White Paper on Social Hiring -WHAT EVERY EXECUTIVE NEEDS TO KNOW ABOUT TALENT SOURCING AND HIRING TO STAY COMPETITIVE

1. THE ROLE OF SOCIAL MEDIA IN
FINDING AND HIRING GREAT
PEOPLE
WHAT EVERY EXECUTIVE NEEDS TO KNOW ABOUT TALENT
SOURCING AND HIRING TO STAY COMPETITIVE
By
Ranjan Sinha

2. THE ROLE OF SOCIAL MEDIA IN FINDING AND HIRING GREAT PEOPLE
1) Social Hiring is fast becoming the leading source for talent, supplanting
consultants and job boards. Most leads for talent will come from Extended
Referrals as your referral leads will extend beyond your employees to include
your company’s alumnus, your employees’ and your alumni’s “extended social
network” expanding the reach of your company by 100X.
2) Majority of passive job seekers are finding jobs through Social Hiring route vs.
job boards and consultants combined. In a recent survey of 2,045 candidates
63% of passive job seekers found jobs through Social Hiring – Social Referrals
and Alumni Referrals - while 42% of active job seekers find jobs through Social
Hiring.
3) Social Hiring Applications (SHAs) will become the platform of choice for
candidates passively looking for a job as SHAs provide higher privacy to
candidates vs. posting resumes on job boards. Candidates will become more
empowered “customers”. She/he will have increased access to jobs and more
information on those jobs, salary and benefits.
4) Facebook will become the dominant talent sourcing social media platform
overtaking LinkedIn by end of 2012. It is 4X larger than LinkedIn and growing
100% faster. Social Hiring Applications developed on Facebook provide
professional business look and feel, provide privacy and block off personal
section of Facebook i.e. your vacation pictures when using the SHAs.
5) Social Hiring Applications (SHAs) (built on social media platforms) are the most
efficient (submission per fill) and cost effective channel for generating talent
WHAT EVERY EXECUTIVE NEEDS TO KNOW ABOUT TALENT SOURCING AND HIRING TO STAY COMPETITIVE

3. THE ROLE OF SOCIAL MEDIA IN FINDING AND HIRING GREAT PEOPLE
leads, seeking and engaging with your talent community in a private and
secure fashion.
6) Job boards will have to reinvent themselves to define value for their
customers, both in terms of quality and financial cost. Recruitment companies
will have to become more quality focused versus throwing resumes at clients
hoping some will stick.
7) Companies that empower their employees (through social hiring technology
and exciting referral marketing programs and rewards) will provide significant
advantage to their HR department to win the war for talent.
8) Talent Acquisition Managers will talk about recruitment becoming a profit
center vs. cost center as Social Hiring Technology will generate significant
saving in hiring costs in terms of reduced consultant fees, newspaper
advertisement costs and job board posting and log -in charges
9) Companies will start getting rated by their candidate community about their
hiring process and culture compelling them to manage their social media brand.
They will need to work with specialist companies who can help them manage
their social media brand and traffic.
10) Smaller companies will have a more level playing field as they will not be
limited by smaller employee base for referrals as they can have same access to
extended referral networks.
WHAT EVERY EXECUTIVE NEEDS TO KNOW ABOUT TALENT SOURCING AND HIRING TO STAY COMPETITIVE

4. THE ROLE OF SOCIAL MEDIA IN FINDING AND HIRING GREAT PEOPLE
EVOLUTION OF CANDIDATE SOURCING AND HIRING
Until 1995 -Recruitment was relatively an inefficient market where companies
and candidates had limited access to complete market information (Job openings
and candidates). Candidates relied on their connectivity with one or two recruiters
and communicated primarily over faxes and postal mail for sharing resumes.
Recruiters maintained rolodexes of candidates and having a Rolodex of 300 resumes
was considered “large”. Companies ran print ads and waited for resumes to come
over postal mail and faxes. Real time updating of jobs and resumes was impossible.
1995 – 2005- Internet, browser and job boards commoditized access to talent
and job opening information as companies and candidates uploaded job and CVs on
paid job boards or free sites like Craigslist. The market became more efficient as
candidates and recruiters could access job and candidate information in real time
and connect in real time using cell phones and email.
While technology evolved in this time period, the approach to sourcing and hiring
stayed pretty much the same - recruiters relying on active candidates that were
either uploading their CVs on job boards or hoping for candidates to respond to
online job postings or print ads and candidates hoping to get an email or call from a
recruiter who searched his resume on a job board vs. a rolodex
2005 and the 2010 - The emergence of Web 2.0 created technology that
started revolutionizing how people created and shared information across wiki
networks to meet their business and social research needs anytime anywhere. The
WHAT EVERY EXECUTIVE NEEDS TO KNOW ABOUT TALENT SOURCING AND HIRING TO STAY COMPETITIVE

5. THE ROLE OF SOCIAL MEDIA IN FINDING AND HIRING GREAT PEOPLE
participants of the network produced/contributed information that was consumed
by other participants of the network for mutual benefit. Based on this simple
principle Wikipedia revolutionized the concept of encyclopedia. LinkedIn started as
a business networking platform that over couple of years morphed into a powerful
tool for recruiters to connect with passive candidates and do effective recruitment
research to find name and titles.
THE FUTURE IS SOCIAL HIRING.
Employee Referral is a powerful demonstration of “social hiring” concept where
employers are leveraging the social network of employees to find high quality
talent. Social Hiring is the natural progression of sourcing and hiring where majority
of people will find jobs by using their social networks of friends and colleagues and
their friends and their friends to get introduced to employers. Employers will find
talent through leads being generated by members of their employees’ and alumni’s’
social media network for mutual benefit. This phenomenon of extended referrals is
going to
gather
significant
steam as
Social Hiring
Applications
(SHAs) like
mYParichay
(built on top of Facebook) will empower employees, individuals and recruiters to
WHAT EVERY EXECUTIVE NEEDS TO KNOW ABOUT TALENT SOURCING AND HIRING TO STAY COMPETITIVE

6. THE ROLE OF SOCIAL MEDIA IN FINDING AND HIRING GREAT PEOPLE
interact in total privacy on Facebook. Business/workflow capabilities will allow
recruiters to use it as a powerful business tool for sourcing, processing candidates
and hiring. One of India’s largest IT/ITES Company has 16,000 of their employees on
this Social Hiring platform. In 9 months, the employees have referred 84,000
candidates from their social network. Now these 84,000 candidates are referring
candidates for a reward using the platform expanding the reach for candidates by
over 5X in 9 months.
In a recent survey of companies in India, 85% of them use employee referral
programs to find people; one fourth of them fill more than 30% of their jobs through
employee referrals; referred employees are significantly better in quality than
candidates sourced through job boards or consultants; and 70% plan to step up their
investment in Social Hiring and Social Hiring tools.
IGNORE FACEBOOK AT YOUR OWN PERIL
Facebook dominates social media in India, in terms of network members, reach,
WHAT EVERY EXECUTIVE NEEDS TO KNOW ABOUT TALENT SOURCING AND HIRING TO STAY COMPETITIVE

7. THE ROLE OF SOCIAL MEDIA IN FINDING AND HIRING GREAT PEOPLE
richness of features, and openness of platform for software developers and is Free.
These attributes have made Facebook the platform of choice for software
developers who are building 8X more business applications on Facebook than
LinkedIn. Facebook is becoming the platform of choice for Social Hiring applications.
Facebook has more 4X more users than LinkedIn, it is growing faster and has an
open rich architecture and sophisticated interface for “social marketing” than
LinkedIn. On an average, people between the age of 18-34 spend more time on
Facebook than LinkedIn and log in 300 days in a year compared to 56 days on
LinkedIn in a year.
LinkedIn is also finding it hard to attract application developers to write quality
applications and tools like BranchOut that are replication professional networking
on Facebook put more pressure on LinkedIn. In a May 2011 survey of 800 US
companies, more employee referrals came from Facebook than Linked In.
Social Hiring Applications (SHAs) applications are optimized for referral based
sourcing and hiring. Some of the key features that transform the underlying
Facebook into a powerful business tool are:
a) Privacy - the ability for individuals to communicate, refer and get referred by
their friends in complete private, secure and business professional fashion.
Ability to find jobs without posting your resume on a job board.
b) Mutual Benefit and Good Karma - You help people find jobs and get cash
compensation.
c) Community Feedback - Ability to get valuable information about the job,
company and candidate from a trusted talent community.
WHAT EVERY EXECUTIVE NEEDS TO KNOW ABOUT TALENT SOURCING AND HIRING TO STAY COMPETITIVE

8. THE ROLE OF SOCIAL MEDIA IN FINDING AND HIRING GREAT PEOPLE
d) Professional Information - Feature to capture business and professional
information to help match people and jobs. Coupled with a powerful relevance
algorithm to filter candidates by relevance and availability. Search for jobs across
companies, receive inside information about companies and jobs.
e) Simple but effective recruiter backend for process management - It allows HR to
post and manage jobs and referral awards through a simple but powerful web
backend.
SOCIAL MEDIA APPLICATION CATEGORIES
There are four classes of applications being developed or available in the
marketplace that leverage the Facebook network. I have categorized them based
on their innovation to leverage the network and ability to transform candidate
sourcing and hiring in India
a) Social Hiring Applications - e.g. myParichay These are the most powerful and
impactful category of applications that create a new mechanism for finding
people and jobs by leveraging extended network and will be accretive to a
company’s current tools. They have the ability to rapidly engage with a very
large relevant network in a cost effective fashion to transform candidate sourcing
just like job boards did 10 years ago. They are feature rich and incorporate most
of the features of the other product categories.
WHAT EVERY EXECUTIVE NEEDS TO KNOW ABOUT TALENT SOURCING AND HIRING TO STAY COMPETITIVE

9. THE ROLE OF SOCIAL MEDIA IN FINDING AND HIRING GREAT PEOPLE
b) Job Board with Facebook Skin - CareerBuilder has launched an application that
allows employees to post jobs on the wall of their friends. It is a rudimentary
application that can broadcast jobs on walls of friends and colleagues. Facebook
users have been reluctant to adopt such applications that start “spamming” their
wall with job postings.
c) Business Networking Platforms - BranchOut, These applications are trying to
create a LinkedIn within Facebook, i.e. network within a network. The ability of
such applications to replace LinkedIn is still unclear. Their efficacy as a social
hiring platform is perhaps better than category (b), but fall significantly short of
Social Hiring Applications
d) Job Boards on Facebook – Beknown from Monster, have created a Facebook
application that allows users to use Monster through their Facebook account. It
is not a social hiring tool but provides access to Monster while you are logged
into Facebook, eliminating the need to log into Monster in a separate window.
WHAT EVERY EXECUTIVE NEEDS TO KNOW ABOUT TALENT SOURCING AND HIRING TO STAY COMPETITIVE

10. THE ROLE OF SOCIAL MEDIA IN FINDING AND HIRING GREAT PEOPLE
Ranjan Sinha has founded and directed number of award winning internet
companies and service companies in the area of human
resources in India and the USA. Ranjan founded Summit HR
with the vision of helping CEOs and their teams win the war
for talent. Summit HR is recognized as the Top HR Outsourcing
Company by The Wall Street Journal®, International
Association of Outsourcing Professionals, The Gartner Group
and Fortune® magazine.
Ranjan was selected as the “HR Outsourcing Superstar’ numerous times by HR
Outsourcing Today magazine for his pioneering contributions to the HR Outsourcing
industry in the US and India. He is a frequent speaker on various industry panels on
Social Media in HR, Talent Management, Hiring Risk Management and HR
Outsourcing. He is widely quoted in leading business newspapers and magazines. He
writes column for The Financial Express, has written numerous articles on use of
psychometric tools for improved hiring and Six Sigma applications in HR and Talent
Supply Chain Management.
Ranjan serves on the board of Summit HR Worldwide Inc., Global Talent
Management Inc. and Greenwich Capital Venture Corporation and is an advisor to
Peoplestrong.
Ranjan “commutes” between India and California He is a member of the Young
Presidents Organization (YPO) Northern California Chapter.
Ranjan is currently pursuing a Ph.D degree in industrial psychology from University
of Utrecht, Netherlands. Ranjan has a Masters Degree from The Wharton School of
Business and a MBA from the Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore. He has a
B. Tech from the Indian Institute of Technology, Roorkee.
WHAT EVERY EXECUTIVE NEEDS TO KNOW ABOUT TALENT SOURCING AND HIRING TO STAY COMPETITIVE