As a small business or a large corporation have you ever thought about the possibility of your social media department completely taking over for the HR department? Well, maybe not the entire department, the HR department could be one employee who handles the paperwork and the complaints that nobody else wants to or is qualified to handle. I don’t see a social media expert working with sexual harassment warnings anytime soon.
How would the social media department ever take over for HR, well I was thinking about this the other day and the answer is relatively simple. LinkedIn and Skype can turn any company small or big, into a player on the global market. Companies can go after the exact employee they want and then do an online face to face interview within a couple of hours or days depending on everyone’s schedule. LinkedIn has over 160 million members, and professionals are joining the network at a rate of 2 per second. That’s 170,000 professionals every 24 hours joining a professional network.
These people joining are from every industry and many times are the best in their industry. Other times they are new college graduates looking for a fresh start in their respective industry. Still today 50% of people say they were hired from a personal connection and through networking. We need to look at LinkedIn as a personal connection at a distance. One cool feature of LinkedIn is it will tell you how many degrees of separation you are from that person. You can almost always find someone who knows that person, and get a personal reference right away.
As of January of 2012 Skype had 31 Million users, but of course I simply used Skype as an example. The interview could be conducted on several different platforms, such as Google+, or even face time on an iPhone or iPad. This gives the social media department the ability to overstep the HR department, creating a one-to-one personal connection with virtually anyone. Again this will give basically any business the ability to operate nationally or globally.
Maybe I am wrong and we will always need an HR department and I was just having a moment thinking how cool it would be for social media to take over another part of the world. But, I do think there is something to be said for the power of LinkedIn when it comes to finding new talent and even new business. It is personal connections and networking 2.0, but added together with a platform like Skype, I do believe some really great things could happen.
