Once again “Big Data” is all the rage as enterprises struggle to cope with the data deluge that is exploding across the globe. The tsunami of user-generated content has generated an urgent demand for more sophisticated analytical tools in the social media space. This rising demand is bringing the worlds of big data solutions and social media services (i.e. social recruiting, marketing, and sales) closer together than ever before.
In the past two months the software behemoth Oracle acquired the social media marketing platform Virtue and Salesforce acquired Buddy Media. Acquisition of enterprise social media provider Yammer by Microsoft for $1.2 billion raised a lot of eyebrows. Clearly Microsoft didn’t buy Yammer based upon its direct revenue potential. Instead, the acquisition was an acknowledgement of where the market is heading, and how Microsoft desperately needs to reposition itself for the future.
How is BIG data influencing social recruiting?
Social media data is essentially unstructured—that’s what makes it so interesting and so hard to analyze. To meet those ROI needs, we need to turn social media into actionable data or we may end up harming the brand instead of helping it. Analysis is not only about manipulating data, it is an art of cooking the data into a delicious dish for the decision makers to enjoy.
Big data analysis can be applied to recruiting as a way to screen resumes and candidates. Think about all of the HR transactional data that is now in digital form. We have detailed information on almost every employee interaction from the time they begin poking around our career portal until we hit “save” on their exit interview. This is an example of the 95% that we will be able to structure and analyze with big data tools.
The merging of big data solutions and social recruiting platforms will make sure social media analytics experts have to elevate their technology competency. Increasingly, the rudimentary manual analytical methodologies of the past are proving inadequate for fully harnessing the power of big data to provide strategic insights for social media recruiting. At present, the most common approach to analyzing social media data is manual and protracted.
Companies are already sitting on huge data sets of human capital data that they have captured over the years in their ATS/CRM systems, yet few if any companies are really tapping into the latent power of that pool of data. Blogger and Sourcing expert Glen Cathey states:
Regardless of title, data scientists in support of talent identification and acquisition efforts will collect, extract and analyze human capital information from large datasets and deliver actionable intelligence to hiring managers and teams. In other words, these data scientists will find and identify top talent and enable better data/fact-based sourcing and hiring decisions, empowering their employer with the competitive advantage of consistently hiring the best people.
Defining and mapping social networks is extremely challenging. Some of the social recruiting tools that are leveraging big data solutions are:
- TalentBin taps into candidate information from a plethora of social networks to create a searchable database. TalentBin applies big data interpretation to build the canonical database of professional identity.
- Bright aggregates data from social networks to match candidates to jobs. Steeped in data science, Bright eliminates the noise in the hiring process by efficiently connecting job seekers to their best opportunities, and employers to their top prospects. Bright unlocks the power of artificial intelligence to identify and establish a one-to-one signal between candidates and recruiters.
- SmartRecruiters is architected as an open SaaS and described by Gartner as a wake up call to the HCM industry.” Unlike other systems, SmartRecruiters is pre-integrated with many free boards, social networks and job boards. SmartRecruiters consolidates all your recruiting activity in one place and keeps it easy and organized for you. SmartRecruiters has a unique social approach that promotes team reviews, discussions and ratings of candidates.
What tools are you using to cope with big data?