Recruitment Futures & the Social Space
I recent read a post on 2010 predictions on Recruitment futurology, and whilst I generally leave the core of my day job out of my blog (I work in the recruitment industry) I felt the need to respond with some thought of my own.
I probably would have moved on to the next post if it wasn’t for a comment left suggesting social applications that can deliver “100,00 unique visitors, and conversion rates higher than 15 %”. My response would be to question the 85000 who did not convert and the time and technology wasted in parsing and processing those candidates.
That comment got me thinking about the detail, and potential power in social networking that’s yet to be harnessed by the recruitment industry.
Win friends and Influence people
In the U.K. (and I suspect globally) there is a shortage of women in Technology. Recruiters are asked, especially by the multinationals, to address the balance and find more women for them to recruit. Enter Women in technology – Part forum, part news site, part training ground, part job board and 100% targeted towards recruiting women in technology.
Personally I think it is a great idea, and a good example of creative thinking using established web mediums. Many people, both men and women have been disenfranchised by the approach of some hard sales recruitment agencies and the anonymity of the jobs boards. Word on the street spreads quickly, thanks to social media a successful solution to an old problem was born.
As powerful as Women in technology is, it still misses much much of the power in social media. It’s a niche player, albeit a good one but relies on the “obvious” facets of social technology. It presents a good idea in an easily accessible format and waits for word of mouth to spread. But could that word be spread even faster if we new who the influencers and experts were?
Crowd Sourcing
A few months ago I found myself searching for a new greener web host. I tried google and got 47,900, 000 hits. I clearly needed a better search and selection strategy. It was late, and most of my U.K. contacts would have been offline for the night, and whilst I was in no hurry to move to a new host I am stubborn and didn’t want to wait for help.
One Tweet and a few #tags later and I had 5 recommendations. One hour after that I had signed with a new provider and shut down for the night. I had just “Crowd Sourced” my first answer. Crowd sourcing is not a new phenomena, in fact we have been asking for recommendations, help and advice pretty much forever. Now we can get that help from complete strangers often faster than from friends and vendors. Salesforce.com see crowd sourcing as so integral to the future of customer support that they have integrated it into the ServiceCloud 2 platform where the likes of Dell are using it to resolve customer issues.
Recruiters should live and breath referrals. Building strong relationships with candidates allows you to ask if they have friends or colleagues with similar skills. It’s a tried and testing strategy: ask someone who’s skill set you know and trust to recommend people with similar attributes, but can social media go even further than crowd sourcing to fill vacancies?
Throwing me a sheep.
Most Facebook users have been poked a few times, some of the luckier ones may have even been subjected to a hail of sheep, but what does that tell us about them? It shows us who popular people are, the people the rest of the gang turn too when looking for a leader, someone to show them the way.
So what if we could use sheep to calculate popularity? What if we could throw all that cool data into an OLAP cube and mash it up with job, skills and interests? Then we could identify the most popular people within a given area of influence. Then we could focus our crowd sourcing or advertising strategies on these people and who knows where that would lead?
It would seem that there is a way to achieve all of this and more using data from social sites to make more informed decisions, source better candidates and to spend less time sifting through the unsuitable and unusable. It’s happening in sales and marketing and perhaps 2010 will see it making it’s way into the recruitment world.
Until then, anyone got a sheep?
Picture from Flickr gari.baldi’s photostream
