When Open Source And HR Collide|When Open Source And HR Collide
open-source-hr

When Open Source And HR Collide

Transparency. It’s a term we use a lot in HR. This idea of openness is often applied to areas like employer branding — sharing culture openly to help organizations more effectively draw talent that aligns with their culture and organizational values.
We’ve adopted this approach at Hootsuite, empowering our peeps around the world to “work out loud” and share their experience. Our culture is built on the foundation of a passionate, egoless team having fun and building something bigger than ourselves, free to find new ways to share and give back to our respective communities, including HR.
Open source comes to HR

We recently launched a new initiative within our HR team called Open Source HR (#HootHROS). The idea is to empower our HR team to share what we’re working on, what we’re learning and where we’re finding inspiration.

This initiative also includes bringing transparency into our HR projects by creating detailed case studies—e. g., a recent global Periscope branding campaign, #FollowTheSun—breaking down where ideas came from, how we pitched and executed, metrics and results, and what we got wrong. Yes, what we got wrong.

Sharing mistakes

That last part is really important, and highlights why transparency in HR matters. You might think a company like Hootsuite has advantages when it comes to Social HR, and you’d be right, but that doesn’t mean we don’t make mistakes.

Illuminating and sharing our mistakes in our case studies shows that, by nature, many social HR efforts are experimental. That means there’s always a degree of risk and unknown, but if you embrace that and see them as learning opportunities, you can help move your HR team forward, faster. Leading with humility is a core value at our organization. So being committed to sharing (no matter the outcome) aligns us.

Scaling open source HR

Without a doubt, open source technology has been an incredible boon for software development. Now, imagine the benefits if more organizations embraced open-source HR, sharing their hard-won best practices and successful initiatives in recruiting, talent development, onboarding and retention! We’re in, are you?