social hiring

THE ROLE OF SOCIAL MEDIA IN

FINDING AND HIRING GREAT

PEOPLE

WHAT EVERY EXECUTIVE NEEDS TO KNOW ABOUT TALENT

SOURCING AND HIRING TO STAY COMPETITIVE

By

Ranjan Sinha

THE ROLE OF SOCIAL MEDIA IN FINDING AND HIRING GREAT PEOPLE

WHAT EVERY EXECUTIVE NEEDS TO KNOW ABOUT TALENT SOURCING AND HIRING TO STAY COMPETITIVE

1) Social Hiring is fast becoming the leading source for talent, supplanting

consultants and job boards. Most leads for talent will come from Extended

Referrals as your referral leads will extend beyond your employees to include

your company’s alumnus, your employees’ and your alumni’s “extended social

network” expanding the reach of your company by 100X.

2) Majority of passive job seekers are finding jobs through Social Hiring route vs.

job boards and consultants combined. In a recent survey of 2,045 candidates

63% of passive job seekers found jobs through Social Hiring – Social Referrals

and Alumni Referrals - while 42% of active job seekers find jobs through Social

Hiring.

3) Social Hiring Applications (SHAs) will become the platform of choice for

candidates passively looking for a job as SHAs provide higher privacy to

candidates vs. posting resumes on job boards. Candidates will become more

empowered “customers”. She/he will have increased access to jobs and more

information on those jobs, salary and benefits.

4) Facebook will become the dominant talent sourcing social media platform

overtaking LinkedIn by end of 2012. It is 4X larger than LinkedIn and growing

100% faster. Social Hiring Applications developed on Facebook provide

professional business look and feel, provide privacy and block off personal

section of Facebook i.e. your vacation pictures when using the SHAs.

5) Social Hiring Applications (SHAs) (built on social media platforms) are the most

efficient (submission per fill) and cost effective channel for generating talent



leads, seeking and engaging with your talent community in a private and

secure fashion.

6) Job boards will have to reinvent themselves to define value for their

customers, both in terms of quality and financial cost. Recruitment companies

will have to become more quality focused versus throwing resumes at clients

hoping some will stick.

7) Companies that empower their employees (through social hiring technology

and exciting referral marketing programs and rewards) will provide significant

advantage to their HR department to win the war for talent.

8) Talent Acquisition Managers will talk about recruitment becoming a profit

center vs. cost center as Social Hiring Technology will generate significant

saving in hiring costs in terms of reduced consultant fees, newspaper

advertisement costs and job board posting and log -in charges

9) Companies will start getting rated by their candidate community about their

hiring process and culture compelling them to manage their social media brand.

They will need to work with specialist companies who can help them manage

their social media brand and traffic.

10) Smaller companies will have a more level playing field as they will not be

limited by smaller employee base for referrals as they can have same access to

extended referral networks.



EVOLUTION OF CANDIDATE SOURCING AND HIRING

Until 1995 -Recruitment was relatively an inefficient market where companies

and candidates had limited access to complete market information (Job openings

and candidates). Candidates relied on their connectivity with one or two recruiters

and communicated primarily over faxes and postal mail for sharing resumes.

Recruiters maintained rolodexes of candidates and having a Rolodex of 300 resumes

was considered “large”. Companies ran print ads and waited for resumes to come

over postal mail and faxes. Real time updating of jobs and resumes was impossible.

1995 – 2005- Internet, browser and job boards commoditized access to talent

and job opening information as companies and candidates uploaded job and CVs on

paid job boards or free sites like Craigslist. The market became more efficient as

candidates and recruiters could access job and candidate information in real time

and connect in real time using cell phones and email.

While technology evolved in this time period, the approach to sourcing and hiring

stayed pretty much the same - recruiters relying on active candidates that were

either uploading their CVs on job boards or hoping for candidates to respond to

online job postings or print ads and candidates hoping to get an email or call from a

recruiter who searched his resume on a job board vs. a rolodex

2005 and the 2010 - The emergence of Web 2.0 created technology that

started revolutionizing how people created and shared information across wiki

networks to meet their business and social research needs anytime anywhere. The



participants of the network produced/contributed information that was consumed

by other participants of the network for mutual benefit. Based on this simple

principle Wikipedia revolutionized the concept of encyclopedia. LinkedIn started as

a business networking platform that over couple of years morphed into a powerful

tool for recruiters to connect with passive candidates and do effective recruitment

research to find name and titles.

THE FUTURE IS SOCIAL HIRING.

Employee Referral is a powerful demonstration of “social hiring” concept where

employers are leveraging the social network of employees to find high quality

talent. Social Hiring is the natural progression of sourcing and hiring where majority

of people will find jobs by using their social networks of friends and colleagues and

their friends and their friends to get introduced to employers. Employers will find

talent through leads being generated by members of their employees’ and alumni’s’

social media network for mutual benefit. This phenomenon of extended referrals is

going to

gather

significant

steam as

Social Hiring

Applications

(SHAs) like

mYParichay

(built on top of Facebook) will empower employees, individuals and recruiters to



interact in total privacy on Facebook. Business/workflow capabilities will allow

recruiters to use it as a powerful business tool for sourcing, processing candidates

and hiring. One of India’s largest IT/ITES Company has 16,000 of their employees on

this Social Hiring platform. In 9 months, the employees have referred 84,000

candidates from their social network. Now these 84,000 candidates are referring

candidates for a reward using the platform expanding the reach for candidates by

over 5X in 9 months.

In a recent survey of companies in India, 85% of them use employee referral

programs to find people; one fourth of them fill more than 30% of their jobs through

employee referrals; referred employees are significantly better in quality than

candidates sourced through job boards or consultants; and 70% plan to step up their

investment in Social Hiring and Social Hiring tools.

IGNORE FACEBOOK AT YOUR OWN PERIL

Facebook dominates social media in India, in terms of network members, reach,



richness of features, and openness of platform for software developers and is Free.

These attributes have made Facebook the platform of choice for software

developers who are building 8X more business applications on Facebook than

LinkedIn. Facebook is becoming the platform of choice for Social Hiring applications.

Facebook has more 4X more users than LinkedIn, it is growing faster and has an

open rich architecture and sophisticated interface for “social marketing” than

LinkedIn. On an average, people between the age of 18-34 spend more time on

Facebook than LinkedIn and log in 300 days in a year compared to 56 days on

LinkedIn in a year.

LinkedIn is also finding it hard to attract application developers to write quality

applications and tools like BranchOut that are replication professional networking

on Facebook put more pressure on LinkedIn. In a May 2011 survey of 800 US

companies, more employee referrals came from Facebook than Linked In.

Social Hiring Applications (SHAs) applications are optimized for referral based

sourcing and hiring. Some of the key features that transform the underlying

Facebook into a powerful business tool are:

a) Privacy - the ability for individuals to communicate, refer and get referred by

their friends in complete private, secure and business professional fashion.

Ability to find jobs without posting your resume on a job board.

b) Mutual Benefit and Good Karma - You help people find jobs and get cash

compensation.

c) Community Feedback - Ability to get valuable information about the job,

company and candidate from a trusted talent community.



d) Professional Information - Feature to capture business and professional

information to help match people and jobs. Coupled with a powerful relevance

algorithm to filter candidates by relevance and availability. Search for jobs across

companies, receive inside information about companies and jobs.

e) Simple but effective recruiter backend for process management - It allows HR to

post and manage jobs and referral awards through a simple but powerful web

backend.

SOCIAL MEDIA APPLICATION CATEGORIES

There are four classes of applications being developed or available in the

marketplace that leverage the Facebook network. I have categorized them based

on their innovation to leverage the network and ability to transform candidate

sourcing and hiring in India

a) Social Hiring Applications - e.g. myParichay These are the most powerful and

impactful category of applications that create a new mechanism for finding

people and jobs by leveraging extended network and will be accretive to a

company’s current tools. They have the ability to rapidly engage with a very

large relevant network in a cost effective fashion to transform candidate sourcing

just like job boards did 10 years ago. They are feature rich and incorporate most

of the features of the other product categories.



b) Job Board with Facebook Skin - CareerBuilder has launched an application that

allows employees to post jobs on the wall of their friends. It is a rudimentary

application that can broadcast jobs on walls of friends and colleagues. Facebook

users have been reluctant to adopt such applications that start “spamming” their

wall with job postings.

c) Business Networking Platforms - BranchOut, These applications are trying to

create a LinkedIn within Facebook, i.e. network within a network. The ability of

such applications to replace LinkedIn is still unclear. Their efficacy as a social

hiring platform is perhaps better than category (b), but fall significantly short of

Social Hiring Applications

d) Job Boards on Facebook – Beknown from Monster, have created a Facebook

application that allows users to use Monster through their Facebook account. It

is not a social hiring tool but provides access to Monster while you are logged

into Facebook, eliminating the need to log into Monster in a separate window.



Ranjan Sinha has founded and directed number of award winning internet

companies and service companies in the area of human

resources in India and the USA. Ranjan founded Summit HR

with the vision of helping CEOs and their teams win the war

for talent. Summit HR is recognized as the Top HR Outsourcing

Company by The Wall Street Journal®, International

Association of Outsourcing Professionals, The Gartner Group

and Fortune® magazine.

Ranjan was selected as the “HR Outsourcing Superstar’ numerous times by HR

Outsourcing Today magazine for his pioneering contributions to the HR Outsourcing

industry in the US and India. He is a frequent speaker on various industry panels on

Social Media in HR, Talent Management, Hiring Risk Management and HR

Outsourcing. He is widely quoted in leading business newspapers and magazines. He

writes column for The Financial Express, has written numerous articles on use of

psychometric tools for improved hiring and Six Sigma applications in HR and Talent

Supply Chain Management.

Ranjan serves on the board of Summit HR Worldwide Inc., Global Talent

Management Inc. and Greenwich Capital Venture Corporation and is an advisor to

Peoplestrong.

Ranjan “commutes” between India and California He is a member of the Young

Presidents Organization (YPO) Northern California Chapter.

Ranjan is currently pursuing a Ph.D degree in industrial psychology from University

of Utrecht, Netherlands. Ranjan has a Masters Degree from The Wharton School of

Business and a MBA from the Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore. He has a

B. Tech from the Indian Institute of Technology, Roorkee.