featured in a list of Recruitment Thought Leaders

I really am not a recruiter, but feel incredibly honored to be featured in this list of Recruitment Thought Leaders along with these amazing list of people I have followed via the internet for a long time!

Facebook's Resume Feature - Should LinkedIn be worried? My take

Yesterday it was all over the tech websites, Facebook is reportedly testing a new resume feature called "work histories" that can help users share them privately.

Here are my thoughts about how this can play out:

1. Facebook is making an enterprise play. First with Workplace , the collaboration feature and then with  Facebook Jobs the job advertising feature. However, they haven't really done a great job marketing the jobs feature. If you see currently the number of jobs advertised in India is very low. As I write this is what is shown - 27 jobs in India (plus all of them seem to be with Facebook, not even sure it is used by other employers)
   
2. Facebook's big revenue features come from display advertising, sponsored posts for consumers. LinkedIn has that market cornered when it comes to employers - with their company pages and posts targeted to different kind of talent segments. So cracking this market is going to be tough for Facebook unless it invests in feet on the street to take on LinkedIn's Account Management, Sales and Customer Service. Facebook pages had talked about introducing a jobs/careers tab for adding to their business pages beginning with US and Canada, however I am not sure if this is in the priority for Facebook sales teams to pitch it to their customers
3. The big opportunity, Mobile recruitment. Where Facebook has a big edge over LinkedIn in the developing markets is the users who are solely on the platform as well as being actively engaged - the users for whom the internet is first mobile screen. These would be the blue collar workers which are not a strong point of LinkedIn. However to reach them Facebook would have to give the screen real estate to the product to make jobs a clear feature which might mean compromising on things like its news feed.
4. Microsoft and LinkedIn. Microsoft's acquisition of LinkedIn and its data getting integrated into Outlook and Office 365 is a moat that Facebook may find it difficult to cross.   
5. Facebook's perception problem. The biggest problem for Facebook is its perception of being a "social network" that is for friends and family. Whatever Facebook does in the jobs and careers space would run into that huge perception issue. At least in the white collar workforce, hence IMHO, the best bet for Facebook would be to concentrate on the blue collar workforce and focus on a "apply with Facebook" button with job sites to make the application process friction-less. The question is will they focus on it - at the cost of hurting their other revenue streams like digital advertising? And will they be able to convince the recruiting ecosystem like job sites and staffing agencies and make the products that they see value in? Time will tell, but very unlikely in my view. I hope I am proved wrong because LinkedIn can really do with some competition in this space.

What is Candidate Experience - How RPO and Automation can help improve it

What is candidate experience?

Candidate experience comprises the whole journey of a candidate from awareness about a company, specific roles that she/he is suitable for, the application process, and the communication with the recruiter, hiring manager during the interview process (telephonic, video and in-person) to the offer letter and joining and onboarding. Each of the touchpoints where a candidate comes into contact with the prospective employer is a “moment of truth” to build a great candidate experience.

To illustrate the fact let’s take come conservative numbers, suppose an organization hires 100 people in a year. And it gets 50 applications per role it advertises on job portals and professional networking sites.

That means 5000 people come into contact with the company at an annual basis – of which 4900 don’t get hired.

The experience these 4900 people have during the recruiting process can either make or break the brand of the company. Handled well they can either be neutral to having positive impression of the organization. Handled badly, though, they can become detractors and in the age of social media can negatively influence the reputation of the organization.

So from our earlier example let’s say 20% candidates had a very bad experience during the recruitment process. That’s 980 people. Let’s assume that each of these people have an active network of 150 people (Dunbar’s number) but bear in mind they probably have much more than that, on various social media platforms. Of these 980, assuming 10% post scathing reviews of their experience on sites like Glassdoor, Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn, that’s 98×150 or 14,700 people would know about it. And if it gets further shared that number can quickly go in a geometrical progression to impact your brand image in front of an audience of hundreds of thousands

(Read the full post on the VBeyond Blog)

Gender stereotyping in Indian recruitment advertising

Thought I'd share this article in the DNA that I came across: 

Research confirmed 77% of the total ads that had a gender specific term recruited only females (Anand, 2013). Least gender stereotyping was observed in jobs that required specialised skills and technical education like IT, engineering and medicine.Secretary/front office assistant, telecaller, sales(man) and manager claimed the top spot in gender stereotyping.
Gender stereotyping in recruitment ads for receptionists ranged from the benign ‘Receptionist only – Female’ to comments regarding age and attractiveness ‘beautiful and broad minded(F) office assistant and personal secretary’, ‘up to 25’ (Anand, 2013).
Receptionist has not just been relegated as a women’s only zone. Recruitment advertisements have objectified the kind of women recruiters prefer. Ads have portrayed receptionist as decorative pieces in the lobby, behind the front desk of corporate offices, young beautiful and easy on the eyes.
A similar sort of story was depicted by the data on recruitment advertisements for telecaller and data entry operator position. Next to the ‘FEMALE TELECALLERS’ rubric was the image of a girl talking on the hands free. Now, even though there wasn’t any mention of the age or physical attributes, but the picture certainly said everything the recruiters wanted to convey. Sales and field jobs were earmarked as the boys-only section, with keywords like ‘field boys’ and ‘sales boys’. 

What do you think as recruiters in India do we need to eliminate such blantant stereotyping?