New Jobvite products: Engage and Refer

Yesterday, I had a chance to talk again with Dan Finnigan, CEO of Jobvite. Jobvite’s been a pioneer in connecting social media, workers' connections to other prospective workers, and, recruiters for years. Their core product  defined how employers could tap into the social connections of workers to find more people just like the best and brightest that the employer had already hired.

I like taking a call with Dan as he and his team are perpetually rethinking how recruiting and HR ought to work.  So, during yesterday’s call, Dan told me of two new products they’ve developed: Engage and Refer.

Let’s start with Engage. I believe the best way to imagine Engage is to ask “What if we took the best attributes of a CRM (customer relationship management) solution and applied those to job seekers? More specifically, what if we applied these to passive job seekers (the ones already employed somewhere else)?”

A CRM system treats customer and prospect information like a scarce asset. It tracks and records all interactions with prospects as they progress from being a raw lead to a paying customer. The software knows all of the touch points a prospect has had with the company and its people.  The whole point of these systems can be to drive a ‘conversion’.  These systems can also manage a large number of contacts. It knows who in the company has a relationship with this customer/prospect.

Applying concepts like these to recruiting can be compelling.  The new process would have to look like this:

1. Recruiters could seek referrals from current, active employees or tap into the social networks of these workers (incidentally, this is part of the Refer solution mentioned earlier).
2. These referrals should be added to something more than an ATS (applicant tracking system).  Why? Some of the potential candidates might not be in the market for a job or career change at this time. Yet, if they possess great skills, their information should be captured for future use.
3. The candidate’s data needs to be continuously updated. Refreshing candidate data with current social media content can help significantly here.  ATS data frequently gets stale but chances are a job seekers’ LinkedIn profile is always current.
4. Recruiters would want to place prospective employees into pools that can be targeted for specific outreach campaigns.  Recruiters want to target specific, narrow pools of potential candidates to avoid overwhelming passive job seekers with lots of irrelevant opportunities. In fact, fewer, better targeted messages to passive job seekers might actually help these individuals perceive the company in a better light, improve the company’s recruiting brand, reduce recruiting costs and improve candidate quality.

Jobvite’s Engage is constructed around this new recruiting process flow. Check it out.  And, maybe more importantly, ask yourself if your HR/Recruiting organization is ready for new performance metrics. Are they ready to work to ‘click-thru rates’, engagement statistics, etc.? There’s a different vocabulary about to hit the HR scene.

Jobvite’s Refer works the other angle. Refer helps employers push content into the social media that workers use. It publishes job opportunities to Facebook and Twitter. 

Used together, Refer will help add to the richness of a company’s prospect pool while Engage keeps this information current and helps focus the recruiting efforts on targeted conversion campaigns.