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One of the biggest challenges confronting a CIO is finding good human resource for his IT department. According to studies, it takes an average of 45 days to fill up a vacancy, which is a huge loss when it comes to productivity in any organisation. To overcome this challenge, enterprises are increasingly relying on social media when it comes to hiring.
Zafar Rais, Founder & CEO, MindShift Interactive, says, “Social media is a dynamic platform. Choosing the right platform is of prime importance. Social HR is the emerging tool to gratify and engage with the employees of the company. Creating a social media mix using effective mediums like Skype, Twitter, Facebook and Linkedin is a perfect approach. Using social media on learning an overall personality of the person is a must in today’s world.”
Reflecting the increasing importance of social media, he says, “14.4 million people in theUSutilise social media to look for jobs. More than 4 in 10 use their social media network when making career or employment decisions. This is the highest in Asia-Pacific.” MindShift Interactive (MSI) substantiated this trend through cumulating a one year research data into insights and statistics.
While talking about providing more insights into social media, Rais says, “As many as 92 per cent of the companies are using platforms like Twitter, Linkedin and Facebook for recruitment. About 45 per cent of the fortune 500 companies include links to social media on their career pages. Meanwhile, Linkedin, used by 93 per cent of companies in 2012, is the number one platform when it comes to social recruitment. Linkedin drives almost 9 times more applications than Facebook and 3 times more applications than Twitter.”
MSI itself has been working with some of the top brands when it comes to hiring through social media. “Clients like Dabur, WMNS and Infosys use social HR as a tool to recruit prospective employees. L’Oreal launched its Facebook page ‘L’Oreal carriers’ handled by MSI. The page invites Facebook users to send in their CV. Few other brands like JW Marriot, Sula vineyard also use the medium of Social HR. According to an international report, employees abroad are now demanding company cell phones with an access to social media,” says Rais.
He feels enterprise technology decision makers can also innovatively leverage social media for recruitment. Not only can a CIO hire a resource with the desired skill set in a short time span, he can also gauge a potential candidate’s communication skills.
“Every company can plan an approach suiting the job profile they are looking to hire. For instance, a CIO recruiting for the managerial post should create a Facebook application that could have a recruiting form which a person could fill and submit,” says Rais.
“Also, to prove their skills, a twitter contest could be run suggesting ‘Explain your capabilities in 140 characters.’ This could garner a person’s capabilities in limited words putting forth a challenge of proving his or her worth in limited words. Hence, creating a social media mix for recruiting is the best a company can do,” he says.
So, what is the feedback of corporates that have turned to social media for meeting their human resource needs? What has been the impact of social recruitment?
“Forty two per cent of the companies claim (their) candidates’ quality improvement after using social media for recruitment. Twenty per cent of them believe it takes lesser time to hire using social recruiting, and 73 per cent of candidates were successfully hired via social media. However, 36 per cent of companies still do not capitalise on social media for recruitment,” avers Rais.
MindShift Interactive runs three different business verticals, namely, MindShift Digital (Digital Marketing, Influencer Relations & Mobile Technology), MindShift Metrics (Digital Research Consulting) and MindShift Activate (Events & Promotions).
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