Introduction of Job Sites – Revolution in Recruitment

Introduction of JobSites – Revolution in Recruitment

Introduction of online job portals was one of the biggest innovations in the field of recruitment. It allowed recruiters to access a zillion number of resumes at just one click. To the jobseekers also, it provided access to hundreds of thousands of jobs with ease. All one has to do is select the relevant function, industry, location. It eliminated the need of transactional work, that is, maintaining manual databases in the form of spreadsheets for the employers. Moreover, it also reduced the candidates’ dependency on employment classifieds and snail mail, more neutrally, the postal services.

For once, this new technological advancement reduced the transactional work involved in the process of recruitment. However, these job portals also gave rise to a huge resume spam which is faced by the recruiters on a daily basis. Hunt through the heap of profiles for suitable ones becomes vague and purport less. Unfortunately, the focus of jobseekers on the salary negotiation is a major challenge for the task of recruiters. To avert this attention from salary to what the job/role entails in terms of responsibilities is a major task that recruiters as well as developers are trying to put their focus upon.

Major Players in the field of Social Recruitment

In the world of recruiting, there are candidates who are actively searching jobs, that is, the active job-seekers. And, there are those who aren’t actively seeing job – the passive job-seekers. Most of the users of LinkedIn, the business networking website were the recruiters who were mainly looking for the set of passive job-hunters. This realization led LinkedIn to target these recruiters and transform itself into a platform that poses huge competition to one the biggest revolutions in recruitment of its time – jobsites. LinkedIn, with a membership of more than a hundred million, has now become a one of its kind platform where both recruiters as well as job-seekers go for jobs.

In the US, Jobster and in India, it was Reffster. Before LinkedIn brought in this revolution, these start-ups also tried to leverage on the social tools but could not- may be due to scalability factor or due to lack of awareness. Besides, this the recruiters are also backing up on Facebook for making out ways to leverage it for social recruiting. These days companies – each one of them, has a Facebook page. Not only does this speaks about the companies work, culture, values etc., but it also simulates its careers page (similar to the one on the company website).

Developers are developing applications for the same – “BranchOut” for some time was also known as “LinkedIn of Facebook”.  Monster.com has “BeKnown” in its piggy. These were the applications to target freshers who do not yet have a LinkedIn profile. An understanding that we gauge from all these gimmicks that the social websites or start-ups have been playing is that, the major aim of social recruiting is by far the least focussed upon building engagement and open communication between the organization and the external pool of talent. However, it clearly is to just broadcast jobs by leveraging upon the social networking websites.

Building up Talent Forums may be the way!

Developing Talent Forums would help both companies as well as candidates to engage on a better level than what can be called as “first time attractions”. Unlike regular recruiting ways, Talent forums would help companies to focus on people who are positively pre-disposed towards their organization. And from this set of people they can chose the people with relevant skills. Thus, building a successful talent forum would require efforts like that of company’s social media marketing team.

So, to build up a talent forum, instead of just focusing upon broadcasting the jobs, the recruiters should try and utilize this platform by creating engagement right at this stage. Developing forums that foster open communication between the employers and the external talent pool on these networking websites would facilitate this.

This way, instead of targeting just the people with the right skill-set, the recruiters can gauge an idea of who among these are the people interested in their company or vice-versa. The idea is to target the set of people with relevant skills as well as a positive inclination towards the company.

The surge of such a talent community would require unconditional support from the leadership to foster openness and transparency. Rather than trying to poach candidates, it is necessary that recruiters focus on attracting the right talent pool and building a bond with them. Recruiters should stop being defensive about their fall-outs and discuss them openly with the talent pool.

Click here for government certification in Human Resources