Supporting Startup Growth with the New Recruiting Ecosystem

Talent acquisition and retention are critical to the growth of startups and midsize companies. Many things affect talent management, including corporate culture, company reputation, compensation, career path and so on. But an employee’s first exposure to a company is usually through the recruiting process.

According to some estimates, traditional recruiting firms consume a third of hiring budgets but produce fewer than 10 percent of the results, due to fees that range above 20 percent of first-year salaries. However, professional social networks like LinkedIn and Viadeo are changing the rules. These companies leverage a much larger database of candidates and already play a big role in talent acquisition. Companies like BranchOut, Jobvite and Monster, meanwhile, are building Facebook apps for hiring and career development. Indeed, a 2011 study commissioned by Jobvite found that 89 percent of respondent companies planned to use social media for recruiting versus 83 percent in the previous year. The same survey stated that 55 percent of companies would raise their budgets for social recruiting and that 87 percent used LinkedIn; it also found that 64 percent recruited via two or more social networks, and 40 percent did so through three or more.

Key findings in this report include:

• Small- and medium-sized businesses can benefit from innovative technology that will help their recruiting efforts, and the cost for doing so is reasonable (and decreasing).
• Technology enables the recruiting process to be more streamlined, scientific and democratic.
• The technology-recruiting ecosystem is quickly evolving. The technology itself is becoming more innovative, and the industry is consolidating mostly through acquisition. These trends benefit small businesses and high-growth companies, since it is easy to experiment with different solutions without having to lock into a long contract.

In the following whitepaper we will look at what is driving these changes in the workplace.