2012 was the year of social recruiting and 2013 was supposed to be the year of social HR. How far have we moved forward? Quite a bit, but not as much as I would have thought. Gamification has certainly not become mainstream and the death of the resume has been greatly exaggerated.
That being said, we have made significant strides forward in terms of implementing social technology into the functional areas of HR. With recruitment especially, we’ve seen quite a bit of improvement since 2012.
One of the biggest areas social media disrupted in the field of HR was recruitment. We have seen small, medium, and large companies take up social media to either proactive hire or build a stronger employment brand. Considering that 72 percent of adults who use the Internet also use some sort of social media, it makes sense that companies have been more open to engaging prospective candidates in this way.
According to Jobvite’s industry leading report on the topic, 94 percent of recruiters surveyed plan to use social media in their recruiting efforts and 78 percent of recruiters have been successful in doing so. We are seeing a universal increase in the adoption of social recruitment across industries.
Fledgling startups that focused on recruitment have also matured significantly. Work4 was started in 2010 and continues to make great progress in Facebook-related recruitment solutions. Recently, it has introduced Recruiter Solutions, which is essentially Graph Search on steroids. Also established in 2010, TalentBin is a go-to platform for sourcing tech talent. Having raised an additional $2 million in funding earlier this year, it is likely to expand its search capabilities even further. Gild has also released some new features and Dice.com released a new profiling tool early in the year geared at finding tech talent. All of these tools focus extensively on data mining and analysis, so improving their analytical capabilities and management of Big Data continues to be a priority. We will see more features that focus on matching/scoring profiles (like Bright and Jobvite).
Video interviewing was trending for a little while — companies like HireVue and InterviewStream seem to still be going strong. We will see more full recruitment management suites/applicant tracking systems like Jobvite integrating video interviewing into their recruitment solutions.
The biggest heavy hitter in the social recruitment industry, LinkedIn, has not been sitting idle either. From announcing a new Recruiter Certification (which may totally flop), to bringing in new features like Showcase Pages and LinkedIn Intro, LinkedIn has demonstrated that it is continuing to innovate in the social recruiting space. We can expect to see more from it and other new startups. Having already developed a pseudo ATS, LinkedIn will focus more on user acquisition and additional data points for recruiters to use for searching. We might even see LinkedIn start to acquire smaller startups and expand its recruiting solutions even further.
Similarly, the heavy hitter Bullhorn has also been making some big moves. It has been making a lot of strategic acquisitions. Not only does it provide recruitment solutions in regards to talent sourcing and applicant tracking, it now has solutions for timesheet and expenses. With its end-to-end recruitment solution, it’s likely that it will simply work on acquiring more clients. However, it might expand to add other HR features and slowly become more of an HRMS or ERP rather than just an ATS.
There are still a lot of areas ripe for disruption, and one of the areas we will see greater focus is in the area of employment branding. User experience will be key, and that means tools or features that help with communicating the company’s value proposition through something like specialized recruitment landing pages. In this space, Karmahire is doing a really neat job and is the only one I’m aware of that focuses more on the branding experience as opposed to candidate sourcing and recruiting.