Earlier, most companies did not know where to look for a quality hire to fill a critical position. Their only available source was an active talent pool, which was mostly unavailable and unapproachable because the high-quality and high impact professionals were well looked after by their companies and there was no way to reach out to and influence this pool. Social professional networks changed all that.

It allowed companies to approach and influence talent, especially passive talent. Social professional networks helped break the communication barriers between a prospective candidate and a hiring organisation. It provides both with the opportunity to evaluate a match between a role and profile fitment more objectively.

There are a lot of passive candidates on such networks who are not necessarily looking for a job. But, a hiring organisation can use the network in various ways to influence this passive pool of talent, who use it as a source to stay current and relevant. Passive talent employ social professional networks as a real-time dashboard that provides information on employment and job market trends.

A hiring organisation, thus, has a greater chance of finding high-quality talent by tapping into the passive talent pool. “Quality is all about getting the best people to be successful for a particular job. Companies are influencing the passive quality talent pool through social professional networks,” said Irfan Abdulla, Director, Talent Solutions at LinkedIn India.

LinkedIn’s 2013 Global Recruiting Trends, a survey of 3,300 talent acquisition leaders across 19 countries, reveals that the top global recruiting trend is the increasing use of social professional networks for impacting quality of hire. The survey also reveals that improving the quality of hire is the top recruiting priority for Indian companies and is much higher (39 per cent) than the global average (30 per cent).

The importance of employer brand has slowly moved from something that organisations considered “nice-to-have” to becoming one of the most important channels for influencing quality hiring. About 84 per cent of organisations believe that employer brand has a significant impact on the ability to hire great talent. “Talent acquisition leaders feel that employer branding is among the top three competitive threats,” Abdulla said.

In the area of employer branding, the most significant trend has been the increasing importance of online social networks for promoting the employer brand. Compared to the previous year’s survey results, there has been an 11 per cent increase in the number of companies investing in online professional networks such as LinkedIn.

Traditionally, India has been an insights and data driven market and it is no surprise that compared to global recruiting organisations, Indian organisations rely much more heavily on data for recruiting. The top three ways in which recruiting organisations use data are — making hiring decisions (52 per cent), understanding the brand position (55 per cent), and measuring the employer brand impact (48 per cent).

“Companies, especially in India, are creatively looking at data to make intuitive decisions. For example if an IT company wants to set up a development centre in a new location, it will likely analyse viability through objective data such as skill and talent availability to assess viability,” he said.

Surveying new hires regularly gives a good basis for getting a qualitative review of the organisation’s talent brand. It is important that organisations use numerical metrics to measure the employer brand quantitatively over time and against competitors.

The survey also highlights that internal hiring and mobile recruiting are the other two hot recruiting trends. Internal hiring has emerged as one of the key sources to retain talent with 94 per cent of companies investing in it more or at least the same compared to 2012. Companies use internal hiring as a method to stop talent from leaving, develop them and improve productivity.

Lastly, while there is limited investment globally in mobile-friendly ways to find, manage and nurture talent, a large number of candidates use the mobile platform to learn about opportunities (59 per cent) and to apply for jobs (52 per cent). “Candidate behaviour is changing rapidly and the mobile recruiting space will likely pick up steam in the coming times. The space will likely see innovations to enhance the mobile experience for prospective candidates making it one of the major channels for candidates to research about jobs, evaluate opportunities and apply for them seamlessly,” Abdulla said.