SI Review: May 2013

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The Buzz

Why I ‘Like’ Work4Labs

Making Facebook social sourcing/recruiting happen

By Andrew Karpie

Facebook Connections

When it comes to the rise of social recruiting, our minds tend to rest on LinkedIn as a truly “enabling platform.” Facebook, on the other hand, seems to raise more questions than it provides answers or solutions. While Facebook offers connections to several hundred million people worldwide, how to exploit these connections remains fuzzy to many of us.

Poking Friends

Since 2010, Work4Labs has been progressively inventing and delivering sourcing/ recruiting solutions that are significantly (though not exclusively) organized around the Facebook platform of potential candidate connections. Understanding that the enormous Facebook platform is evolving and maturing as a candidate sourcing/recruiting platform, Work4Labs continues designing specialized solutions for those hiring businesses that want to start leveraging the Facebook platform.

‘Like’ What’s Up?

Today, 18,000 hiring businesses around the globe are using one or more of Work4Labs solutions to source/recruit workers. Hundreds of very large, often global, companies (including staffing firms like Kelly, Adecco, Robert Half, et al) are making use of the Work4Labs solutions, which allow these hiring businesses to “do their thing” socially in up to 26 different languages. For some of these businesses, it’s about starting to penetrate and have a footprint in the Facebook platform/ population; for others, it’s about being able to target and engage very specific classes of candidates almost anywhere in the world.

Spread Your Social Wings

The value add of Work4Labs interconnected solutions is driven by complex engineering under the covers — the kind needed to navigate and exploit the new social universe. The main solution set is called Social Recruiting, which comes in both a free and a paid enterprise version. It provides a very rich set of tools to enable hiring businesses to “spread their social wings” on Facebook and get down to the active business of social sourcing/recruiting.

Another solution offering, Recruitment Advertising, provides analytically driven, high-precision “targeted ads” to build brand in certain sub-populations or selectively engage certain kinds of candidates. The third main solution offering, Mobile Recruiting Solutions, provides a unique solution set/ tool kit to support the sourcing/recruiting of those candidate species that tend to live and breathe in a more mobile habitat (away from landlines, desktops and fixed offices, etc.).

The Buzz

The ecosystem of social recruiting solutions emerging around the Facebook platform is different from the more closed ecosystem that grew up around LinkedIn (in that case, LinkedIn itself seized the initiative to become the primary provider of sourcing/recruiting solutions for the platform). In Facebook’s case, the question so far has been left open. Among the players that are trying to complement the Facebook platform with new value-added talent acquisition solution, Work4Labs is the one making the most progress in filling out a portfolio of solutions that can help hiring businesses leverage the enormous Facebook population to find and engage candidates and workers.

Andrew Karpie is a research analyst at Staffing Industry Analysts. akarpie@staffingindustry.com