Traditional recruitment processes take anywhere from days, to weeks, to even months to complete, and finding these “top-shelf” candidates is a lengthy process where the company has to spread the word about the recently opened position with the hopes that the right person will get the news and apply. It’s a game where the odds are pretty narrow.
Despite the odds, big companies are attracting the best talent and growing their value and reputation at a fast pace. Google, for example, grew its employee number from 16,805 in 2007 to 98,771 in 2018. That’s 6 times more growth in just a decade! How do you think they can hire with such speed without harming their internal culture along the way?
Big companies understood the power of referrals and social recruiting in today’s environment where dedicated professional online networks, like LinkedIn, play an essential role in getting the attention of the best candidates.
But looking forward, these platforms look like stepping stones, because recruiting is ready to be changed completely by blockchain-based projects such as Canlead, Aworker, and Indorse.io. Leveraging the best features of today’s social networks, these new platforms are shaping the “Opportunity Sharing Economy” where users are being directly rewarded for successful referrals.
What’s the fastest way to get an interview at Google?
In almost every large company, recruitment is managed by a department of tens to hundreds of experts. These are the ones responsible in determining employee attainment, employee satisfaction, employee accountability, and employee turnover.
Google is our best example of a company having some of the most prestigious recruiters, a reputation in the job market, and a volume of 1 million CVs received every year. With such a high number of applicants, how can you stand out as a candidate? How can you reach that desired interview and, with it, achieve a real chance for landing a job?
According to ex-Googlers, an internal referral is immensely powerful in landing an interview. Furthermore, they claim that most candidates land their jobs by being recommended by existing employees, even if the relationship between the two is not direct. Most of them are second or third-degree connections, where the word of mouth and a chain of emails brought one’s CV to the table of the person in charge.
Before judging this recruitment strategy, however, try to think about how many replies you’d get if you’d ask your personal network the following question: “Do you know anyone who wants to work at Google?”
Employee referrals are considered one of the most productive recruiting strategies for a whole host of reasons:
- Takes the shortest time to hire.
- Has the lowest turnover rate.
- 82% of employers rate referral programs as offering the best return on investment of any recruitment channel.
No wonder people are trying to turn their employees into “recruiters” by offering incentives. Most of today’s companies are looking to create a rewarding workplace for their employees. Combine that with a straightforward process for encouraging referrals and you end up with a win-win deal.
How have social networks changed the recruitment process?
In an era when technology rules, the recruitment process shouldn’t stop evolving. That’s how new solutions have been developed for recruiters to take advantage of the new online networks to find qualified applicants.
Today, LinkedIn is the most recognized social platform for screening and recruiting candidates. 350 million professionals are connected under the same social network showcasing their skills, expertise, and job-seeking desires.
Employers find the platform useful because they can even approach those who are not actively seeking employment but may be interested in the right opportunity. It’s a win-win interaction.
LinkedIn is not the only social network used by companies to find candidates. Employers consider LinkedIn to be the most effective (73%) social media site for recruiting, but it’s closely followed by Facebook (66%) and Twitter (53%).
Throughout the recent years, recruiters are more open to using these platforms to reach their goals. Unfortunately, social media websites sell both personal and business data to others, while the candidates and employers get no reward (or something to say).
Furthermore, employers are unable to tap into many social referral networks to source talents because social referrers are outside of the employers' payroll system. This remains the biggest obstacle in the job market to overcome.
Libra, lead by Facebook, announced recently that their goal is to create a reliable digital currency and infrastructure that together can deliver on the promise of “the internet of money”. This will change the way payroll system works and how people will be paid in the future.
Recruitment platforms are rising fast in the job market
In today’s world of data-driven recruiting, looting information and calculating metrics have become one of the top priorities for most companies looking to build effective recruitment platforms, while the social aspect has been all but ignored. Who would have thought that the blockchain would be the one to dig into that? There are three projects fall into this category: Canlead, Aworker, and Indorse.io, and we are going to dive into each of their unique solutions.
“A company’s employment brand must be both highly visible and highly attractive because in modern days, candidates often find the employer, not the reverse,” Deloitte said at a “Global Human Capital Trends” event.
There are two characteristics that lead to a win-win situation for candidates and employers; they are job opportunity sharing and social referrals. Canlead bets on both with the ambition to create a global decentralized network with built-in incentives for everyone. That is a decentralized job opportunity sharing platform where everyone can be a recruiter anytime, anywhere, and earn commissions for helping friends, colleagues, and strangers (why not) connect with their future employer. This is all wrapped up in an ecosystem powered by the blockchain, whose goal is to give employers access to higher quality talent globally at lower costs and to give candidates access to unique opportunities.
Recruitment, as seen by Canlead, will happen within the platform where employers, employees, and referrers will maintain a balanced ecosystem. It starts with an employer or recruiter posting a job opportunity (advert) and inviting their network of leads to become referrers of candidates. Naturally, the employers and candidates receive referrals and recommendations, but they can also become referrers themselves at any point. While the network will become wider and deeper, the blockchain will act as a record of all opportunities and referrals, as well as ensuring that payments and rewards are seamless.
Aside from cost, the other biggest issue that we identified with the current social networks is the lack of privacy and control over the participants' data. Aworker turns it around, allowing people to control their own information. The recruitment platform built on top of its protocol creates a network of users based on verified data and reputation score. Think of it as a job marketplace with a verification system for each record (CV, skills, recommendations) on the blockchain. This type of verification system means that this information is immutable and permanently stored on the network.
Somewhere between referrals and immutable skills, Indorse.io comes up as a LinkedIn where individuals are being rewarded for claims and endorsements. In their platform, a “claim” is a skill backed by proof, such as a degree or a certificate, and that same claim can be “endorsed” by other members through a mechanism called the Indorse Score (SCR). Individuals with high scores will be seen as more trustworthy, socially networked, and employable, with the scope of helping companies in the hiring process.
Breakthrough in the job market and recruitment industry
Since job seekers trust employees much more than employers, these decentralized solutions are looking more like the ways in which companies will attract talent in the future.
These platforms are not meant to replace the current hiring process, for example Canlead unique selling point is ‘simple-to-share jobs, easy-to-pay referrers, and fast-to-hire talent’ together with a three-sided marketplace where job seekers, referrers, and employers are working together. As a result, Canlead differentiates itself by providing the most innovative application of a job opportunity sharing and referral platform on the Blockchain.
This is the “Opportunity Sharing Economy” model innovated by Michael Quan, Founder and CEO of Canlead, who is building the “Job Opportunity Sharing and Referral” platform to utilise Libra, the internet of money.
Source: https://www.talentlyft.com/en/blog/article/170/a-guide-for-setting-up-an-employee-referral-program
A distributed ledger and the blockchain can be leveraged by the recruitment industry to double down on its strengths. While qualified candidates are hard to come by in today’s market, the use of smart contracts for guaranteed rewards bring benefits for all parties involved. Could this be a major breakthrough for the industry?