Days ago, I downloaded one survey report issued by Jobvite who is a provider of next-generation recruitment solutions. This survey has been published in 2008 which is focusing on social recruitment. Social recruitment is the practice of leveraging social and professional networks, online and offline, for talent acquisition. The survey shows that companies are increasingly tapping social networks to find employees. But most have yet to implement a comprehensive social recruitment strategy that fully leverages companies' most valuable social networks – those of their employees.
To increase hiring success, Jobvite recommends setting up processes and incentives to involve all employees in identifying candidates, as well as leveraging the full suite of available online tools. “In a talent crunch, such as the one many companies with professional staff face today, your employees are the most valuable asset you have for recruitment,” said Jesper Schultz, Chief Executive Officer of Jobvite. "Recruiters are natural networkers and recognize the value of using new social tools and leveraging their employee networks. However, the survey shows that companies are losing out by not fully communicating recruitment priorities to the whole company. By enabling and motivating employees to participate fully, employers can leverage the connections of the whole company in acquiring talent."
You can download the 2009 Social Recruitment Survey Report from Jobvite Company Site or download 2008 Survey Result from my box file
From my perspective, there are more different views in terms of China market. The following chart shows the top social networking sites which companies use to find candidates in western countries. Without doubts, Linkedin ranks the number one channel. Also, in terms of Geographic Ranking of Member Base, China ranks number one among the fastest growing countries (by member sign-up, November, 2008). And we see a growing trend for MNC companies in China investing on linkedin solution for recruitment purpose. However, for Facebook, Jobster and Myspace, they are facing an embarrassed situation in China. While rest of the world generally sticks to Facebook, Orkut and MySpace etc, Chinese have their own Social Networking Websites. According to a study carried out by CR-Nielsen from 1st December till 28th December, 2008, you can find the top 10 best social networking sites in China. Also, you can find more articles about China social network: Cracking China's Social Network Market (Forbes). Facebook has enjoyed the media spotlight for over a year now, but it is still far from ruling the world. It is interesting to see that Facebook has almost no presence in China. In China, QQ dominates by far with 300 million active accounts. QQ makes most of their money from digital goods - from background music to personalization, avatars or casual games. Xiaonei in China applied the early Facebook model (alumni) and is doing very well in terms of users. Both QQ and Xiaonei are working on expanding their services to recruitment market in China (Cite from the interview with Tencent HRD and the strategic development plan from Xiaonei focusing on campus recruitment and advertisement). Notably, QQ had 523 million USD in revenues in 2007 and 224 million operating profit, with only 13% coming from advertising! This is a total different profit model compared with Facebook and overseas social networking sites, which mainly depend on advertisement. The reason could be China has not yet developed a very rich online advertising market compared with US, and then, they had no choice but to find alternative revenue models. In a way, the rich online ad market has been holding back innovation in the US, and forced most Internet companies to design their service around pageview as a main metric. Whatever the different thinking logic coming from, this leads me to think more beyond social networking sites in China. We know Job aggregator is getting more popular now in US, but according to the above assumption, I have doubts if it will have the same influence and performance in China due to the immature online advertising market.
The concept of social networking is becoming an ideal business case for investors and we see more and more similar social networking sites appear in China. But up to now, I haven't found there is a dedicated social networking site focusing on recruitment, so called social recruitment site. Maybe in the near future, some successful social recruitment models could be come out and until that day, I don't expect the existing layout of China recruitment market has any dramatic changes.
