Who dun it?  The now-departed CEO?  Or the executive recruiting firm that helped him land the job?

No matter who is to blame, the case of former Yahoo CEO Scott Thompson has taught one thing: the black-and-white ink stamped on resume paper is no longer the most accurate way to find out what kind of candidate you’re hiring.  The times of the resume and a firm handshake as the only indicators of a good hire are long gone, and that’s a good thing.

With social recruiting and referral networks, firms now have a wealth of vetted, potential hires, just waiting to be tapped into.  Think about it: would you rather hear about a senior level candidate from an executive search firm that’s paid to place him, or through the referral of a former computer science classmate?  Companies now have the power to crowd source the search and due diligence process on all senior level hires, simply by tapping the people who know them in social networks.  How well they choose to harness it is they key.

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Take for example the following stats:

• Global internet traffic through mobile devices, excluding tablets, is doubling every year and accounts for 8.5% of all web traffic.*
• Social media usage has increased by 305% over the past 3 years and now represents 1.3 billion total users.**
• 89% of companies will use social media networks for recruiting.***

Those numbers cannot be ignored; people are consuming data in new ways.  Clients now have social media and mobile channels at their disposal and need to leverage these channels to drive deeper engagement among their community members.

Our newest releases of the Talent Community module have included several key features to capitalize on this behavior.

• Mobile:  When users access the Talent Community site on their mobile device, the system automatically displays the site in a mobile optimized format to provide a positive experience to the user.
• Social Distribution:  Clients can easily disseminate Talent Community content to their Facebook fan pages and LinkedIn groups to increase awareness and drive traffic to their community.
• LinkedIn Profile Import:  Members can register for a company’s community using their LinkedIn login and with one click import their LinkedIn profile, significantly lowering the barrier to participation and providing our clients with robust data on all of their members.
• Viral Network Growth:  Members can easily find and invite connections from their social networks, extending a company’s reach to drive participation in the community.
• TalentVine Integration:  Our Social ERP Module is seamlessly integrated into the careers section of the Talent Community to allow members to easily search a company’s open positions.  The module also periodically sends emails with targeted jobs to community members to generate alumni rehires and high quality, referral candidates.

The great news is that these enhancements have already produced an overwhelming increase in engagement across all of our client’s communities.  Although some of these enhancements have just been released, there has been a marked improvement.  On average:

• 8 out of 10 users that click an invitation link, register for the site
• Registered users have increased by 11%
• Profile Updates have increased by 332%
• Logins have increased by 53%
• Content Views are up by 64%
• Message Open Rates and click through rates are upwards of 20%.  For some clients we’ve seen rates as high as 70% (by comparison Standard Email Open Rates are 18% and Email Click Through Rates are about 3%)

Although we are extremely happy with the results we have seen thus far, we will continue to evolve our product to allow our clients to engage their members.  The conference’s presentations generated many constructive conversations, and we are already beginning to incorporate feedback and new ideas gained from the conference into our product road map.

It was great to meet with all of our European clients and we look forward to moving our product forward to drive further client success.

* Source:  StatCounter
** Source: Social Media in Recruitment Conference
*** Source: Career Enlightenment

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What do these CEOs know about hiring that the rest of the world does not? Well, for at least 7 of them, SelectMinds is part of their secret sauce. SelectMinds clients that grace the list are ADP, Google, Ernst & Young, Qualcomm, PwC, L3 and Lockheed. And that means that your social network could hold the key to job you’ve been daydreaming about.

So what are you waiting for? Check out the full Forbes’ full list, by clicking here.

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One of the keynote speakers at the event is Paul DePodesta, VP of player development and scouting with the New York Mets and one of the subjects of the hit book and film, Moneyball.  He’ll be speaking about the innovative strategies he uses to create a winning team, as well as the application of these strategies in the corporate world.

As baseball and Brad Pitt fans around the world now know, Moneyball is all about efficient recruiting, using data analysis to identify the most productive candidates for specific roles.  We love this concept at SelectMinds, because that’s exactly what TalentVine is designed to do: distill clear, actionable data from the unstructured web of connections that exist in an employee population.  Essentially, we let corporations crowd source their talent scouting through their entire workforce to create a stream of vetted, high-quality referrals.

Instead of measuring our results in on-base percentage, however, we measure them in hires.  In one recent example, eBay used TalentVine to generate 13,000 referrals, 4,000 job applications and 158 hires in just 9 months, all coming directly from the social networks of existing employees.  We’re so impressed with the results that we’re thinking about optioning the movie rights to the right bidder.  Any takers?

To follow the play-by-play from HCI, follow #hcievents

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The conference will kick off at 9:30 AM, with programs from our own David De Angelo, Sarah Lombardi, and of course, our CEO Anne Berkowitch.  They’ll tackle topics that matter most to today’s HR execs, with programs on hires and referrals, professional networks, and best practices for social engagement highlighting the agenda.  In attendance will be representatives from such companies as Swiss Re, Credit Suisse, AON Hewitt, and more.

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The really short version:

Have you read The Lean Startup? That’s basically what we’ve been up to.

The longer version:

First, I highly suggest reading the book, regardless of what you do and where you work. As its author, Eric Ries, said, the idea of a “startup” or of innovation is not at all limited to small companies.

While SelectMinds has been around for a while in Internet terms – over ten years – we launched our TalentVine Employee Referral product a year-and-a-half ago. It was part of a larger vision that has this week taken a major leap forward with the inclusion of six modules that allow our customers to automate every component of their social recruitment strategies.

Two years ago, we saw a huge opportunity in recruiting. In short, things were changing – very quickly – in the world of Talent Acquisition but also in enterprise software in general.

• Job Boards were on the rapid decline.

• Companies hadn’t figured out how to use social networks to engage candidates, hire great people and market their recruitment brand.

• Technology was (and had been for a while) moving to the Cloud, and clunky old applications with horrible user experiences and complicated, slow release schedules were becoming less and less tolerated by people and, as a result, companies. Frankly, the technology offered by ATS’s and other vendors in HR and recruiting was particularly bad.

• Everyone was buying and becoming addicted to a Smart Phone.

• The Consumer was inheriting the earth. Consumer adoption was preceding and engendering enterprise adoption, and IT policies were becoming harder and harder to maintain.

The last point – the Consumer is King – is particularly relevant to our vision. A company should be able recruit through it’s people in ways that make everyone a winner. What is a social network, after all, but people and their connections with each other?

Two years later, all of the points above still hold – we’re just further along. But the main difference between now and two years ago is that there now are a large number of software vendors offering something in the “social recruiting” space to also try and capitalize on the points above.  In other words, a lot of players – from market leaders to startups to first-class VC funds – agreed with us and are putting their money where their mouths are.

With all of this noise and competition, what was – and is – our angle? It’s the combination of three things:

1) Our access to the world’s best companies as customers and thought partners.

2) Our process – the Lean Startup methodology: Build – Measure – Learn

3) Our team, which totally rocks.

Back when we started, if I wanted to test out an idea, I could just get on the phone with senior members of the Recruiting departments at our existing customers, companies like IBM, or ADP, or Credit Suisse. And it’s far better for us now. I can ask McGraw-Hill, or eBay, for example. I can also tap into our rapidly growing database of usage data, fueled by hundreds of thousands of automated messages we send every month, to apply best practices to any individual customer.

It’s even better: it turns out that early adopters and thought leaders abound in the Recruiting departments of these companies and many others. You just need to know where they are and – most importantly – earn their trust.

Which brings me to our team and approach. Building great products quickly (speed is everything!) and therefore earning your customers’ trust is all about your development process and the dynamic of your product team.

Here it is: we all get along.

No, really: a bunch of creative people with strong opinions who actually get along. The best part is there’s not a single naysayer. (You know the type, right? The engineer or other person who is naturally inclined to say No and needs to be convinced to say Yes.) When a customer asks me for something, my first inclination is to say Yes. Fair enough, I’m a Product Manager – we love to say yes. But I’m not filled with that dread of “Oh, no! What will my Head of Engineering say? He’ll kill me!” On the contrary: I immediately call him, interrupting dinner, to tell him what we’re now going to do for Acme Corporation, and he immediately figures out how we can get it done along with everything else. And then everyone else gets excited and makes it happen.

I’m not saying we’re Yes Men, because here’s the other advantage, and a natural consequence of having amazing customers: their problems are everyone’s problems. Since first launching TalentVine I haven’t received a single request from a customer that isn’t strategically important for us to do anyway. All I have to do is shut up and listen, then go create and build.

As you can probably tell, I’m excited – and equally impatient – because there’s so much to do. With all of this noise that’s emerged in the world of recruiting technology, it’s a race for mind and market share. For us, the most important thing is to continue to let our customers drive our decisions and cement their trust in us with each new release.

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Now, for the first time ever, corporate HR pros are able to automate all aspects of a social recruiting campaign – from Facebook job posts to talent community management – through a single interface with TalentVine.  The announcement is the result of a multi-month overhaul to TalentVine, whereby we’ve taken our core social recruiting engine and built six flexible modules that can work separately or together to power complete social recruiting campaigns. 

The key functions of each TalentVine module are as follows:

• Social Jobs Distribution: Automatically sends new job listings, links and status updates to existing company Facebook pages, Twitter accounts, and LinkedIn groups.

• Talent Community: Highly configurable corporate social networks that allow HR managers to engage with active and passive candidates.

• Social Employee Referral Program: Referral engine designed to automate the referral process across social networks, giving HR personnel the ability to effortlessly solicit active and passive job candidates referred by the most reliable source available: their existing employees.

• Facebook Job Pages: Create a searchable jobs page within Facebook that is automatically populated with new job posts.

• Social Career Site: Seamlessly integrate social recruiting campaigns into existing corporate website and careers site or create new, socially-optimized career sites from a single interface with intuitive user experience.

• Mobile: Optimize all job listings in a mobile-friendly format that is sharable on Facebook and Twitter.

All of the modules are supported by a single Analytics Dashboard that measures activity and reports results with hard data on the performance of social recruiting campaigns across all social channels.

To learn more about the new and improved TalentVine, click here.

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A huge issue brought to light by the Associated Press, the amount of employers that make this request is higher than one might think and, according to the Washington Post, many applicants fold under pressure and succumb to the request, for fear of losing the opportunity. Any candidate has the right to refuse, but when pressed, most don’t. And what some companies still haven’t grasped is anything you learn about a candidate comes at a huge price.

Actions like this can actually be more of a conviction on a company than any dirt dug up on a candidate. If you’re a firm looking to attract the best talent, asking for a Facebook password doesn’t exactly instill a lot of trust. You can only imagine what kinds of alarms and red flags are being set off in a candidate’s head about, say, the work environment. Once a company has boxed themselves in as one of those companies, it’s a stigma that can last. Trust us, there are other ways to be diligent in the hiring process. The harm is does to your recruiting brand is practically irreparable.

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That’s the question we were left asking after reading Pam Moore’s post on Social Media Today. Moore explains that a company’s ability to go with the Facebook flow could say a lot about their marketing strategy:

If you are completely freaked out over these changes then you really need to do the “double think” on your online marketing strategy. Remember, you do not own Facebook. Facebook can make any changes they see fit, whenever they decide to do so. It is a free platform and although you may have put too much weight into the platform for the success of your business, use the anxiety you feel today as a positive to move at least a few eggs out of the Facebook basket.

So how does Timeline change the way a company markets itself and its open positions? Will it just be an aesthetic tweak? Or will companies find a way to utilize any new functionality that may come with the new look? And what about candidates? Will a slick cover photo change the way a recruit sees a company or brand? Is there a way to make Timeline more engaging the old business pages? Ultimately this is further evidence of the need for a holistic approach to employment branding on social networks.  A stand-alone job post does not make a great visual.  But an integrated Facebook careers page, complete with a steady flow of new content, will send the message that you are serious about your talent and automatically put you ahead of the competition.

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For the study, researches asked a group of 586 undergraduate students (274 of which had publicly accessible profiles) to complete a personality questionnaire commonly used by companies to gauge conscientiousness, agreeableness, extraversion, emotional stability and openness. Raters were then brought in to balance how they evaluated the students’ profiles against how they answered their questionnaire. Turns out Facebook scores gave better insight to the subjects than their own answers did:

Researchers followed a subset of students who were employed and asked their supervisors, six months later, to complete a performance evaluation. Comparing those scores to the personality scores, they found that the Facebook-derived scores provided a more accurate predictor of future job performance than the self-evaluation

Of course, there are plenty of caveats that come with disqualifying someone from their Facebook persona, but studies like this support the notion that a winning social media presence should be both an honest and a positive one. And to you job seekers sweating that they may have missing highlighting something on an interview? You can rest easy knowing Facebook knows you even better than you know yourself.

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