Leverage Social Platforms to Attain Competitive Advantage in Today's Candidates Friendly Market Date:   Friday , June 26, 2015 Founded in 2003, LinkedIn is the world\'s largest professional network on the Internet with over 364 million members worldwide. Headquartered in Silicon Valley with offices across the globe, LinkedIn has a current market cap of $27.32 billion. The advent of social platforms has led to an unprecedented emergence of passive candidates, who are not actively searching for jobs, mostly because they are extremely productive and successful in their current jobs. Especially in Indian market, an astounding 45 percent of the overall population is open to talk to HR recruiters, even though they are not looking for a job change. Although it is the dream of every organization to hire such high-quality professionals, it was almost impossible before the arrival of social platforms, which are redefining the way organizations attract, hire and engage talents by becoming the default platform for passive candidates. Data-Driven Decision Making Today we live in a candidates-friendly market, where they have a plethora of choices. Hence, it is imperative for companies to create a talent brand and position themselves as an employer of choice by conveying the right message to attract the target audience. For instance, a conglomerate that has financial and manufacturing services could attract people for their financial arm by promoting themselves as a trusted brand creating a new microfinance industry and can brag about their cutting-edge technologies to magnetize talent for manufacturing services. Social platforms enables this labour segmentation approach in a big way, since candidates can gain profound insights about the company including the people they would work for. Vis-a-vis the nineties where traditional sources like newspapers were the only medium in the talent industry, today we have several social networks and professional websites that help candidates to make data driven informed decisions. Similarly, sitting on such vast data helps organizations in many ways such as analysing the supply & demand of talent in a certain city and decide where they can setup their next development center. Simple Yet Effective Facilities Professionals have the opportunity to put their best foot forward by presenting a heavy background profile with rich media content, rather than just a paper. What better way for an artist to showcase his/her talent than by posting images of his/her work in the social platform\'s gallery! Likewise, a professional pitching for leadership position can create a visual appeal by uploading a video of him/her giving an impressive speech, considering that communication is an important quality required for leaders. Certain skill sets are in high demand and low supply such as senior management consultants. LinkedIn created a facility called Influencer, where we invite thought leaders to share their wisdom with larger communities. But we realized that it\'s not about brand and there are 30 million professionals in India who have useful knowledge in a particular domain that should be shared with the entire population. Hence, we released the ability to publish long-form content to all LinkedIn members. There are simple yet effective facilities like Talent Pipeline, which enables organizations to track, manage and engage talent leads, until there is an immediate opening for them. They can not only share company\'s information like notifying candidate about their foray into a new domain that the candidate specializes in, they can also observe the candidate\'s status updates, shared connections, skills, recommendations. Talent is the Heart of Startups Most of the disruptive Indian startups operate in extremely niche domains, which require an awful lot of insight to attract the suitable people who can adapt to their culture. There is a heavy involvement of leadership in hiring and engaging talent in startups, since the talents are their extremely important intellectual properties. They have to invest more in establishing a talent brand by liberating their employees and leveraging them as brand ambassadors to attain a competitive advantage. They should encourage their people to be active in social platforms to influence prospect employees. Upcoming entrepreneurs and startups should realize that it\'s the employees who distinguish them as a grade A company and hence invest more than half their time in getting right people as the startup\'s Talent head. Social-savvy entrepreneurs can create much more impact by reaching out to millions of people to market their products & solutions as well as to woo high-quality talents. Social selling can be leveraged to create networks, right connections and references to make informed calls, thus enhance business. This kind of higher-end marketing is the heartbeat for B2B organizations. We are glad that we are covering the Indian economy, wherein we are creating plenty of opportunities for each and every member and making them more productive and successful. (As told to Susila Govindaraj & Rashmisree Deb)