Finding a mentor close to home

Have you noticed the ease with which some people take to the digital world? They're the ones tweeting on the bus to work, communicating with friends and colleagues through social networks and finding an intrinsic value in their time spent online. These social mavens may be using Yammer internally within an organization to engage in conversations that drive their work forward; they might be using Twitter to share and find links to useful work-related articles; they may volunteer as a community coordinator for a group's Facebook page; or they may successfully leverage LinkedIn's posts and conversation threads to engage with their professional network.

You may recognize a gap between your own capability as the HR or Recruiting Manager who needs to execute your hiring strategy and the social networking expertise of the social mavens in your organization. If this is the case, you can build the capability to connect a recruitment strategy with these online communication channels through a mentor.

Mentoring is an ideal way to build new skills, and the skills required for navigating social networks are best learned in a person-to-person way in this kind of trusted learning environment.

Using an internal social network

If your organization uses Yammer, it becomes quite easy to identify a potential mentor. You can use the Yammer leaderboard to identify people who are active on this enterprise microblogging platform, and once you've followed them, you can start to pick out who are the good role models you'd like to learn from. They may even refer to their activity on external social networking platforms such as their blogs or their Twitter feed. This helps identify those social mavens with the skills and experience you can learn from.

Note

Tip

Type the name (or Twitter handle if you know it) of a few of your likely mentors into a free tool such as Klout.com and gauge their influence.

Using an external professional network

Another approach is to connect with your company's LinkedIn groups. If you haven't already, now is a good time to set up your LinkedIn profile. When you log in, you'll find that the platform is quite good at suggesting "groups you may like", which will include fellow employees. Once you're connected to fellow employees, you'll notice your feed showing posts by colleagues actively participating in discussions. It becomes easy to identify who is an active and positive participant in valuable discussions on this professional networking platform.

Using an external social network

Yet another good way to find your mentor is to approach your graduate program employees to find whether they have a Facebook or LinkedIn group that they use to connect with each other. I expect you'll find they'll be pleased to have you join their community where you'll have the opportunity to interact with and observe the most active participants.

Your selected mentor will hopefully provide you with excellent learning opportunities as you build your confidence in navigating social networks. Later in the book, we'll be using these same strategies to identify influencers and active community members to drive your recruitment strategy.