The importance of applying digital ethnographic research to HR
People don’t always think of HR when it comes to social listening, but it can be an important facet. Recently we have conducted several studies using our unique market research technique of social listening to help our clients attract talent and retain employees. Working with human resources and often marketing and communications (plus the vendor agencies who they use for promotion), we have been researching the voice of the employee in projects and ongoing monthly or weekly trend-watching.
In applying our digital ethnographic research to HR we:
- Develop and radically improve existing personas for employee segments – deepening personas far beyond generalities to show what channels they frequent, how they speak to one another, top topics, media they prefer, and personal obstacles and goals
- Carefully examine behavior – including how your employees have historically spoken of jobs, management, facilities, over-arching brands, and more
- Understand the impact of current and past employee behavior on recruitment
- Better give voice to publicly expressed trends in positivity and negativity
- Track changes through a crisis
Speaking of crisis, we’ve also been asked to monitor trends in job type by chatter, reviews, and more as they’ve changed throughout the pandemic. Sometimes this has revealed anxiety around safety, new issues with mental health, and illuminating comparisons with chatter from competitor employees.
In two specific industries, healthcare and higher education, we’ve revealed how radically different behavior from current and potential hires can track across months of COVID-19.
If you’re interested in learning more about our research, reach out to Dean Browell, PhD and we’ll customize a plan and approach that works for you: Dean @ discoverfeedback.com .