The talent war just got tougher! In this age of heightened competition to hire the right talent, there seems to be only one way to rule the turf― “own it.”

Since social media provides a cost-effective channel to reach a large pool of talent across the globe it brings all hiring organizations, big and small, to a level playing field. The next evolution of hiring will see a scenario where every employable professional (whether actively looking for a job or otherwise) is a prospective candidate, and recruitment is not constrained by geography and employment status. The key differentiator for a hiring organization will be the ability to attract talent from a large and “borderless” talent pool. In such a situation, a singular question continues to puzzle every recruiter, “where lies my talent pool and how can I attract them before some else does?”

Irrespective of the nature of hiring needs, the recruiter’s perennial challenge remains― finding the right talent, at the right time. Unfortunately, even in this era of information abundance recruiters find it difficult to match talent skills with job requirements, often leading to expensive ‘wrong hires’ or inordinate delays. Aggravating the challenge, the global economic situation has triggered a remarkable shift in the level of specialization that job profiles demand. By raising the bar for specialization, hiring organizations are increasingly finding it difficult to match the skills available in the market with the demands of the job. Mr. Irfan Abdulla, Director of Hiring Solutions, at LinkedIn spoke to People Matters about the macro-hiring trends in the market place. “The challenge for most organizations does not end with recruiting for quality; the game is slowly shifting toward recruiting quality at scale.”

LinkedIn launched the “LinkedIn Recruiter” service earlier this year to empower hiring organizations with the power of information to tap and source talent from its base of 175 million users globally. The LinkedIn Recruiter is the professional networking company’s premium recruiting service that not only opens up a recruiter’s access to skilled talent across the globe, but also offers an organization to target hiring efforts to the deserving talent pool who are not actively looking out. One of the largest bio-chemical research and development companies in India has migrated almost their entire hiring process to the LinkedIn Recruiter platform. “The bio-chemical R&D industry,” Irfan says, “is a very specialized industry requiring niche skills. The organization leverages the LinkedIn Recruiter platform to actively drive their employment value proposition to both active candidates who are looking for a job as well as passive candidates. Without the right medium and messaging, it is exceptionally difficult to convert a passive candidate to an active candidate. Tapping the passive talent pool through the LinkedIn Recruiter platform has been this organization’s biggest source of ROI.”

So how does this work?

When a user logs in to his/her LinkedIn profile, the interface provides for a rolling list of “hot jobs” in the user’s industry. The interface has been designed keeping in mind a passive candidate’s propensity to ‘test the waters.’ An analysis of usage behavior reveals that after a few occurrences of passive viewing, a user is typically driven to click on the postings to assess, what Irfan terms, “an individual’s employability.” With the right targeted messaging at the right time, it is possible to covert passive candidates to active candidates. It is this kind of subtle messaging that forms the basis of the LinkedIn Recruiter platform. The platform has the ability to intelligently detect prospects from the passive candidate pool and facilitate the push needed to facilitate the conversion. What an individual sees on his page is fundamentally driven by his interests, skills, and employability profile. In addition to opening up access to the complete database of professionals across all geographies, the Recruiter platform tracks trends and macro-economic skill profiles. For example, a typical question for a hiring organization can be, “what is the best city in India to hire programmers with Unix skills?” Through the LinkedIn Recruiter platform, an organization can make informed decisions about talent pool locations to target, and thereby avoid unnecessary and costly delays.

The future

As more and more organizations feel the heat of hiring ‘quality for scale,’ traditional best-practice methodologies will no longer remain effective in the new talent environment. Intelligent analytics and inventive messaging will constitute the key differentiator for recruiting organizations. As social media continues to influence and drive talent market trends, the LinkedIn Recruiter platform provides a peek into how social media recruiting will evolve in the years to come.