theSocialCV – A Test Drive In Social Recruiting

Recently I took up a free trial on an innovative recruiter product called theSocialCV which has been in development for over 4 years.

theSocialCV is a global internet search tool that builds profiles of candidates based on attributes and information that has been mentioned on various social networks, blogs and other publicly available data sources.  It uses semantic filters and constant monitoring of status updates from over 30 social media sites to build individual profiles in real time.   In their own words, they are “organizing the world’s largest real-time global talent pool”

Please bear in mind theSocialCV is still in Beta, so although some aspects of its functionality are not perfected yet, keep an open mind in terms of the innovative ways it could be used as part of an integrated online recruitment strategy.

When you log in to theSocialCV, you are presented with a simple, easy to navigate interface as illustrated below with a number of search fields to populate based on your target candidate.

In this example I want to recruit SaaS or Software sales people in the London region. I’ve populated the relevant fields, job title, city, country and the key skills I’m looking for.  Once you hit the search button a list of social profiles aggregated from the various social platforms and information sources is generated.

On the left you can see individual profiles, to the right you can see detailed information on each candidate profile you click on and in the middle, below the portrait image are icons for the various social platforms and data sources the info has been aggregated from.  If you click on these icons, you’ll be taken to the individual’s profile on those platforms

Having gone through a lot of the profiles for the skills I was looking for, it was very accurate and each of the individuals had a history of SaaS or Software sales.  You also have the option to segment the profiles further by filtering by country, company and job title.

Other useful search features include the ability to save your searches, which easily enables you to keep an eye on new matching profiles each day/week.  Furthermore you also have the ability to create folders to add your target profiles to for later engagement.  From within the folders you can easily export the profile data into an excel sheet.

theSocialCV is an extremely ambitious piece of kit, and still a work in progress.  For example, to check how up to date the indexing was, I did a quick search for past and present employees at my own company.  There were several employees whose profiles did not appear in the search results and with those that did appear, the home page link was not necessarily their most recent company. Currently theSocialCV has indexed around 106 million social profiles and continues to add thousands more each day.

One of the most interesting features of theSocialCV is the ‘Watch’ button.  Whenever a profile is generated you have a number of options on the top right hand side.  The ‘Save to ATS’ button is a function in development right now but by hitting the watch button you will be notified of any changes to that profile (company, skills etc).  Again I did a bit of a test with this, by adding several of my own employees onto a watch list and asking them to change details on their LinkedIn profiles such as their job title.  Apparently it takes at least 24 hours for theSocialCV to pick up a change (not bad considering the 100+ million profiles it’s indexed) and you will then be notified of any changes via the email address linked to your account.   Unfortunately during my trial it did not pick up on any of the changes so I can only assume this is another aspect of the system being improved.

Earlier I said that although it’s not perfect yet, you should  think about how theSocialCV could be used as part of your recruitment strategy.  The ability to search your competitors and organise key staff that are not active candidates into folders and watch lists, could provide a method for in-house recruiters to talent map their industry and build pipelines in a relatively cost effective and time efficient way.

If you have a wider social media strategy you could then look at ways to engage your talent maps, e.g. encourage them to join your LinkedIn groups, talent communities etc in order to build some brand awareness  before approaching them formally with an employment offer in the future.

Connecting up your social networks

theSocialCV allows you to integrate your facebook and twitter accounts making your network searchable and contactable without leaving theSocialCV environment.

When you want to contact candidates you have saved within lists etc, it’s unlikely you will have their direct email address.   theSocialCV will recognise from their social profile whether you can contact them through a social network like Twitter and give you the ability to tweet them from theSocialCV interface.

Personally I think theSocialCV is an amazing tool, there’s still a lot of ‘indexing’ to be done, and there is a whole host of developments and improvements to come.  As a way to identify, track and engage with passive candidates I think it’s great.  From a UK perspective, a lot of the information on the profiles being returned seemed very much based on LinkedIn or Google profiles.  This made me wonder whether I would pay to use the tool if I had already paid for a  LinkedIn recruiter licence.  This is less of a question though if I was in an EMEA or Global recruiting role, this is where you can really see the power of theSocialCV above other tools.

Running several searches across Germany and France for example, I was able to see the data extracted from the Viadeo and XING profiles (the largest professional networks in France and Germany respectively) of potential candidates.  With the likes of Google+ also adding members globally, the ability to search across all the major professional and social networks and easily organise those profiles into lists for later engagement, really makes theSocialCV a potentially powerful weapon in your recruitment arsenal.

Source: http://thesocialcv.com

More information on theSocialCV is available at http://thesocialcv.com/, there are some interesting infographics on their blog which will give you an idea of currently particularly strong within.