e-vites: An HR/Recruiting tool gaining acceptance

Today’s Sunday comics has a cartoon that showed a frustrated parent dismayed that she’d received a wedding invitation via an e-vite. The parent was longing for the calligraphy, the RSVP card and envelope, etc. The cartoon serves as a reminder that things have definitely changed. Moreover, e-vites and social networking are big now in recruiting.

I’ve written of JobVite before. Their software permits the recruiting staff within a firm to leverage the social networks of the company’s employees to identify and attract potential recruits. The thinking is that great employees know and interact with other great potential employees. The mechanism to make these connections is the e-vite.

JobVite now reports that 83% of recruiters plan to or already use social networking as part of their recruiting process. JobVite believes hiring will likely pickup in the near-term and this will drive the need for more quality prospects to fill the recruiting pipeline. New recruits will be needed to fill all-new positions in addition to vacancies that will surely be created when some currently employed workers get an opportunity to find a better position elsewhere. Those types of moves have been deferred for the last several years but seem to be accelerating today.

JobVite executives also indicated that many companies may have cut their recruiting staff in recent years. Rather than add new recruiting personnel, these firms are looking to technologies to leverage the remaining recruiters they have left. Using social networks and e-vites helps recruiters be more effective (by finding well-qualified prospects via social networks) and efficient (by initiating more searches in less time). JobVite’s solution does more than just parlay the contacts within employees’ LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook accounts. The software can also parse employees’ email accounts and contacts, including Outlook and Gmail.

JobVite claims that e-vites are quite effective. They indicated that e-vites have open rates of 35+%.

If your firm is expecting to need new hires soon or has an interest in upgrading the quality of its recruits, get the full research survey results from JobVite. As for me, I'm still waiting on that engraved RSVP from a recruiter.....