John Zappe
1 day ago
Yesterday afternoon, Facebook did what everyone expected: It filed for an IPO.
In the paperwork submitted to the Securities and Exchange Commission, Facebook said it expects to raise $5 billion from the public sale of its stock. That’s based on the registration fee it paid. The New York Times says it could end up raising much more.
Amybeth Hale
11 days ago
A couple of things have happened in the word of search in recent weeks that were overshadowed by some of the legislature going through the US House of Representatives as well as the US Senate: speculation of an Amazon cloud search, and announcement of major changes to Google’s search functionality, otherwise known as Google ‘Plus Your World.’
Sarang Brahme
on Dec. 21, 2011
I still remember those days when word “sourcing strategy” was define mainly with the names of job portals we would have an access. Well now, the situation is relatively similar — we have simply replaced job portals with Social Media and LinkedIn. More often than not, these so-called “strategies” appear pretty one-sided, lacking an in-depth understanding of the entire sourcing gamut. For now, it seems we are drifting toward “Social Media” as an entire strategy whereas in reality, it is simply one part of the entire strategy.
We get easily carried away with numbers like 800 million on Facebook and 150 million on LinkedIn. Do you know that 81% of LinkedIn and 76% of Twitter users never visit their account? Facebook, by contrast, has a higher engagement ratio — over 42% of users visit Facebook every day. I’m sure you will agree that the actual target population size is much bigger than just these numbers, which means with Social Media we are only looking at one particular section of candidates – not the whole group. Maureen Sharib has touched on this point very well in her Phone Sourcing discussion.
So – when it comes to Social Media channels, do we expect candidates to fall in our laps for easy pickings? Will this be a holy grail of candidate acquisition?
My answer is NO. If what we call a Social Media “strategy” simply means posting jobs in every corner of the Internet and expecting positions to fill, then we are missing the trick. What we need to look at is where our candidates are — are they all hanging on Social Media channels? Are they all equally active? Wouldn’t we look at candidates who are not using these channels? There are several layers of hidden treasure beyond social channels that remain to be excavated.
Amybeth Hale
on Dec. 20, 2011
Though the news hasn’t appeared as an update on its official blog, Facebook has has begun introducing a new feature which allows business pages to receive private messages from their fans on the social network.
Right now, the new feature has only been rolled out to Asia-based admins. When it launched on Monday morning, Facebook page admins woke up to the following information box:
Shannon Van Curen
on Oct. 10, 2011
Have you noticed that Facebook now has four professional networking apps? First we were introduced to BranchOut, then BeKnown made a splash at SHRM, Talent.me snuck in at the end of the summer, and finally PoolDip has entered the scene to stir the pot. I’m sure there are more professional apps on Facebook, but four apps are extremely difficult to manage.
We are all aware of the reach and magnitude that Facebook empowers. With 800 million profiles and growing, it’s natural to have a professional networking presence on this site. However, is it necessary to be on all four?
The advantage of sourcing on Facebook is obvious, as it encompasses more profiles. Likewise, communication is free. While LinkedIn has been our sourcing alibi, Facebook does avert you from directly sourcing by profession. Additionally, with the vast number of profiles, identifying your direct contact with a common name is also a recurring challenge.
With the recent launch of Identified, advanced sourcing on Facebook is starting to become more of a reality. Identified pulls information directly from Facebook and allows recruiters to directly source candidates from its database. With the introduction to Identified, do we really need a habitation in all four apps?
This question has been a bit of an anomaly on my quest to source candidates directly on Facebook. I’ve decided to take a “deep dive” into all four apps. Perhaps you can determine the winner of the professional networking apps.
John Zappe
on Sep. 28, 2011
The Facebook changes announced last week at the developers conference, and those in the weeks before, have major implications for the way employers use the site to brand themselves and build relationships with potential candidates and future hires.
Recruiters who now use Facebook exclusively or mostly to push out jobs will become even more marginalized by the increasing emphasis the social site is placing on engagement. Those who actively invest in courting their Facebook “fans,” offering content of value, and real conversations, will reap even greater rewards than they do now, earning their brand a place on user’s forthcoming Timelines, and the ability to broaden and measure their reach as visitors “Share” content with their own FB friends.
One of the consequences of these and the other changes Facebook is rolling out, is that it will be harder than ever for employers to compete for attention. Even before last week’s f8 conference, when the company’s most profound changes in years were announced by CEO Mark Zuckerberg, routine updates such as a “like” or a me-too comment, and job postings, were being moved to a ticker-style activity window on the profile page. Even more is likely to appear there as Facebook’s standards of what’s worthy of being a top post, and thus rising to the top of a person’s wall, become more stringent. (A good summary of the announced changes is available here.)
Shannon Van Curen
on Sep. 23, 2011
The competition for professional networking sites just took an attention-grabbing twist, as Identified launched in public beta Monday. This new site is actually aimed at aiding recruiters in producing better search results for candidates and predicting which candidates companies would be must interested in. Dubbed as a professional job search engine, Identified ranks people on a scale of 0-100 from three key areas: professional career, education background, and social network.
Built on a combination of your Facebook data and entered information, Identified takes the approach of ranking the top candidates in various skill sets. For example, if you are looking for a Software Engineer, Identified will accumulate a list of the top software engineers on the site.
By using a complex algorithm, Identified provides users on what companies are ideally looking for. In fact, it was that concept that intrigued the minds of Identified’s co-founders Brendan Wallace and Adeyemi Ajao. The two were students at Stanford University when they pondered the question, “What will make us more desirable to employers?”
The two built the site and when it was launched on campus, they had more users in eleven days than Stanford’s career center had resumes. After expanding to nine other colleges (Harvard, Brown, UVA, Georgetown, etc.), Identified raised $5.5M from Google CEO Eric Schmidt, Draper Fisher Jurvetson’s Tim Draper, Bill Draper and others.
“When I first saw Identified exploding on Stanford’s campus, it reminded me of the early stories of Facebook’s growth at Harvard back in 2004,” Bill Draper said. “Like Facebook did for social networking, I think Identified will become the standard of professional networking for the Facebook generation and beyond.”
Identified works closely with Facebook’s API to pull data that helps accumulate your ranking. Historically Facebook has been a college phenomenon. In fact, it was only open to university scholars until 2006. This being the case, there is far more accurate data on Facebook than other professional networking sites such as LinkedIn. According to Identified, 47% of Facebook users enter their professional information in their Facebook profiles.
Currently there are near 80 million Facebook users in the United States between the ages of 18-34, as opposed to slightly over three million users on LinkedIn. If 47% of those Facebook users have entered their professional information, Facebook is a much larger resume database than we realized.
According to Wallace, “the problem with LinkedIn is that it outputs a lot of data. Identified is a professional search engine that delivers professional information in a professional way. You get the best results at the top.”
The biggest debate with Identified has been over its rankings, but let’s takes a closer look. Looking back at the photo of the query I ran earlier, Garrett Marcotte is the top ranked Software Engineer, yet does not have the highest score. In theory, Identified is telling us that Marcotte is the most desirable Software Engineer to companies in their database. After a closer look into his professional and collegiate history, you can see why:
What you can’t see is who Marcotte is connected too. Remember, Identified also ranks your relevancy on your social network. Since I ran a query for Software Engineers and Marcotte is the most relevant candidate, his social network probably contains a vast array of other Software Engineers.
It’s the same theory that you’re only as good as the people you surround yourself with. If you are a good recruiter, your network probably contains a lot of high level recruiting connections. Likewise, if you are a junior recruiter or not the best sourcer, you probably don’t have the largest recruiting network, and you probably are not reading this article.
In a similar search for “Robotics,” Marcotte’s relevancy is ranked lower. This is most likely because he is currently not performing that role and his social network probably contains less “Robotics” professionals.
To date, Identified has scored and indexed over 40 million professionals, 60,000 companies and over 8,000 universities. 40 million profiles is a lot, and Wallace adds that they are growing at a rate of 2 million profiles a day. However, not everyone has signed up just yet. Identified pulls in its users’ connections’ information straight from Facebook and creates scores even for people not registered. This is public information that Identified is providing recruiters without a direct connection on Facebook to these candidates. Currently, users are not able to search on score, but a paid feature will soon be in place for recruiters to utilize.
It is important to note that your score is not an indicator of success or status as a better candidate. Your score should be viewed as an indicator as to how companies may potentially view you. Likewise, your rank does not necessarily make you the best candidate for the job, but the higher your rank, the more desirable you will potentially look to companies. Identified has features, and is working on more, that will help you increase your score. By adding your grade point average, SAT scores, job title, and description of past work done, your score can increase. In theory, if you rocked a 4.0 at the University of Wisconsin, you can have a similar score to a user that attended a more prestigious university.
One cool feature of this site is the analytics it provides for each search. Check out my search for a Software Engineer. Identified lists the most common schools and majors for each Software Engineer on the site. This is a great analytics feature that can be for pipelining and sourcing future candidates.
On your personal page, the analytics go even further. Identified lists the most common job titles, most common companies, most common universities and even most common majors in your own network. Great information to know.
According to Wallace, “Identified is trying to give transparency to users when companies are searching for you in Facebook and how that information is in a score.” He adds, “LinkedIn is a database, and Identified is a search engine that gives relevance to who is going to be on top of the list.”
This might just be the most relevant professional search engine that we have seen yet. The only candidates that we will not be able to see are the ones not on Facebook. But with near 800 million Facebook users, I think we have found our next recruiting playground.
So how relevant are you?
Shannon Van Curen
on Aug. 22, 2011
It’s eminent that recruiters make the best networkers. Being the face of a company and telling its story to potential prospects is part of our vocation. Attending job fairs, networking events, and mixers allow us to mingle with passive candidates and offers exposure to the community.
With Recruitment 3.0, social networking allows us to have access to millions of people and lets us easily grow our talent pipeline. Today, we spend the majority of our day searching for candidates on the most popular social media sites. LinkedIn has become our playground and building our network is an absolute necessity.
Without a doubt, recruiters should be the most connected users on LinkedIn or any other social media site. I actually feel bad for my non-recruiting friends as their LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter feeds have become over-saturated with my latest connections, job announcements, and recruiting news articles.
The words “sourcing” and “hiring” have become part of my friend’s vocabulary. I love reading their responses to my social media updates:
Obviously, my status updates and constant jabber about sourcing has become a little obnoxious to others. As a result, I stumbled upon a new site that makes it easy to reach out to your entire social network without status updates or blasting a tweet.
Knod.es, product of SnapGoods, is a new site that searches your LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook connections that are most likely to have an answer to your question or topic.
Valerie Scarsellato
on Jul. 14, 2011
Sourcing has always been a significant component in the recruiting lifecycle. However, in recent years, sourcing has taken a giant step into the forefront and has become recognized as the solid foundation upon which successful recruiting rests in order to identify and secure top-level talent, no matter what industry you may be supporting.
These days, it seems as if nearly everyone from CEOs of Fortune 500 companies, to inventors in various fields, to the grandmother of your best friend has a Facebook page, a LinkedIn profile, or a Twitter account.
Although some people are still discovering and testing the waters of the Twitterverse, a diverse and large population spanning nearly all industry segments has already fully jumped on to the real-time messaging bandwagon in order to share information or blurt out a piece of nonsense rolling around in their head.
Kate-Madonna Hindes
on Jul. 5, 2011
Facebook has been a forerunner in personal networking. As more companies have joined Facebook, the applications utilizing personal and professional information are also on the rise. Two years ago we saw this same process within Twitter as more and more developers saw a way to profit and join the network. However, an important question is being asked: Is Facebook trying to be too much to too many people?
I’ve seen the fads come and go (Farmville, Mafia Wars, Questions). The latest additions to Facebook are professional networking platforms. BranchOut and BeKnown are the first two I’ve tried. I’ve noticed it’s a battle to leave my Facebook Wall uncluttered. Head to head, which professional application on Facebook is truly the best? This week, I’m looking into BranchOut.
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