A guest post by Mike Mallin, Oracle Product Strategist by way of SelectMinds
There has been a lot of well-justified hype around social recruiting these past few years, as evidenced by LinkedIn’s revenue model, Facebook’s recent launch of a social job board, and numerous venture capital financings. And recently, Oracle acquired SelectMinds (and my colleagues and me) because it recognizes the huge potential for social recruiting and the meaningful disruption it’s creating in the talent acquisition technology space.
The powerful force that’s driving this disruption is the significant change in the behavior of consumers. In short, people are doing what they’ve always wanted to do but which is only now possible, thanks to social and mobile technology.
1) For today’s consumers, life is a stage. People share opinions and facts about their lives with dizzying frequency from wherever they are, including where they work, how happy or unhappy they are there, etc.
2) There are many more job seekers. The expected tenure of the average worker is 4.4 years, but for millennials, people born between 1977 and 1997, it is half that. This means that there are more active job seekers at any given time, and more significantly, there are more of the highly covetedpassive job seekers, because more people are potentially willing to leave their current jobs.
3) People turn to friends and even loose contacts because job boards have proven ineffective for both job seekers and companies. And, thanks to social networks, one’s contacts are there to be tapped for help. In 2012, 52 percent of job seekers used Facebook to help find work (up from 48 percent in 2011), 38 percent (up from 30 percent) used LinkedIn, and 34 percent (up from 26 percent) used Twitter.
4) People have become more demanding about their quality of life and have come to expectmore “human” experiences when developing relationships with companies.
What Are Companies Doing About It?
Companies are faced with numerous, new challenges and are hungry for solutions to meet them. A number of large enterprises are spending a good amount of money and time in an attempt to tackle these problems.
Many are paying LinkedIn more and more money to have their internal recruiters search the LinkedIn database and cold call/email potential talent. A lot of companies are trying to build a fan base on Facebook and Twitter. They are establishing official company pages and accounts and posting job openings to them, either manually or with some degree of automation, through in-house or third-party technology. And, of course, enterprises are still paying third-party recruiters and agencies large amounts of money.
However, in the aggregate, the money has not yet moved in step with the hype. While the above activities have created some measure of value for recruiting departments, companies know that these activities do nottruly tackle the problems they’re facing.
Our Solutions
Oracle is the market leader in the enterprise recruiting technology space. Its acquisition of SelectMinds bolsters its Taleo talent acquisition offering with sophisticated social talent sourcing capabilities. Apart from HCM,Oracle’s acquisitions of Vitrue, Collective Intellect, and Involver have created a powerful set of enterprise social technology tools.
Our solution takes aim at the fundamental and massive opportunity offered by all of this disruption: companies should stop relying exclusively on their recruiters and truly tap social networks to crowd source their talent.
Consider a company with just 2,000 employees; if each employee has an average of 100 friends and each friend has 100 of his/her own, there are 20 million connections a company can, in theory, tap into. Imagine a handful of internal recruiters reaching an audience of anywhere near that size through their own networks!
Candidate referrals from trusted sources – most notably, employee referrals – are much more likely to be hired, which translates to less time and lower cost of hire. Furthermore, according to Dr. John Sullivan who has studied employee referrals extensively, they represent the highest quality applicants, the best retention metrics, and the top performing hires of any source.
Social networks create natural referral networks. However, alone they are simply not enough. For example, according to a recent post by ERE, 60 percent of employees say they’d refer someone to their company, but only 23 percent participate in company employee referral programs. Companies need first-class enterprise technology to meaningfully leverage social networks at scale.
Our solution generates massive increases in the number of high-quality hires a company makes through employee referrals and creates a powerful and extremely cost-efficient social recruitment marketing channel. Additionally, our product drives employee satisfaction. People can engage in a rewarding way using technology that provides the same high level of user experience as their favorite consumer internet applications.
The proof is in our results, as detailed in this recent article from Talent Magazine. It covers a SelectMinds/Oracle client and one of the world’s most well-known companies, eBay. The company estimates that they would have needed four full-time recruiters to hire as many employees as they did using our product.
I look forward to delving into the topics introduced here in future posts to this blog.