In Three To See this week contributions on changing behaviours, workforce planning and research into how companies are using social media.

My first pick is Clay Shirky's 2005 Ted Talk: Institutions vs Collaboration.  Its a fascinating presentation about value creation that touches on the Pareto Principle (AKA the 80/20 rule), employee engagement, performance management and the cross-over of social and human capital.  Is it really five years old?

My second pick, Recruiting Needs to be Part of Something Bigger was posted by Kevin Wheeler to ERE.  Wheeler shares his views on the state of Strategic Workforce Planning and offers up four recommendations.

"An effective workforce planning process should focus on the following four areas:

1. Gaining market awareness in order to better understand emerging trends and to do competitive analysis around skilled talent.
2. Integration of talent planning with business planning so that business needs can be translated into needed skills and abilities and so that an understanding of available skills can be included in the business plan.
3. Development of a system-level focus on identifying key positions and integrating employee development, internal mobility, succession planning, and recruiting.
4. The use of scenario planning and dynamic modeling to help focus activity and justify investments in a variety of approaches"

My final pick draws on Burson-Marsteller's report: The Global Social Media Check-up.  Ethan Bloch posted the graphic below in How Are Companies Leveraging Social Media? [Hat tip to Andy Headworth who shared this via Sirona Says]

This week I've been working with a number of people that will be 'guesting' on StepStone's Community Post blog.  I'm pleased to say that there are some great posts on the way but I also wanted to share three of my favourite contributions from the wider talent crowd this week.

Harvard Business Publishing featured two interesting posts: The first from John Baldoni who said to Hire People That Disagree with You - a great reminder of the importance of obtaining different perspectives before making critical decisions.  The second came from Umair Haque who presented the Nichepaper Manifesto - a description of how current business models for print news media are being reinvented.

My remaining pick of the week came from Sharlyn Lauby who revealed 7 Secrets to Tweeting Your Corporate Culture - a fantastic guide to using social media to engage with current and prospective employees and other stakeholders.

I want to make this a weekly feature of StepStone's Community Post so that I can share my top 'finds' but, if you'd like more recommendations, each day I am sharing interesting content through my Twitter micro blog and book-marking site on Del.icio.us - you are invited to follow me on Twitter and to subscribe to updates to the book-marking site via RSS feed.  And, if you have any recommendations please email them to community@stepstone.com so that I can share them with the StepStone customer community.

I hope you like this week's picks.

This week I've been working on making StepStone Ideas available to the ETWeb and EasyCruit customer communities.  I'm excited that all StepStone Community members are now able to post ideas for product enhancement and to discuss and vote on the ideas of others. 

The aim?  StepStone seeks to benefit from 'the wisdom of the crowd' based on the belief that two heads can be better than one and that 5,000 heads can be better still.  We feel that crowd-sourcing, is one of many ways to engage with customers and to get a deeper understanding of the pains and priorities in managing talent so that empathetic solutions can be found. 

Collaborating with customers is not new - however with the advent of social media, tools now exist to do it in a more transparent and engaging way.

StepStone Ideas has been designed to give community members an opportunity to share challenges, priorities and potential solutions so that StepStone can continue to develop products that meet the needs of customers.

Of course, collaboration is a two-way street, without engaging customers, suppliers cannot focus on finding ways to help.  This is as applicable to providers such as StepStone as to HR practitioners yet I regularly read that HR needs to prove its relevance and its value to other business functions.

In the current market, organisations are turning to HR departments to use the expertise in macro-level people management to get structures into shape and employees primed to deliver above average performance.  How is HR responding to these challenges? 

How does HR engage with its customers to understand what is needed? What techniques are HR practitioners using to design solutions to these challenges?  How are the ideas evaluated and selected?  How is success measured?  Do tools like StepStone Ideas have a place in your HR function?