Article: Hiring, the social way: Ranjan Sinha

Strategic HR

Hiring, the social way: Ranjan Sinha

Social networking sites are the new hunting ground for employers as well as job seekers
Hiring, the social way: Ranjan Sinha
 

No matter which platform(s) an organisation chooses, it is important to recognise that it takes time and consistent effort to reach impressive results

 

According to a People Matters-GTM 2011 survey, 66 percent of that participated in India intend to increase their social media based hiring (social hiring) budgets in the future. An increasing number of companies are prioritizing this spend over other media channels like newspapers and job boards, primarily because of improved response measurability for employer branding and ability to cost effectively reach a large number of passive high quality candidates.

Innovative companies have moved social hiring from being experimentation to being a regular spending. Social recruiting is gaining momentum because of the results it achieves. Genpact hires over 300 candidates per month using LinkedIn™ and MyParichay™ - a Facebook based enterprise hiring tool. These tools have allowed Genpact to digitize their employee referral program and integrate the power of LinkedIn and Facebook to tap into professional and social connections of its employees to find and hire quality candidates. Summit HR India uses Facebook career page with a fan base of 20,000 candidates to develop, manage a talent community and tap into its fans’ Facebook network to support hiring for clients like IBM, KPMG, and Marvel Construction.

The following facts inexorably transform how people find jobs and how employers find quality talent. Companies need to invest in tools that leverage these trends and need to train their recruiters on such tools to provide them with a competitive edge.

A) There are 40 million people in the prime hiring age on Facebook compared to 13 million on LinkedIn and less than 1 million active on job boards. People spend 70 percent of their Internet time on Facebook and most people log-in at least once a week.

B) In May this year, more people logged in to the Internet in India using a mobile device as compared to using their desktop or laptop.

C) LinkedIn remains the number one choice for company recruiters, but Facebook-based hiring solutions will be used more frequently as people increasingly share more professional information on their Facebook page (63 percent share their past and present employer; 52 percent share their job title) and applications like Branchout™, MyParichay™ and Beknown™ make job search related activities private on Facebook.

No matter which platform(s) an organization chooses to use for hiring, it is important to recognize that it takes time and consistent effort to reach impressive results. At the end, the results obtained on having trained recruiters and established a solid social hiring process, are worth the effort.
 

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Topics: Strategic HR, #Outsourcing, #HRIndustry

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