SEMA News—June 2014

INTERNET
By Joe Dysart

Recruiting Via the Web

Even Easier With a New Crop of Tools

With technology’s relentless evolution, businesses have a fresh crop of digital tools that they can use to pinpoint hot recruiting prospects in cyberspace and grab la crème de la crème before they get away. Social-media sniffers, mobilized career websites and video interviewing have all received major upgrades in the past year, making it even easier for businesses to snag prime candidates.

Of the lot, social media is especially hot, with 94% of businesses surveyed saying that they’re currently using the medium to recruit, according to a July 2013 Jobvite Social Recruiting study.

“Social recruiting provides a way to quickly and easily find those ‘under the radar’ candidates—people who might not be actively looking for a role but who are a perfect fit for open positions at your company,” said Dan Finnigan, president and CEO of Jobvite.

“Fast-growing companies can’t wait for a position to open to do individual candidate searches. They need to hire constantly to grow. That means they need to reach passive candidates, keep an eye on their recruiting pipeline and constantly engage potential hires—which is precisely what Jobvite enables them to do.”

Not surprisingly, Facebook and Twitter are the main channels recruiters are using to showcase employer career opportunities, according to Jobvite. All told, 65% of recruiters surveyed are using Facebook and 47% are using Twitter to reach out on the web for prospects. Moreover, recruiters say that monitoring social media also comes in handy after they’ve made initial contacts with candidates. For example, 18% are using Twitter to vet potential recruits after the interview process, and 25% are using Facebook for the same purpose.

There are other key findings of the survey that are also of interest:

• One in three recruiters reported that social-media recruiting has improved both the quantity and quality of candidates they’re fielding.
• Referrals via social media represent the highest quality source of candidates, according to 64% of recruiters using social media.
• About 43% of employees sourced from referrals or company career pages—many of which have been rendered mobile-friendly during the past year—stay longer than three years on the job, while only 14% of job-board hires stay longer than three years.

Given that everyone and his grandmother seem to be walking around with smartphones these days, many businesses have also been rushing to make their website career pages mobile-friendly.

“Companies are losing potential candidates simply because they are not equipped to receive candidate submissions from mobile devices,” said Mike Pauletich, a vice president at Jibe.

Essentially, Jibe’s mobile job search and apply solutions rectify the problem quickly, as does a similar solution from iMomentous. The beauty of both solutions is that their mobile-friendly career sites are designed to interface seamlessly with most popular recruiting software—including much of the recruiting software that businesses are already using on their PCs or via other services.

More employers are also saving valuable time in the recruiting process by leaning on video interviewing services that enable them to get their first look at candidates over smartphones, tablets or desktop PCs. For example, businesses can conduct live video interviews with candidates on virtually any computerized device using online service Interview4. Or they can leave questions for a candidate, which the candidate then answers with video responses that can be reviewed at the business’s leisure.

Pricing starts at $15 per interview using Interview4, with volume discounts available. Similar video solutions are available from Montage, InterviewStream, Jobvite and Zoom.

“Business communications are typically conveyed by e-mail or printed messages, and they typically lack any kind of personal touch,” said Steve Throneberry, InterviewStream’s chief revenue officer. “ivMessage makes it possible to humanize such messages.”

Here’s a closer look at some of the aforementioned tools:

Jobvite Engage: Jobvite Engage allows recruiters to use social media to tap into and collect information on “passive job candidates” or candidates who may not be looking for a job but are of prime interest to growing businesses.

Essentially, the software collects info on prospects from all over the Internet, including candidates’ Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn profiles as well as anything they’ve posted on blogs and personal websites. The solution then collates all this info and creates a “talent profile” on each candidate, which can be referred to time and again. All data is stored in the same format and is updated in real time, saving businesses the trouble of having to visit individual social-media networks to update the profiles they’ve already captured on potential candidates.

Jobvite Engage also comes with a recruitment advertising tool, which enables businesses to create messages that are customized for the tone and feel of each social network. Using the tool, they can create recruiting messages on LinkedIn, for example, that would be much different from the relatively informal messages they’d want to post on Facebook.

iMomentous Mobile Talent Engagement Platform: This recruitment tool enables businesses to quickly create mobile career websites so they can reach out to the mobile phones of prospects. The resulting mobile websites offer candidates the convenience of applying for jobs by using their profiles on Facebook or LinkedIn and then uploading resumes that are stored on Dropbox or Google Drive.

iMomentous also took great pains to enable its mobile websites to integrate seamlessly with other recruitment packages that businesses may already be using, including Taleo, Success Factors, PeopleSoft, Cornerstone, Silk Road and Kinexa. In addition, the service enables a business to analyze the candidates’ use of its iMomentous website so that the business can find what’s working design-wise on the site and what needs to be improved.

Jibe Apply App: Similar to iMomentous, Jibe creates and hosts mobile recruitment sites for businesses. All Jibe mobile career sites feature large, easy-to-tap buttons and an easy signup process that enables job applicants to apply via mobile phone, and résumés can be uploaded via Google Docs, LinkedIn or Dropbox.

Like iMomentous, Jibe Apply App serves as a business’s mobile face to the world and is designed to interface with a business’s already-existing internal recruitment software.

Joe Dysart is an Internet speaker and business consultant based in Manhattan, New York.
Voice: 646-233-4089
E-mail: joe@joedysart.com
Web: www.joedysart.com