As mentioned yesterday, last week I had the pleasure of presenting a workshop on recruiting for call centres using Facebook and social networking for the Contact Professionals Alliance as part of their Institute for Contact Professionals.  Thanks to everyone who participated last week!

I am sharing some of the key content here. We started the day off with a short updated version of a presentation I gave last May to the CPA with the formidable presentation duo Dara Renton and Rob Reid called Social Networking and Call Centres. This is the updated presentation:

Note in particular links to the delightful recruitment videos from Akoha and Freshbooks.

Other exciting “social networking” style sites we looked at:

• Ernst & Young on Facebook (Facebook registration may be required)
• McDonald’s Careers (USA)
• McDonald’s Canada Career Opportunities
• Harvey’s Standard is Lame
• Cara Restaurant’s CaraTown
• Staples’ Staplesville (see especially “Roll Reader”)
• State Farm: Your Style of Success

Some additional issues discussed in class:

• business use of Facebook allowed in the Terms of Use
• setting up Pages on Facebook
• privacy concerns related to sending Facebook invitations to contacts previously collected outside Facebook
• whether contacts can be gathered in Facebook and added to a contacts database
• ways to keep existing employees happy and turn them into evangelists for your company
• deciding which demographics of potential employees are most likely to respond to Facebook and other types of social networking tools

During the day participants worked through the content of the workbook I created for the course. It was my first time creating a full workbook, and I was quite pleased with how it turned out. We have made that workbook available under a Creative Commons licence (30 pages, PDF):

Graphic on cover courtesy of LuMaxArt.

Questions about the course can be directed to me at conniecrosby@gmail.com. Thanks to the wonderful Elizabeth Winters of the CPA for inviting me to develop this workshop.

Have you been using social networking tools (Facebook, LinkedIn, blogs, podcasts and others) for recruiting?  I welcome you to share your story here with us!

Cheers,
Connie Crosby

In May I helped Dara Renton and Rob Reid give a presentation to the Contact Professionals Alliance (CPA), an association for call centre managers, on call centres and social networking tools. That talk was quite successful, and I am pleased that Elizabeth Winters of the CPA has invited me back to give a full-day seminar to their members on using social networking tools for call centre recruiting.

How to use existing social networks such as Facebook, MySpace and LinkedIn for recruiting is an interesting question, and call centres have their own particular needs. I am excited to be putting this seminar together. If you know someone who would like to join us please pass along the link to the full description. It is being held Wednesday, September 10th, 8:30 a.m. - 4:00 p.m. in Toronto (near the airport).

In the meantime, here are the slides from the presentation that I did with Dara and Rob:

I do thank Dara Renton for giving me this opportunity!