Are you a Groupon groupie? Fan of Foursquare ? Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn addict?
Groupon and Foursquare are pairing up to offer discounts in real time. Using geolocation technology, you will now be able to walk down Sainte-Catherine Street and receive discounts in real time to a store three minutes away. And tomorrow, an association with Facebook or Google + will offer you EXACTLY what you want, since Big Brother will know everything about you—even what you don’t yet know yourself. Forget about your privacy; it will be sacrificed to the new gods of consumption!
So what does all this have to do with recruiting? Imagine being able to reach candidates near your office in real time. Suppose they were walking by, in a hurry to get to the store offering a Groupon discount, and then. . . WHAMMO! You short-circuit the process and invite them to apply or come in for an interview (those whose LinkedIn profile you have seen and that meet your selection criteria). Or when a candidate is less than three minutes away from your office, you seize the opportunity to ask him or her to come in to hear about the job of a lifetime. Yet another possible application is meeting potential candidates while enjoying a lunchtime soup and sandwich at the food court near your office. You can alert them to your presence and job openings in their field and have coffee with them right on the spot.
All right then!
- Static recruiters are OUT! Mobile 3.0 is where it’s at. Hold on to your hats, dear colleagues, and prepare to enter this new era of recruiting.
- Resumés are so passé! People are now sending their virtual professional profiles. LindekIn has just launched an “apply now” application that lets users apply for job openings by using their smart phones to send their profile. Now all you need is the geolocation app to connect to your career section.
- Office interviews are obsolete. You can now assess candidates directly on Skype or right from wherever you happen to be.
Selection processes will get shorter since the candidate identification phase is increasingly being done in real time. Don’t forget, however, that confidentiality is an important part of recruiting. Passive candidates may not be willing to expose themselves to this extent. While work tools are diversifying and evolving to offer greater flexibility and mobility, I don’t see the recruiter being limited to virtual networking.
Technology provides us with the possibility of instantizing our processes to save time. Keep in mind that candidate attraction and assessment cannot be modelled. Know how to use the technology but don’t lose sight of the essentials—the quality of discussions and the meaning of relationships. We are increasingly conditioned to Facebook and Twitter and post what’s happening in our daily lives, with our most ordinary actions on display for all to see. Tracking candidates virtually will not replace direct contacts, because not everything can be automated. Recruiting is a job that is based on relationship skills combined with an ability to find gems, which no social network with geolocation technology can replace. That being said, yes, resumé formats are changing, screening interviews are more sophisticated, and the search for candidates is increasingly complex—based on the combination of several platforms and methods because we can no longer rely on a single source.
In addition, more and more companies are prohibiting their employees from posting their profiles on business social networking sites to protect themselves from industrial espionage and are blocking web 2.0 access on company-provided smart phones. Career management is not yet a disposable commodity, and people do not change jobs on a whim—at least, not the ones you want to recruit. . .
Nathalie Francisci
Board Director, Speaker and Colomnist
www.nathaliefrancisci.com