Viral Recruiting - Modernization of the Recruitment Industry

Many existing solutions have stagnated and are becoming increasingly ineffective. Current problems need to be resolved through innovation in the HR industry, and one such innovation is viral recruiting.

The prevalence of many recruitment sites, networks, and job boards have created a surplus of redundant concepts. Both recruiters and job seekers become lost in an increasingly complex web of online Human Resource solutions.

That said, there are a few facts that the recruitment industry needs to come to terms with:

• Job boards are increasingly infective
• Human Resources must learn how to more effectively reach Gen Y
• The best talent may be already employed and not seeking a new position
• Innovation in the recruitment industry must be dictated by new trends, and not the other way around

Although the Internet has complicated matters, the solution must not be to move away from Web-based recruitment. The solution lies in the fact that recruiters must conform to new trends on the Internet. Job boards such as Monster and CareerBuilder were one form of a web-based solution, but as Alex Conway of Yellojobs.com has pointed out on XtremeRecruiting.tv, "job boards are on the downturn and they are becoming the [print] newspapers of 10 years ago."

It is apparent that further innovation is needed to modernize the recruitment industry. For example, marketing strategies have evolved using the Internet to successfully exploit the multitude of opportunities the Internet has to offer. One such solution is viral marketing, the process in which a marketing concept is passed along voluntarily by word of mouth, facilitated by the Internet.

The popularity of social media has bolstered viral marketing. Such marketing can be found on message boards, blogs, viral videos, e-mails, and social networking sites. The viral marketing method enables the targeted market to also become marketers themselves. This method can, and must, be applied to recruitment industry strategy and referrals are the platform in which recruiting can become viral.

The environment to do so has been provided by the aforementioned explosion in, and popularity of, social media. The prevalence of this media can be combined with the oldest and most successful form of staffing, referrals, in order to produce a more effective and cost-saving form of recruitment.

The recruitment industry must streamline the search for talent search in line with online social networking and other social media. Referrals are the most successful and effective form of recruitment and are supported by established employee referral programs at many large corporations. The process of referring a friend for a job is a casual and natural process, the same as suggesting the purchase of a product or service in viral marketing.

Combining online viral marketing methods with the referral process will produce an extremely effective form of recruitment, viral recruiting. Viral recruiting will take advantage of social media by promoting positions to targeted markets.

• By targeting markets and through the inherent screening process provided by referrals, large pools of unqualified applicants provided by job boards will be reduced or eliminated.
• Reaching the increasingly difficult to source pool of talent for the corporate world, Gen Y, will be facilitated through the incorporation of wildly popular social networking platforms such as Facebook and MySpace.
• By "virally" promoting open positions, already employed passive candidates who may not be seeking a new career may be alerted of a more conducive position. These "passive job seekers" are a source of widely untapped and superior talent.
• Through the use of popular social media, recruitment will be brought up to speed and in line with current and future trends