Recruiting Via Social Media

Companies are increasingly using sites like Twitter and Facebook to recruit the right candidates. Uber Cabs and Twitter India are hiring. But unless you follow the right people on Twitter or are on their mailing list, you’ll never know about it. These companies aren’t putting out advertisements on their websites or using traditional recruitment companies to find them the best candidates; but have been sending out mailers and tweets to customers or followers.

The team for Twitter India has posted tweets inviting candidates to apply for a job in Mumbai. It reads:”Team @TwitterIndia is looking for an associate partnership manager to join us. #ApplyNow.”Uber Cabs is looking for managers and has decided to go the non-traditional route to find them. In a mail to clients in Delhi, it said: “Are you fired up by the opportunity to move your city through data and analytics, world-class support and creative strategy? Come join us!” The company considers people who have used their service the ideal candidates since they are locals

Social recruitment has taken off with a bang over the past year.It’s a quick process that helps short-listing candidates while doing some research on them. About twenty lakh jobs are posted on Twitter every month and around 39% of all job seekers are on Twitter and 23% have leveraged Twitter in their job hunt. In addition to this, 45% of the Fortune 500 companies include links to social media on their career pages and 45% are hiring managers to use social media websites to check candidate backgrounds. The most popular social media or networking sites used for recruiting are LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and BranchOut.

And candidates, too, are getting smarter. They are engaging with brands, analysing activities on social media and then drawing out job offers from there.Companies like Aircel, Cognizant Technology Solutions, Expedia and HCL Technologies are conducting recruitment drives exclusively through social media platforms. Some of the other big names in the social recruitment space are Infosys and the Tatas, who use social HR as a tool to recruit prospective employees. Cosmetics brand L’Oreal launched its Facebook page ‘L’Oreal Careers’ and International Business Machines provides a ‘Smarter Workforce’ technology to help businesses capture and understand data from social media. HCL has saved over Rs 3Cr on recruitment costs by leveraging LinkedIn. One of the main reasons for the shift is that the dynamics of the traditional recruitment processes are changing.Social media has a pull factor. It helps engage prospective candidates and companies have to convince them to work with them.It helps get passionate and more committed candidates than someone who was pursued by an human resource manager.Businesses will continue to use social media to hire in future. It not only shortens the process of hiring but also saves cost for organisations. In addition to this, social profiles are representative, more or less,of what the candidate is and it’s good to do research on them before hiring.