in the current edition of HR Executive (not yet available online — why do they do this?) about Web 2.0 and how organizations are going to have to inevitably deal with the changes that are coming.  Lots of discussion about how HR leaders are going to have to consider the privacy, compliance and cultural dimensions of change management(I’ve blogged on this topic previously).  

It’s fascinating to me how rapidly this topic is penetrating the thoughts and minds of HR folks.  I was at a customer today, and we were talking about how to use Facebook to get employees to promote the company’s job openings on their individual Facebook pages.  Six months ago, that would be met with a blank stare.  At the HR technology conference in October, it got lots of interest as something new and innovative.  Today, when I showed it to my customer it was ‘we were just talking about that yesterday!’  Times, they are a-changin’ — and fast!

Second
I was in Nice (France) last week at a sales meeting, showing our EMEA sales team the new Strategic Human Capital Management product, and while I was setting things up to demonstrate our Facebook widget, I saw a friend invitation from someone I hadn’t been in contact with for nearly 20 years.  In this case it was a good thing — I enjoyed reconnecting with this person, and we had a lively e-mail exchange catching up on each other’s lives.  But at the same time, I had to identify with the HR executives I’ve been talking to, because true privacy is becoming a thing of the past.  If you’re going to be ‘out there’ in cyberspace, you’re going to sacrifice your anonymity.  I don’t have (too) many skeletons in my closet, so I’m not sweating it.  But I have an enhanced appreciation for how corporate executives feel.  But I must say that it didn’t stop me — I’m jumping off the cliff on this one!

I’ve been casually observing the China marketplace for the past year or so, in an effort to ascertain when and how that market will be important for talent management.  It’s clearly emerging, and no one knows for sure how it’s going to evolve.  But it’s pretty clear that engaging the younger generation there will be critical, and the Recruiting in China blog this week offers a credible perspective on how that will play out and more importantly, how employers will have to create effective social networks in order to make their brands resonate with target employees.

And I love the idea of our cool stuff turning up in a blog from China!

The term ’social graph’ is evolving rapidly into a buzzword du jour.  The Plasticmind blog had a good overview of the notion of social graphs in the broader context of social networking if you want some background.  Since returning from the HR technology conference last month, I’ve been trying to get my head around how social networking (and things like the social graph) are going to impact HR in the near term.

In an effort to think about it beyond the next cool software demonstration, I am intrigued by how we can leverage the technology we in HR ‘own’ for populating social graphs.  In most organizations, HR is generally the system of record for demographic data (sometimes even including e-mail address), organizational structure information and supervisor data.  If we wanted to feed a social graph for the organization into a set of social networking technologies, these sources of data are powerful and valuable.  Couple that with the attention being paid to creating technology APIs to connect with social networks (Google is the latest), there’s lots of innovation to contemplate.  It’s also getting closer to home — Chuck Allen made some interesting observations on the topic in his HR-XML blog as well.

Today’s post is to merely raise the question and ask — has anyone else contemplated the problem?  How do you think HR executives are going to embrace (or oppose) the idea of enabling their organization’s social graph and exposing it to the wide functions social networks can provide?  I have more questions than answers at this point, but I’ll be blogging more about the topic as I figure it out.