More than 60% of the corporate private jobs are unpublicized. Workforce planning at most organizations is not quantitative, so job listings are created only for positions that the organization is very sure of filling in a fixed period of time. Rest of the hiring is driven by internal referrals, agencies, consultants, head-hunters who passively keep sharing profiles with organizations to explore fitment, if any.
Candidates looking for job change face the following problems:
Anyone looking for a job change has certain expectations in mind from the next employer, role in terms of compensation, work-life balance, work city, office location in the city, Organization type: product/service, B2B/B2C etc., business model etc. Based on these expectations, the candidate makes a list of organisations he wishes to apply to. Say, there are 13000+ organisations with offices in Bangalore. A candidate on his own may not be aware of 30-40 companies fitting his search criteria. Most job search websites are listing driven which means a company would never appear on these sites if they are not actively posting their openings on these sites. Products like glassdoor and LinkedIn also do not provide detailed organization search and filter features. So, if we can help candidates discover companies relevant to their experience, their options open up and their job switch time will decrease. This will also help companies widen their candidate funnel.
Candidate referral is known to be a good source of hiring (attribution available). Referrals primarily work on trust basis. Not everyone is confident of referring to a random applicant at his organisation unless they have some shared history (Alma Mater, Employer etc.) or some mutual connection. Even if we help the candidates discover companies like mentioned in point #1, it only partially solves the problem because the candidate would then need someone to refer him to one of the roles at the organisation. He/ She may ask for a referral on LinkedIn if there are any mutual connections. This also works on request basis and success rates of such requests are not clear. There are Facebook groups where people with a common thread in their education/work history, help each other with referrals actively. BITS Pilani’s referral network is one such group. Significant engagement is seen in these groups. But a fb group has its own limitations. So, it makes sense to build a 2 sided platform. One side would be candidates looking for job change and others would be ‘connectors’ who would want to help job seekers with referrals at their current organisation.
For candidates:
- Company discovery
- Easy referral in each company
- Visibility on status of referral
For Referrers:
- Candidate discovery. Referral Bonus or Salary commission on successful hiring.
- Platform to manage referral request:
- Set filters on who can send referral requests (min experience, mutual friend etc.)
- Auto-forwarding of matching requests to HR/ Hiring manager.