The power of social recruiting

“Social recruiting” is simply using your network and social networking tools to find and vet candidates for a vacancy.

It’s a fantastic way to hire people, as through your connection you have someone you trust that can vouch for their competencies (and sanity!). And it’s cheap.

Lots of companies use social recruiting in its most simple form – approaching well connected contacts within their network and asking if they know anyone suitable. Candidates sourced in this way are typically high quality and a good match for the vacancy, as the employer / recruiter has en existing professional relationship with the referrer.

For small companies with well connected management this approach is effective. But for bigger companies and recruitment agents, the size of any individual network isn’t big enough to shake out enough suitable candidates. At this point many companies start advertising their vacancies on job boards and in newspapers: a more expensive option that can attract an influx of low quality candidates.

So you could conclude that social recruiting doesn’t scale well.

However, at Careerworms we created a social recruiting solution that works for small, medium and large organisations. We apply a crowdsourcing model to find candidates. In our case the crowd is the hiring company’s (or recruitment agent’s) employees, alumni, clients, investors and previous candidates etc. When an employer is looking for staff, SocialReecruit sends a notification to the relevant people in the employers ‘crowd’ and encourages them to seek out suitable candidates within their own networks. A finders fee incentive ensures a good response to the request for talent.

Sharing tools embedded into the platform and in email notifications increase the exposure for each vacancy, through integration with LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and the major online social networking sites.

For companies looking for talented staff, without spending lots of time and money searching, it’s a very effective tool.