This post comes from Su Oakley, Best Practice Consultant, with StepStone Solutions.  In this post Su discusses the use of social tools for recruiting.

Social recruiting is a hot topic amongst many of the customers I work with and something that most recruitment teams think they should be part of, though many are yet to identify how it fits into their recruitment and resourcing strategy and the approach they should take - this is not surprising, according to Department for Work and Pensions three quarters of employers are missing out on candidates by failing to use social networking sites to recruit staff.

Looking at some of the adoption statistics it would seem that the social web has a momentum that makes it compelling to recruiters:

• Socialising has become the number 1 activity on the web
• It took Radio 35 years to reach 50 million users, TV 13 years, the internet 4 years and  iPod 3years. Facebook had 100 million users after less than 9 months.
• If Facebook were a country it would be the 4^th largest country in the world.
• There are currently somewhere between 3000 and 5000 social sites.
• By the end of 2010 generation Y will outnumber baby boomers, 96% of them will have joined a social networking site.

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Two posts on differentiated workforces and a third on personal reputation management In this week's Three To See.

Professor Dick Beatty of Rutgers University talks about the importance of differentiation in Be Strategic With Your Workforce on the HarvardBusiness YouTube Channel.

This clip leads into my next pick How and Why we Must Differentiate Talent, posted by Josh Bersin to The Business of Talent blog.

Bersin poses the following questions:

1. Who differentiates talent?
2. How do you differentiate?  Who are really the High Performers?
3. How do you create more of these High Performers?
4. So what does this mean to HR?

In his answers he refers to the challenge of identifying "pivotal" talent (a term that cropped up in "The New Science of Human Capital" featured in last week's Three To See) and a technique that he describes as "a "heat map" of the specific characteristics which "define" high-performing managers in this particular company."

In Matrix: Building and Managing Your Online Career Reputation (Unvarnished, LinkedIn, Blogs and More) web strategist Jeremiah Owyang offers advice on how to protect and develop a personal brand.

Owyang outlines the Control Rating, Opportunities, Risks and "What No One Tells You" about your online footprint, reference submissions, LinkedIn references, Unvarnished references and Google listings.  If you've not yet heard of Unvarnished, Owyand describes it as "a website where people you’ve worked with can leave anonymous comments about working with you, both good –and bad."

This is an interesting post that puts individuals in the same position as organisations in having to deal with the perceptions propogated by others - sometimes a welcome, solicited endorsement but at other times a much less welcome "anti-referral" - perhaps because it is negative, unsolicited or accidental (i.e not intended for public consumption) - another useful contribution to the online background checking debate.

Three great contributions from the talent crowd this week.

The UK's Chartered Institure of Personnel Development (CIPD) has published an overview of talent management concepts with fact sheets on Recruitment, Development, Performance Management, Succession Planning and Compensation that use simple images to illustrate key points (example below from www.cipd.co.uk).

Brian Chappell of Ignite Social Media shared geographic, demographic and traffic data from the 2009 Social Network Analysis Report's look at more than forty social networks.  The data is displayed in a series of easy to understand charts with brief analysis on each of the social networks included in the report - useful information for anyone using 'social' for talent acquisition.

Staying with social, if you are thinking about using social media for pre-employment background checks then Steve Bruce's post to the HR Daily Advisor blog; Background Checks on Myspace - Dangerous or Due Dilligence is worth reading - not least for some of the sensational examples of  what employers have found when conducting internet searches.

I hope that you enjoy this weeks Three To Read - if you'd like more, please see what else I've bookmarked at http://delicious.com/craigendicott.

We're looking forward to receiving the results of this round of the bi-annual Net Promoter Score (NPS) survey. 

In response to the last survey we did a number of things to enhance customer experience including StepStone Ideas, investing in our Customer Support operation and developing a means of sharing best practices with and between customers.

What will be in your priorities this time?  The survey closes shortly so if you havent yet responded, please do - not only will you have the satisfaction of voicing your opinion about StepStone, but, for every response received we will be donating €1 to charity.