Making more than the sum of its parts

Recruitment seems, at a first glance, not the right place for facilitating collaboration. Associations with this topic inherit negative connoted words and expressions like “War for talents”, rivalry, selection processes, and a huge administrative effort. There seems to be not much space left for being social in any way. But this is only one way to look at the topic.

Literally all companies are looking for top talent if they have to fill an open position. The major problem is to find such candidates, attract them for the job, structure the recruiting process in an efficient way, and do not scare them away again during the hiring process. Social collaboration can help here on the employee side as well as on the employer side of the recruitment process. On the employee side, social collaboration could be used to provide e.g. experts communities or social platforms which attract people equipped with certain skills. Once users are identified as high potentials in a certain field, they can be added to a talent pool and are easier to find if a suitable position opens up in the future. Using online social collaboration is also promising because a recent McKinsey study has shown that 80% of all online users interact with social networks of any kind on a regular basis and the reach of social collaboration exceeds the traditional way of recruiting by publishing ads by a great amount. Also the activation of otherwise passive candidates is easier. Nevertheless, establishing such a community or social network from scratch is a difficult and tedious task connected with costs and high risk. Therefore, it might be more beneficial to use existing social collaboration possibilities, whereas the competition for the potential employer is intensified.

But social collaboration in the recruitment environment does not only happen on the employee side. Also companies do benefit from a well-established social collaboration system and process during a recruiting phase. Not many things are more annoying for an applicant than a recruiting process which takes too much time. Waiting for decisions or information can cost valuable time during the recruiting process and maybe scares the potential employee away right in the arms of a competitor. Speeding up such a process and making it as efficient as possible should therefore be one of the top priorities for recruiters. Social collaboration plays a big role in this because using the right tool accelerates the whole process. Bringing all participants on employer side together in one virtual place makes decision making easier and also sharing knowledge in such a tool helps to bring every party on the same page. Social collaboration tools like SAP Jam fulfills the recruiter’s needs of social collaboration by providing an easy to use platform. Such a platform could be used to store information in one central place which might be included in several emails spread other several people. This reduces the time in which recruiters have to search for a specific piece of information and increase the added value of the recruiting process.

But not only recruitment can be supported by social collaboration. Also onboarding as a logical follow up process to recruiting can be supported by social collaboration. One application would be to make it easier to establish networks for a new-hire if they are appointed into the right social collaboration groups.

It is clear that technology alone does not improve the recruitment process but it helps a great deal.