Social Networks and Corporate Recruiting: Leveraging Employee Referrals to Find New Talent
The advent of social networking sites like MySpace, Facebook and Linked In have been a boon to recruiters and human resources (HR) professionals. Social networks represent a vast and easily-accessible source of job candidates whose professional credentials and personal information are readily available to determine whether or not they may be potential new hires. While the effectiveness of recruiters and HR professionals to source new talent is debatable, I contend that there is nobody more qualified than employees at a company to identify prospective new employees who may bring value to an organization. A number of forward-thinking companies have realized that the best way to find “right fit job candidates” is to mine the social networking contacts of their existing employees. To that end, Appirio and Jobvite, two San Francisco, CA-based start ups, developed software platforms that allow their clients to link employee social networks and candidate sourcing solutions to employee referral programs.
A hiring company that uses Appirio’s application, ask its employees who belong to Facebook to add the application to their personal pages. When new jobs are available, Appirio’s matching engine searches the Facebook pages of an employee’s friends and uses job titles, geography and key words to determine which friends might be a good fit for the available positions. Once identified, a friend receives a referral from the employee inviting him/her to apply for the job (if interested). If the “friend” is ultimately hired, Appirio’s application allows the company to identify which employee found the match and offer a referral bonus. To address privacy concerns, the list of possible matches is available to only to friends/employees—not the hiring company or Appirio.
Jobvite offers a similar service but in addition to Facebook, it also searches and mines friend/contact information from Linked In and Twitter. And, anyone who receives a Jobvite referral can also search his/her own network to identify suitable job candidates and pass it along again. Jobvite recipients who are hired can be tracked to the original sender, so that the employee can receive a referral bonus—even if the Jobvite referral has been passed from one inbox to another up to six times.
Despite the explosion of job boards, social networking sites and social media tools like Twitter, employee referrals are still the most effective way for jobseekers to find new jobs. The Appirio and Jobvite solutions represent a novel way to leverage employee relationships to match jobseekers with prospective new employers. However, in this job market, I wouldn’t sit around and wait to receive an Appirio or Jobvite invitation from one of your social networking friends. Instead, I recommend that you put your social networking sites to good use and tell everyone you know that you are actively seeking employment. Because at the end of the day finding a new job is all about networking!
Until next time...
Good luck and Good Job Hunting!!!!!!!!!!
