Facebook's Resume Feature - Should LinkedIn be worried? My take

Yesterday it was all over the tech websites, Facebook is reportedly testing a new resume feature called "work histories" that can help users share them privately.

Here are my thoughts about how this can play out:

1. Facebook is making an enterprise play. First with Workplace , the collaboration feature and then with  Facebook Jobs the job advertising feature. However, they haven't really done a great job marketing the jobs feature. If you see currently the number of jobs advertised in India is very low. As I write this is what is shown - 27 jobs in India (plus all of them seem to be with Facebook, not even sure it is used by other employers)
   
2. Facebook's big revenue features come from display advertising, sponsored posts for consumers. LinkedIn has that market cornered when it comes to employers - with their company pages and posts targeted to different kind of talent segments. So cracking this market is going to be tough for Facebook unless it invests in feet on the street to take on LinkedIn's Account Management, Sales and Customer Service. Facebook pages had talked about introducing a jobs/careers tab for adding to their business pages beginning with US and Canada, however I am not sure if this is in the priority for Facebook sales teams to pitch it to their customers
3. The big opportunity, Mobile recruitment. Where Facebook has a big edge over LinkedIn in the developing markets is the users who are solely on the platform as well as being actively engaged - the users for whom the internet is first mobile screen. These would be the blue collar workers which are not a strong point of LinkedIn. However to reach them Facebook would have to give the screen real estate to the product to make jobs a clear feature which might mean compromising on things like its news feed.
4. Microsoft and LinkedIn. Microsoft's acquisition of LinkedIn and its data getting integrated into Outlook and Office 365 is a moat that Facebook may find it difficult to cross.   
5. Facebook's perception problem. The biggest problem for Facebook is its perception of being a "social network" that is for friends and family. Whatever Facebook does in the jobs and careers space would run into that huge perception issue. At least in the white collar workforce, hence IMHO, the best bet for Facebook would be to concentrate on the blue collar workforce and focus on a "apply with Facebook" button with job sites to make the application process friction-less. The question is will they focus on it - at the cost of hurting their other revenue streams like digital advertising? And will they be able to convince the recruiting ecosystem like job sites and staffing agencies and make the products that they see value in? Time will tell, but very unlikely in my view. I hope I am proved wrong because LinkedIn can really do with some competition in this space.

top 25 #HRInfluencers on #socialmedia by @SHRMIndia

So last evening SHRM India unveiled its list of Indian HR Influencers on Social Media and I was at (ahem!) number 1

You can download the full PDF list here
  

Using #SocialMedia for your professional growth

So the good folks at +SocialSamosa invited me to a "Twangout" - where people could ask me questions via Twitter and I had to reply via a Google Hangout. It was moderated by the co-founder +Ankita Gaba

You can watch the video here - more about the Twangout here

SAP's Human Potential and @Kruse's Employee Engagement list

So here are two lists I found myself listed in January 2014 to start off the year.

One was this blog post by SAP on the top 51 Human Potential Influencers

Another was author and speaker Kevin Kruse's list of Top 100 Employee Engagement experts online.

Go through the lists, you will discover a great list of people to follow on Twitter and blogs.

My blogging and social media journey over the last decade

The Smart Manager magazine last October asked me to write an article on how I started blogging and my eventual career change into the "Social HR" area.

Thought you might like to read it too :)

Social Media Masterclass - Tweets from the #PhilipsHRMeet - Storified

Philips logo following the March 2008 Identity Update (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Two days ago I delivered an internal training to the Philips India HR Team (follow us on Twitter at http://twitter.com/HRPhilips ) and encouraged them to Tweet at the end of the session.

So thought that the Tweets would give you a flavour of the training. You can find the ppt here.

HR and its role in making a "social business"

The following is an article I wrote for the National HRD Network newsletter. Would love your feedback

How Human Resources can help craft social business from Gautam Ghosh

What can HR do to create value? #IndiaHRChat with @IndianYash on what it means

Was an interesting Twitter chat today on HR and value creation and how it is different from value addition and what competencies HR people need to exhibit to create value.

Here are some tweets (in reverse chronological order) on the discussion.

McKinsey on 6 social media skills for leaders

McKinsey Quarterly has a brilliant article on how leaders need to build social media skills, at a personal and organizational/strategic level. Along with examples from GE.

So if you're a leader in an organization which of these skills would you focus on depending on organizational priorities?