Posts Tagged ‘hiring technology’

JobLark, Joins the Flock of Employee Referral Tools

February 4th, 2013

JobLark joins the growing flock of employee referral management products that have landed in the market over the past 18 months. Very similar to Zao, Goood Job, Sticky, Select Minds (Oracle) and dozens more Joblark leverages social networks to enable referrers to discover and refer job applicants. And like Zao, Joblark also allows employers to track and reward all the people that help make successful hires, whether they work for the employer or not. Joblark (like Zao) makes money by charging a fee once a hire is made.

Headquartered in Utah, JobLark appears to have around twenty or so employees and claims to have taken 1 million dollars in funding with 9 million more committed by Apple Tree Capital. Not much else is known about the company, the management team or active customers.

The Hiring Sciences Hunch

The employee referral management space is white hot but the space is getting crowded. The editors here at Hiring Sciences agree that ERM is an interesting niche in the HR Tech landscape but the window may be closing quickly for small upstarts like JobLark. Competition from applicant tracking software vendors, many of which already offer integrated employee referral management modules, will force standalone solutions like JobLark to focus on smaller employers with smaller budgets. Also, user adoption will pose challenges for the likes of JobLark as employees are inundated with tools and a standalone ERM solution may not carry the weight of other more mission critical systems. Overall, we believe the ERM space is very interesting and solutions like JobLark are making great use of social networks but it’s still unclear if a majority of employers are ready to adopt these new standalone tools.

If you are interested in learning more about JobLark visit the site at https://www.joblark.com/

Recruiter Roles are Evolving with Technology and Social Media

February 1st, 2013

Social Media Recruiting TechnologiesFacebook’s value to recruiters as a tool for discovering promising new job candidates will get a boost now that the social networking behemoth has announced the release of its new Graph Search feature.

Graph Search, currently available in a limited beta program for testing, is a search engine running inside of Facebook. It is designed to let ordinary Facebook users find answers to queries such as, “French restaurants in San Francisco my friends have eaten at” or “videos of my friends’ birthday parties.”

Savvy recruiters know that they have to keep up with developments in technology and social media if they want to find the best candidates for the positions they are trying to fill. Sites such as Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn and Twitter offer a treasure trove of information about potential candidates. They enable employers and recruiters to follow connections as they search for professionals to fill important positions.

Facebook’s Graph Search should provide value to recruiters because it will enable them to search the social network for candidates who have  profiles that align with employer needs, according to Work4Labs CEO Stephane Le Viet’s recent guest post, “Graph Search And Online Recruiting: How Facebook Is Transforming An Industry,” at Forbes magazine.

Le Viet notes, for example, that the Hard Rock Cafe could use Graph Search to help it fill positions in a new Tokyo outlet by targeting Tokyo residents who have said they like rock music.

Facebook’s value to recruiters becomes even more evident when you consider that you can focus on specific keywords and dive deeper into data about the candidates you discover. The recruiter will see details about the candidate’s education, job history and what motivates and interests them, Le Viet says, without necessarily having to even review a resume.

As potential job candidates spend more of their time on sites like Facebook, it makes sense to look for them there.  This is where there personas, skills and interests are truly on display.  If the open position relies on the candidate being tech savvy, checking up on how they present themselves via online profiles can be very demonstrative to their abilities.  For example, you can see how helpful  or knowledgeable a candidate is as he offers (admittedly self-serving) advice to people via Twitter or by posting comments on someone’s Facebook page.

It is a sure thing that social networks such as Facebook will change the way that you look for and recruit job candidates. Users are connected to  one another in ways they they may not even realize, such as through shared interests or people in common. This may lead a discerning recruiter to discover candidates who are friends with people already working at the company and whose interests and skills line up with the requirements of the position.  It is integral that those at the front lines of recruiting keep up with the latest web technologies – in particular the big social media platforms like Facebook.