subject: Online Recruitment Database & Social Media: New Recruitment Trend [print this page] The world has changed in the last five yearsThe world has changed in the last five years. Social media is not just a toy anymore. It informs the way that search engines work, it influences public policy and it has changed the face of the recruitment industry.
A recruitment database requires information stored by the social media as a matter of course, current employment, job history, skills history and geographic location. These are just a sample of the indicators that can be caught when a designer trawls through the mass of information generated by business-oriented social media; other telling pieces of information might include relevant interests, skills that can be cross-pollinated and even membership of or connection to influential companies, organisations and committees.
The more information that can be stored in an employment database, the more fruitful would be the matches, whom a system can make when a client requires a candidate to fill a role or when candidates look out for work. Recruitment, after all, works in two ways - both by accepting corporate briefs to find workers to fill positions and by accepting candidates with whom to fill those jobs.
A recruitment related database is ultimately the engine that drives all job searches. The system overlaid on the database allows the user to steer to the correct candidates.
There is, then, a direct relationship between the two. The better the database, the more chance it has of delivering perfect matches. But the system, used to interrogate it, needs to work intuitively and well too; otherwise, the searcher won't be able to interrogate the stored data properly.
A means of sensible interrogation is the key to all database use. The information is in there but the user has to have a way of getting it out. To this end, it is possible that a third party interrogation system will be required, which has been specifically designed to make interrogation of the database easy and productive.
The total recruitment package is moving the industry towards a centralised way of researching candidates, interrogating a recruitment database and making appointments to interview. The database itself is increasingly likely to be owned and leased by a company with exceptional knowledge in the area, which gathers information about potential candidates and stores it in a single location.
Clearly, the more comprehensive the recruitment database becomes, the more valuable it would be to the potential end users. There is, though, a possible conflict between different types of end users, which might be erased when the system used to interrogate the database is subtle enough.
For instance, a company seeking only executive level candidates for specific industry roles simply isn't interested in non-executive candidates. So, the system interrogating the database must be customisable to the degree that it can ignore all members on the database who don't fit the executive bill.
There might be natural segmentation at the data end; that is, executive candidates might be collected into executive databases. In these cases, proprietary and relevant datasets might be made available to each user.
Summary : An online recruitment database can potentially gather information about thousands of high quality candidates using social media graphs.
