Skip to content

JobVidi – A new approach to social recruitment?

The increasing use of social media by recruiters, direct hiring firms and jobseekers is having a profound impact on how people find jobs and jobs find people. Indeed,the recent successes of social media technologies like BranchOut and Glassdoor have added further weight behind the notion that social media will eventually lead to the death of traditional job boards, much in the same way that the internet itself ultimately all-but-eliminated the classified sections (including jobs) of printed newspapers.

JobVidi is the latest innovative recruitment tool that utilises social networks to connect recruiters with job seekers. Recruiters can access their profile by logging in with LinkedIn, and can post jobs directly onto JobVidi from their LinkedIn status or Twitter feed using #jobvidi. Most recruiters will be familiar with the use of this LinkedIn feature to promote jobs to connections, as many as 70% dosage of clomid of recruiters regularly using LinkedIn use their status bar in this way, and JobVidi is the first tool to enable posting from these networks directly to a targeted group of matched candidates.

JobVidi – A new approach to social recruitment?

Welcome to the talent economy

Like many functions in the organization, the way in which companies identify and recruit talent has changed more in the past 10 years than it did in the last century. According to Jobvite, 89 percent of companies planned to use social media to recruit in 2011, a source of talent that didn’t even exist at the start of the century. This trend has big implications for both the recruitment profession and the ways companies compete and win overall. But what forces are driving this change, and what can we learn from the companies pioneering this age of recruiting?

Welcome to the talent economy

Job boards must evolve or die

Over a year ago, I wrote about the changes in the job board world. I also promised myself I wouldn’t write about job boards ‘dying’ for at least a year. In the meantime, Jacco Valkenburg wrote a great post about “Job Boards 2020“, making some excellent observations about where job boards are going. Here are some of my thoughts – and cheap cialis soft some ideas on why job boards fail.

Are some job boards dying? Well, of course they are. All industries have some companies that are dying – and some that are growing. So, through the Darwinian fight for survival, some job boards die.

But does that mean that all job boards are dying? Of course not. If anything, there has been an explosion of niche sites over the past several years.  Why? Job boards can be very efficient at bringing employer and job seeker together.

Instead of arguing about the disappearance of an entire industry, I think it is more useful to look at why some job boards do die. Smart job boards do just this – they study and analyze the failures to avoid becoming one of the statistics.

So…here are a few reasons why any given job board might fail:Job boards must evolve or die

Five Thesis why we still have to recognise a low level of Employer Branding

Before getting to my five thesis, two tiny mental games:

If you envision an image of a company is assembled by its Product-, Employer- and finally its Company Brand and you would consider the Company Brand and/or the Product Brand gone; what will remain? The Employer Brand.

Try this evaluation with companies, such as Amazon, Deutsche Bank, Coca-Cola etc. Fast you will realise, that neither in Germany, nor in Europe, a strong Employer Brand exists.

Second game:

Put ten recruiting announcement of big companies, or companies in your mind next to another and erase the sender. You will come to the conclusion that the communication of the employers are almost identical to another and for that replaceable.

We recognise a low level of Employer Brands because:Five Thesis why we still have to recognise a low level of Employer Branding

A Great Idea That Will Never Happen

It is too easy to become a recruiter. I suppose that can be said for a variety of disciplines, but I would wonder how closely those positions affect the bottom line the way recruiting does. A company is powered by its people and the gas of that engine is recruiting.
Staffing professionals know this, C-level executives are aware of the fact and likewise savvy investors who bet on the jockey rather than the horse they ride on. However, across many organizations the staffing department is grudgingly regarded as a resource of necessity that is wholly unappreciated. To make an unfair comparison, recruiters are often thought of like Firemen; well appreciated in times of fire, but forgotten otherwise.

Sure, there are organizations that give lip service to the value of recruiting, but consider these questions. How often does the CEO of your company wander the cubicles of the staffing department to personally congratulate their contribution? When was the last time the staffing department was given kudos in a press release from upper management? When the stock goes up in your company, is staffing cited as a factor?

Recruiting overall suffers from bad publicity (or the lack of a significant amount of good publicity) reflected in the unspoken accolades from above and the occasional disdain from candidates. What do I mean? If a candidate is unemployed, unhappily employed or under-employed, then a call from a recruiter is a welcome God-send.

Conversely, if the candidate is comfortable in their present role, such solicitations can be a nuisance. Furthermore, consider those recruiters who engage unqualified candidates and handle their candidates haphazardly. The end result is a negative impression of a certain company and a black eye on recruiting in general.

It would seem that when recruiting (in any discipline) you have to contend not only with the requirements you are trying to fill, but also the biases of recruiting coming from all concerned. Fortunately, I have a strategy for turning this around.

Simply put, serving as a recruiter does not carry the prestige of being a doctor or lawyer; neither high school nor college students decide early on to become a recruiter. (How many graduate programs offer an intensive training in recruiting?) It has been my observation that people tend to “stumble” into recruiting and therein lies the issue.

Returning to my initial statement, it is too easy to become a recruiter. While it takes a lot of effort to be a good recruiter and great experience to be seen as superlative, only a nominal effort is required to become an “official” recruiter. This is why I propose that the recruiting industry submit itself to an international standard of ethics that is regulated by a global consortium of staffing professionals. Specifically, I would like to see the following:A Great Idea That Will Never Happen