Sunday, July 08, 2007

Combining Social Network and personal network as recruiting tool

I've been working in software industry for last 4 years as engineer. Since most work in a software industry is of technical nature recruiting persons with right skills becomes very important.

Strong technical background is fundamental requirement, it can tested much easily because of binary nature of the tests.

Broad areas typically tested in technical interviews are
1. Fundamentals knowledge of technology.
2. Strong problem solving skills.
3. Learning skills.

General question to be answered during any interview by interviewer is
"Would you like to work with this person?"
Now this is the tough question. Several interviewers ask this question to themselves about a candidate and take the decision. While answering this question they have to also answer "whether my teammates would like to work with this person?".
These questions are most difficult to answer as you meet that person only for an hour, lots of chance of making an error of judgment and you may have a false opinion about a person.

Few things that helps us decide about a person are
1. Attitude of person toward other people, life, work.
2. Professional maturity level. (For experienced candidate).
3. Ethical values.
4. Verification of facts stated in resume.

Now how do one can find it about a person.

Few things generally companies do are
1. Ask candidates for reference:
This solution has its own problems. Candidate can easily control the information shared by such a source.
2. Employ a detective agency to do the background work.
This is a very costly option and is surely a overkill.
3. Get in touch with teachers from the processor.
4. Some professional companies do this work as there primary job.

With the advent of phenomenon of "Social Networking" like orkut and linkedin.
We have one more way of finding about a person.
"Through mutual friends", "Finding in which forums the person participate".
Information shared through mutual friend will have more trust value.
Activity partners or people who play some game with candidate can give lots of valuable information about attitude, team spirit, ethics. Old colleagues/classmates can give you more information about professional maturity, smartness, ambitions, team spirit, work and even technical strength.

Out of all sources "Social Networking" phenomenon and use of personal network to find about a person is low cost, easy and trusted way of recruiting right candidate.

3 comments:

Sethx said...

Dude.... Glad that my Orkut profile was not checked thoroughly (I know it was checked at least once though). Otherwise communities such as "Torry Harass" :-P would have stood against me.

Nice one !!

Zimbabao said...

Generally things should be pardoned for freshers as they are new to the professional world and yet to grasp lots of things.

SmartKid said...

LinkedIn is a professional site meant for networking. Databases like NSR ( https://nationalskillsregistry.com/) have made things a lot simpler. I don't think any employer trusts the social networking sites like Orkut to check the background. People use foul language in most of the forums. Does it mean that he/she is having bad character?