Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
MIKE ELLSWORTH: Hi, I'm Mike Ellsworth. I'm the project manager for the Minnesota Social
Media for Workforce Development pilot. I'm going to talk a little bit about how we got
into the re-employment connections initiative and what we've done so far. \
So after receiving the grant, the first thing we did was convened a project team. That included
members from DEED, which is the agency I'm in; the Department of Employment and Economic
Development, from the Workforce Development Division from our labor exchange, which is
MinnesotaWorks.net, from our communications department and representatives from three
of the WIPs in Minnesota. And we got together and we established the project objectives,
and our overall general objective was to provide a place where users can get quick answers
to their questions, and generally, these questions have to do with job seeking and workforce
development types of topics. And how we will know when we are successful is by the level
of engagement.
We -- one of the reasons I think that we were selected to be a pilot state was because we
have a fair amount of social media activity and we were looking to increase that and use
some of the metrics on the screen here in order to figure out how well we're doing.
A little more detail on the objectives, we decided we had a handful of them. One was
to develop a social media policy -- we did not have one statewide at the time we started
the project; understand the segments of our audience -- so job seekers and counselors
and employers, for example; develop training as necessary on social media techniques for
use for helping job seekers as well as employers; and to cooperate with another project that's
ongoing, a state project called the Virtual Workforce Center effort.
And finally, we didn't want to forget the employers. We wanted to make sure that we
collaborated with them, and our target was develop a talent community, and I will talk
lots more about that later on in the presentation.
So quick results. We have a draft of the social media. It's going through final approvals.
We did execute statewide surveys for both people who work in the workforce centers as
we call them here -- or American job centers, as well as for UI claimants. We developed
and executed the training based on what we found out from our survey. We are advising
our virtual workforce center effort, which is ongoing. And the thing that we're most
focused on right now is collaborating with employers to create a talent community integrated
with our labor exchange, MinnesotaWorks.net.
So we executed two statewide surveys, one of job center staff -- this included all partners,
it wasn't just necessarily state staff; and the other with REA session participants. And
we were focusing on the demographic of 40 to 55 years because our assumption was that
this age demographic would probably need a little more help with social media. So the
target audience for the job seeker, as I said, unemployed -- they're on UI, they're 40 to
55. We wanted to focus a little more on the structurally unemployed people having a hard
time finding jobs, leaving out seasonal, union represented.
So 40 percent of claimants in Minnesota are over the age of 40, and the average age of
a UI claimant is 44, so I think we selected our demographic fairly well. On the AJC staff,
our focus was everybody there, anyone who wanted to respond to our survey or take our
training -- including all partners, managers, et cetera. And then we also had a secondary
objective to identify candidates to adopt pilot training programs that we were going
to provide. So first, let's take a look at the staff,
and we first wanted to find out whether there was a difference between outstate Minnesota,
Greater Minnesota and the Twin Cities, where the majority of the -- it's the largest population
concentration in the state. And we found not much difference in terms of where -- what
was being used -- Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, et cetera -- and how much people were using
them.
The UI claimants, we got a really good response rate from REA attendees over the course of
a month of over 2,900 surveys -- 57 percent. And we did not really find a whole lot of
differences between respondents age 40 to 55 and the whole population.
There were some, they used mobile devices much less to access the Internet. They were
much heavier users of LinkedIn, they're more likely to use LinkedIn and less likely to
use Facebook, and they were more interested in training related to job searching for LinkedIn
and Google Plus. They also were more likely to be concerned about sharing personal information
-- that probably doesn't surprise anyone who's worked with younger people; they don't seem
to have that same kind of feeling -- and less likely to have a postsecondary degree in our
case. But other than that, the findings were all pretty consistent regardless of age demographic.
So one of the objectives of this survey was to find out whether people were interested
in obtaining training through the workforce centers on social media, and we found that
there were some people who were interested, but we were actually quite interested to find
that last row there which says I'm not interested in training, 45 percent. That either means
they don't want to use social media or they feel like they already need -- already have
everything they need in terms of social media training.
And with some of the other questions of the survey, we determined that it was probably
the latter, that they actually felt -- they were confident in using social media for job
search, which was a very surprising finding.
So we went ahead and we created job-seeker training, and then we trained -- the Job Center
staff, including the partners -- and these are the training modules. There are some intro
courses, some advanced courses. There are some general things about creating an online
brand and how to act online and how to network using social media.
So that was the initial effort that we did, and we completed the training of the workforce
center staff in June, and we've turned now most of our attention to our next objective,
which was talent communities. So we did some research and we found at least -- I know there
are probably more -- three public sector talent community efforts in Minnesota. I'm going
to give you a definition of talent community in a minute.
And so we took a look at those efforts and we combined their business requirements and
added some of our own, and then we developed a plan to integrate third-party talent community
software with our labor exchange, MinnesotaWorks.net.
So these were our objectives: to add a statewide, multitenant talent community to our labor
exchange, available to all qualified Minnesota employers and economic developers and, of
course, interested talent; and enable regional entities to create spaces with customized
job feeds to help attract and retain talent into their regions. These are the three efforts
-- I'm not going to through them, but they were all over the state. The Bremer Grant
was a foundation grant given in the northwest area of Minnesota. St. Cloud is north-central
and Duluth is northeast. We also did some research on private talent
communities -- and this is quite a trend in human resources and in -- especially in talent
acquisition we found. And here's an example of a private talent community in Minnesota;
you may have heard of Best Buy.
So the reason that HR professionals and employers are interested in talent communities is the
fact that research shows that 92 percent of candidates that go to a career site aren't
ready to apply to the job for one reason or another. It's not a fit or they're not -- they
don't know enough or they're not ready; they may be passive candidates. So, you know, HR
people want to try to figure out what to do with these folks. They've indicated an interest
in your company and in a job, but you can't get them into your system, into your applicant
tracking system.
The other problem is regions lack effective tools to retain talent and attract new talent,
and that's why, of those three efforts that I mentioned in Minnesota, all three were either
led by or had a significant economic developer component. They were -- they were interested
in trying to either stop the drain of talent out of their region or to attract new talent
as well as new businesses. And then also the fact that, in general, smaller businesses
find it difficult to compete with talent. They don't have the money of a Best Buy to
do a nice, slick talent community like what we just looked at.
So finally, I'm going to give you a definition of what I'm talking about when I mention the
talent community. It's a shared community space where businesses with jobs connect with
people wanting jobs now or in the future via one-to-one and one-to-many communication features.
So it integrates a log of social media; also, other types of online techniques such as forums,
video, video chat, online webinars like we're doing right now, various other types of online
features, to make sure that there's a better way for a -- someone with a talent to connect
with someone with a job rather than just the resume, which we feel is kind of a bare minimum
to be able -- for someone to be able to communicate what they can do for an employer and for employers
on the job rec site to communicate what it is they want. So it's a more rich interface
between the two parties.
So the general features that we feel a talent community needs to have is places for business
to advertise the benefits of employment -- so this is why, in the case of Best Buy, this
is why you want to work for Best Buy: We're cool, we have all these benefits, there's
a great culture -- those types of things. Ways for businesses to engage with talent,
not only active job-seekers but also passive candidates. And they need to try to provide
a way to attract them to keep coming back to the talent community, because if you're
not actively searching or if you maybe have visited one time, what is the reason why you
might want to come back? So you have to set up attractive features like interesting forums
and things like that.
And then integration with MinnesotaWorks.net. All three of those efforts that I mentioned
in Minnesota had a job feed component, and most of them were going to collect jobs from
their regions and basically host a mini labor exchange. So we feel that as the state's labor
exchange, MinnesotaWorks.net was the place to try to not only take this jobs feed but
also organize the whole talent community around.
So some of the other features -- need to have various types of community communication -- private,
one-to-one, one-to-many, many-to-many. Social integration -- social media integration allowing
people who may see a job on MinnesotaWorks.net -- they're not qualified for to maybe post
that on Twitter or LinkedIn or for the benefit of the people who may be more interested in
it -- needs promotion features for both employers and economic developers so that in addition
to having, you know, pages that talk about items of interest, ability to have ads on
the site, email campaigns, that sort of thing. And then an integration with MinnesotaWorks.net
so that -- so that people can actually get a custom-filtered job, an employer can, by
region, by occupation, and present that to job-seekers who may be interested.
So in the screens that follow, I'm going to buzz through them kind of quick, showing you
the mock-ups we have of what our talent community might look. This'll take just a minute to
talk about where we are right now. We have the business requirements, we've discussed
those with the technical resources here at Bead (ph) and have some cost estimation, and
we're preparing an RFI to try to find a vendor to provide the services. We don't want to
build; we think it's much more efficient for us to buy that since there's plenty of talent
community vendors out there.
So here's a little bit of the mock-ups that we have. Think about a talent community as
something akin to kind of a private LinkedIn or Facebook -- so it's got a lot of different
features that you'll think are very similar. So you can have, like, a home page where you
can see messages from your friends, announcements from the various employers that you may have,
quotes, "friended," people that you know, a calendar and a little bit of a summary.
This is very much like LinkedIn in many ways.
You can drill down deeper into the people who you've connected with and you can -- and
we'll want to be able to filter them by the various types of attributes those people might
have. And then kind of like friending, we have the idea of maybe shaking hands with
them, introducing yourself, sending a message, adding them as a -- as a connection.
There's a calendar. We feel that we need to be able to integrate things like a virtual
career fair and webinars and other types of one-to-many types of communication. So, you
can see that we've -- I've highlighted a virtual career fair here on the calendar, and you
can get more information on that and RSVP to it.
Messaging is critical, both private and public messaging. This is an example of a java feed.
This is just mocked up; it's not what the final one is going to look like at all. But
once again, you're going to want to be able to filter things on the side here by the types
of companies and type -- job types and categories that you might be interested in.
One big key to talent communities is communities, so forums you might think of -- (inaudible)
-- or LinkedIn groups or Facebook pages. Those various types of popular social media, those
types of ideas need to happen in here because probably the way you're going to get somebody
to come back to a talent community is by providing interesting discussions, so that's key.
And then of course there's the profile. So, in our initial iteration, we're not going
to synchronize the profile with the MinnesotaWorks.net profile. But eventually there'll be a much
tighter integration between the two so that there'll be a single login.
And then as, of course, as I mentioned video-enablement so that you can have, you know, on-the-fly,
ad hoc video conversations with people. Maybe you do -- an employer could do a video interview
with you, you could post a video resume and introduce yourselves that way and other types
of video integration into the community.
So, now that we have our business requirements, get them costed out, we're going to get -- were
going to get back and get some more employer feedback. And these are the general questions
that we're going to ask. Basically, are you interested? We're going to show them the feature
set -- well, now that you've seen the feature set, kind of like what I was just showing
you, which are the interesting and less interesting and the less valuable features. And then an
indication of interest -- well, would you actually join this and would you recommend
it to your peers? So, that's where we are right now on that.
So, if you have any questions or suggestions, you can contact me directly using the contact
information you see right here, and thanks a lot for your participation.
(END)