Today, almost half of our workforce is under the age of 35, and they’ve literally grown up with the Internet as an after thought.  Their level of expectations for information about where they should earn a living is huge, and when they don’t find it they get frustrated and move on to someplace that does.  This type of frustration didn’t exist ten years ago - or at least no where near the level it does today.  Of course there are other issues motivating a person to consider job openings, but we can make recruitment so much easier by doing a better job of providing what makes our companies tick.

There are positive strides being made, but we really haven’t scratched the surface on what our sophisticated workforce is seeking?  They want to know what its like if they choose to work for your company: what the environment is like, what the people are like, what management is like, what the coffee is like, how they could get ahead if they joined your staff and more.  Employee Videos or getting an email for visiting a career page or interacting with a Community Manager at a company Social Network page are fine, but these activities are viewed mostly as “corporate propaganda” and except for the “job starved” - for the most part they're ignored.   

An area getting a lot attention is the work in improving employee referrals, but can anyone really agree that referrals are the “big” answer - particularly when more than 50% of hires are still being made through advertisements?  Don’t get me wrong, companies streamlining referrals using Social Networks are very cool, and it is a terrific use of all the data streams out there, but in the end the interested person is only getting info from one other person.  Sure it’s presumably a trusted person, but it’s still pretty narrow and if ultra successful how homogeneous will companies grown this way become through a lack of diversity?

O.K., so now that I have dissed the landscape of what’s out there, do I have the answer?  Not entirely…but with over 15 years of research I have found one truth.  The information that the U.S. workforce is interested in learning about potential employers is being stymied by corporate road blocks at nearly every turn.  Sure, for every company like O-Power or Zappos that transparently make it easy to learn what to expect as an employee, there are 98 companies that fear doing so.  For every company like Microsoft that encourages employees to blog about their experience (not their secrets), there are thousands that don’t trust their employees to tell the right story or the story they want told…keeping control is their only way…

The reality is that these same companies are being talked about everyday somewhere on the Social Net and they have no control.  If they spent as much time promoting a healthy corporate culture as much as they try controling Social Network access, they would find that their employees would let the world know about it and this in itself would hugely impact the quality level of the people they attracted.  Of course, this in turn would vastly improve the execution of the work that they do improving profits and driving overal company success.  One only has to look at some of the companies with the most respected and sought after corporate cultures to also see the most successful companies.   

Creating a great place to work is not as difficult as it seems.  Letting people know about it is even easier.  Both vehicles exist and some of the most exciting technological advances are happening in HR Tech to support it.  It takes little to begin down the path of really creating and exposing a great place to work.  The message is clear – time to wake up Corporate America and begin engaging with your workforce and the one that is trying to learn about what its like to work for you or face being tuned out…