Social networking sites--recruiters' new hunting ground

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NEW DELHI, Aug 5 (PTI): Orkut, Linkin, Facebook and other similar popular social networking sites are fast doubling up as the modern day employment exchanges with job seekers as well as companies and recruiters head hunting for talent.
The social networking sites, immensely popular with the netizens especially the young, are having increasing number of 'communities' helping both job seekers and employers.
"Searching for the right person for a job is always a challenge," says Gauri Sarin of Approach Talent Solutions. "So, there is a rising trend among the companies and recruitment agencies to use social networking sites to look for the right person," she adds.
With 100 million Internet users in the country, India is now the fourth largest country in terms of Internet penetration, a recent Assocham study points out.
According to Assocham , E-recruitment is gaining ground as a preferred medium of hiring in India. Especially for job seekers, the Internet has opened up the world of job searching, turning it into a 24-hour-a-day market place.
Internet is arguably the most immediate, convenient and comprehensive medium for employment seekers to research and prospect for jobs.
Upon a search for 'jobs', communities such as Orkut throw up about a 1,000 odd related communities such as 'IT jobs India walk-ins','Freshers','Retail Jobs in India', 'Walk in for Jobs', Job Sampark' etc.
Staffing services providers like Cloud 9 India, Pathway Recruitment Agency use such sites as a platform to hire and have links to their own websites. Populated with thousands of members each of these communities have a huge database of job seekers and can reach them within seconds.
"Of all new services on the internet, social networking sites hold the most promise. The reason for this is that these community-driven sites have the ability to leverage their user base across other verticals,"says R. Sunder, President, Times Business Solutions.
He further adds, "most of the growth in the social networking space has happened in the last one year. It will
continue to grow at an accelerated pace as more people gain high-speed internet access. It has come down to mobile phones and with web 2.0 coming to market, the future seems to be limited only by the imagination."
Young people are making most of it. Says Neha Kapoor a fresh graduate from Kanpur,"I got a job in one of the best BPOs in Delhi thanks to a 'scrap' ", a term used by Orkut to describe the messages that are posted on the net.
B Sudhir, software engineer, 25, moderator of a community 'Walk in for Jobs' in Orkut says, "I started this community as an hobby, as I am Internet savvy and had gone through the grind of trying the to find a job. I wanted to create a platform for freshers."
His community claims to have membership of over 30,000 members. Sudhir says,"Other than the recruitment agencies many corporate houses directly post their requirements on the site."
He also has a blog whose members receive job opening postings into their mail boxes. Although most of these services are free yet there are ways to monitise these communities by dividing the jobs into free and paid categories, in which the recruiter pays for some specific advertisements.
There are many networking sites other than Orkut such as Facebook, Myspace,Yaari and also very popular professional networking site like Linkin, Ecademy, Doostang, Xing, Plaxo, etc.
Linkin, a business oriented social networking site is mainly used for professional networking,with a membership base of 12 million across 400 economic zones, it very popular in the US.
Linkin as Wikipedia says allows regular users to maintain list of contact details of people they know and trust in
business. It is now fast catching up in India.
"Sites like Orkut cater to those who require fresh blood like BPO's and especially IT industry. While Linkin is effective for the senior levels," says Sarin.
According to Assocham survey junior, mid-level and senior executives accounted for more than 50 percent of the online job seekers. Also 46 per cent of the online job seekers fall between 26 to 35 age group. Thus with an estimated 120 million Indians logging on to the net in 2007-08 head hunting through networking
sites is a trend that will only increase.
"While social networking is one of the current mainstream media buzzwords, in the recruitment and staffing space it is all about helping employers to find and better match candidates to open job positions - and build a talent pool. Whether social networking is the answer to recruitment is yet to be seen," says Sunder.