Tit (f)or Tat

Recently, Graham Salisbury wrote a post over at HR Case Studies called “The (almost) Naked Truth about the Recruitment Profession.”  It’s a quite amusing post as Graham takes us on a tour of LinkedIn where he uncovered (ahem) the profiles of several recruitment consultants living and operating in the UK.  Cleavage figured prominently.  Very prominently.

Graham and I chattered back and forth about his post and he mentioned it might be interesting for me to see what if there were similar bits and pieces being displayed by US recruiters.  Challenge accepted.

So over the last week or so I’ve poked around on LinkedIn searching for recruiters, recruitment specialists, recruitment managers, talent acquisition specialists, and the like.  Nary a breast in sight.  I did see profile pictures that seemed to be taken at the beach and a few which appeared to have been snapped at a nightclub, but nothing overtly sexual.  Whew.

One thing I did discover though was a staggeringly high number of profiles without a picture at all.   Profiles with NO details.  And many that lacked even basic contact information like a phone number or an email address.  For a recruiter!

While this was still rolling around in my brain, I had the opportunity to join a Google hangout the other day hosted by Colleague Software where the discussion centered on storytelling.  A wide-ranging conversation, we we talked about things like using social media to tell the story about your organization/agency, how to distribute content and ultimately how to allow employees (recruiters in particular) to be “personalities.”  The Brand is you.  That sort of thing.

While there may be a number of reasons that individuals or organizations are hesitant to ‘be themselves’ online, we all pretty much agreed that fear is one of the primary reasons;  individuals are fearful of appearing stupid; organizations are terrified someone will say the wrong thing; companies want employees to button-down their online profiles in order to keep the competition on the other side of a locked door (‘don’t poach my employees!‘).  And HR ladies get their panties knotted up because they don’t understand these things and so implement policies in which they try to clamp down on any online activity.

Not that long ago a friend told me that her employer (Company X) informed staff members they were not to list Company X as their employer on LinkedIn.  Verboten.  I’ve spoken to a small business owner (in a very relational-type business) who saw no need to highlight his staff members on his company website and didn’t even see the need to list their names.

There’s a general consensus that we all like to do business with people we like.  Cleavage or not.

So maybe it’s okay to let the girls go free?

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image courtesy of zazzle