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India – Social media recruitment to grow by +50% in 2014

22 April 2014

Social media has moved rapidly from being 'purely social' to a 'business tool' as more and more companies are now using the platform to recruit the right people for specific jobs, a trend that is expected to grow by about +50% compared with 2013, reports profit.ndtv.com.

According to Sunil Goel, Managing Director of executive search firm GlobalHunt, "Mid and senior-level professionals do not want to project themselves as easily available resources but by putting up their resume in job portals or an agency makes them easily available resources, which affects their role and compensation negotiations. Sectors like IT, IT-enabled Services, banking and finance have been recruiting across levels using this platform. However, even [Fast-Moving-Consumer-Goods], manufacturing, power and energy, retail, automobile are also using the social media for mid to senior level hiring."

Alf Harris, Director of India for recruitment firm Michael Page explained: “Social media is obviously a much-talked about aspect of recruitment and it undoubtedly offers individuals an excellent opportunity to access opportunities and for companies to reach out to talent.”

"However, one must keep in mind that social media is part of the recruitment process. Once the recruitment process moves into the assessment cycle, there is limited impact from social media," he added.

The advantage of social media is the ability to reach a significant number of people quickly and easily compared to traditional recruitment process, he said.

KPMG India partner Nishchae Suri said almost 80% of companies use social media for recruitment: "This trend is more prevalent in Fortune 500 and global firms. We expect social media to play a stronger role, particularly in India. A number of companies here have only recently started posting vacancies on websites building company-specific pages. Recruitment till now has largely been through direct approaches from specialist recruiters and company websites.”

Mr Suri added that since the advent of online applications, the recruitment process has become much quicker: "The interactive aspect of social media is also extremely attractive - most companies have pages on social networking websites where candidates and recruiters converse real-time.”