This post started as one on the Social Media Recruiting Summit but went and did it's own thing. I'll cover the summit on my next post........

On Monday I stepped out of my daily consulting activities which revolve around Applicant Tracking and SAP and spent the day listening and talking to people about sourcing candidates through social media. So Alice here headed down to the Microsoft campus in Redmond and jumped head first down the rabbit hole that is the Social Media Recruiting Summit (run by ERE).

I survived and may have come out of it smarter. I'm going to give some main findings over the next two blogs, but you can also watch the recorded videos at http://socialrecruitingsummit.com/sea2010/agenda/. If you like them and want to tweet about them don't forget to use #socialrecruiting tag.

Everybody is learning social media together and though some recruiting successes are emerging, it's not yet reached its true potential, and is not something has had a huge measurable impact on traditional recruiting metrics. More on metrics and stuff in my next blog post. Today is about where it all starts: Your defining mission, your people, your workplace.

Your employees are your best advocates, and have much greater credibility than a carefully crafted message that was created by marketing. To that end get your own house in order as much as possible before spreading the word to the outside world.

Richard Cho from Facebook used Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs to illustrate why we need an emotional connection to our work and workplace (the top two levels of the pyramid) after we get everything else. Richard mentioned sex quite a lot. Hopefully he doesn't work too long hours at Facebook.

A lot of my current reading and thinking leads me down the same path (not about sex, but the company purpose stuff). I've been reading "Start with Why" by Simon Sinek. The premise of his book (and he probably wouldn't disagree if you called it a movement) is that the reason why you do what you do, your beliefs, sends a stronger message to your audience than product details and pricing.

This is visualized through the Golden Circle. You start with a clear reason for why you were doing something, translate it into how you achieve it, and in turn translate what you actually do. I believe in what Sinek says. I think it's not a marketing message but something you should figure out before you start any new company, product, hire, or any major decision.

For Facebook the Why would be "We want to connect people", the How might be "We let people express themselves and share news, connect using the internet" (I'm sure FB would have a better “How” defined than that). So that sounds exciting. What's the "What"? Well Facebook has a hugely successful social networking site.

Having the biggest social networking site on the planet with 500M+ users is cool and all but "Connecting people" is still a stronger message and evokes the kind of emotions in the workplace that get people through 16 hour workdays and weekends. When you have such a strong core raison d'être, your external audience (your customers, candidates) have the same beliefs as your employees. I think in the case of Facebook they're not there yet. Facebook doesn't itself evoke strong emotions other than privacy concerns. The site is cool, but I use it and don't have an emotional connection. Being a recent convert to Apple fanboy-dom, I'd say Apple builds a stronger connection. Other brands would be Southwest Airlines, and in the HR world I'd say Workday. Workday are not just a company. They're a movement.

Give your employees some basic guidelines (not a canned message to repeat), some tools, and a reason to work at your company beyond money, and they'll be your best mouthpieces. And their friends are probably the kind of people you want to hire.