Blog Assignment: Using SNA for Corporate Hiring!

Using Social Network Analysis to solve hiring challenges in a Corporation

The Challenge: Corporate Hiring

Corporate firms are experiencing a tremendous challenge of hiring the right talent and retaining them. The concern is that there are too many applicants for any job profile and the quality of neither can be attested on the face of the application and interviews completely, hence retention gets tough. The right and the shortest way of finding the right talent has become the major concern and taking a toll on the corporate business.

Collecting and Utilizing the Data:

To attack the challenge, the recruitment teams should firstly try to maximize the references they can get internally within their firm and through all the resources they could access and then get outside the firm. For this, they could send out a flyer to all its employees and allow the firm to access their contacts in the professional and social network on a voluntary basis. In return to this, the firm should offer an incentive at different levels from where they can get resources for Interviews and/or Hiring.

This should not be a very hard to achieve for the firm and once they gain access to these networks which in this case we could consider portals like LinkedIn, Glassdoor, CareerBuilder, Facebook and Twitter. I would like to take this instance and bring it to notice of a lot of people that Twitter is considered mostly as a social networking site similar to Facebook but in fact a lot of new jobs and active hiring happens through Twitter. Rather Twitter is one of the best mixes for a Professional cum Social networking site and that is why if observed there are most LinkedIn profiles which show their Twitter Id.

Plan of Action:

We could create a network map as in UCINET from all the network connections these employees have and see how these employees are connected to whom and from which nodal points. The attributes to this Network could be Professional Contacts, Friends, Acquaintances, School Friends, Family members, Groups (@ LinkedIn, Facebook, etc), Common activity groups (Meet-ups, adventure activities, Religious, Charity, etc). We will then find how their contacts at different degrees (1^st, 2^nd, 3^rd, etc) would be of interest to the corporate, like for example if the employee is on LinkedIn then definitely he would be a part of some groups which have resources of the same skill-set and also friends and at times some family members also.

Outcome of the SNA:

If we find them matching the skills we need then we would also like to verify their career interests and do a quantifiable as well psycho analysis of their personality. This will help the firm not only understand the technical capability of the resource for a job but also the mindset and persona which will help the firm take a better decision in hiring and retaining the employee on a long-term basis.

There could be such that most times an employee is so busy with his work that he would not know if there is a possible job prospect for his/her friends, family and most importantly spouse. Ideally this could be in favor of an employee to help the contacts and if the souse could work in the same place, this could be a lot better reason to work for the same employer for a real long duration and keep them both happily retained with their work life balance being rewarded. At the same time even if friends could work at the same place, people feel less workload and enjoy the workplace all the more.

The corporates can also view which kind of companies are looking at the same potential employees they are targeting and get a better estimate of the role, pay and perks that are offered by competitors to the resource base and likewise prepare for their remuneration plan. The corporates can surely get a welcoming response from employees for this plan since they could get benefits like Cash incentives or similar for people being interviewed and recruited through their contact and this would lead to a Win-Win situation for most parties involved in the action plan.