careerbuilder: Envisioning the Nexus Of Recruitment Date:   Monday , July 01, 2013 ‘Work’ may not be a place to go to, but a thing to do in the near future. Our tasks may be recited to us by a program, our kitchen may become our office and the office need not be a physical place anymore. If twenty years ago, the only way to work was to sit behind a desk then it’s quite possible to be in a future without any office space and to be recruited by a program instead of a headhunter. The attitude towards work has taken a sharp turn and recruitment has become an even tougher business. More workers are setting their own work hours, taking up contracts, and working remotely – the traditional 40 hours a week, jobs have faded out. Today, requirements in the industry are more specialized and recruiters are forced to take up unorthodox ways to pull in prospective candidates. Social media, job portals and online communities are all areas of recruitment for headhunters today. The market leaders in this domain have understood this drastic shift in trends and have cashed in with mammoth resume databases and solutions. “But in large part, the industry is far from being maximized,” says Premlesh Machama, MD, CareerBuilder India, a prominent online job portal. “We have not seen any innovation in the job portal category, job portals still offer resume database services” says Machama. Having realized the need and an opportunity, CareerBuilder has invented a revolutionary product suite that will stir up a stagnant market. With a domain experience of over 18 years and unprecedented dominance in North America and Europe, CareerBuilder intends to storm the Indian recruitment market with its innovation driven philosophy and solutions. With its fresh products and social media integration, CareerBuilder is poised to capture the untapped market space. Despite the fact that the market share in this domain has already being dominated by big players, CareerBuilder sees a sweet spot that it can dominate from, in online recruitment. The products that this company intends to introduce to the Indian market are used by the Fortune 500 in Europe and America. Having customized their products to serve the Indian industry seamlessly, CareerBuilder is just a step away from market dominance. The company entered the subcontinent in 2007 and thus began their journey of well-crafted innovation for an industry that is in large part stagnated. Current Innovations to ease Job Seeker’s Conduit Today, the modes of recruitment have changed, both from the perspective of the employer and the employee. Job seekers apply for multiple jobs at a time but are largely unaware of the success or failure of their application, until the very last moment. “CareerBuilder understands a job applicant’s pain. Attending multiple interviews and waiting for the verdict. It is a highly stressful and testing process, and we have tried to remedy that,” adds Machama. The primary method for job seekers to find a job online is after the long process of uploading the CV and separately filling up multiple forms, uploading picture and contact details – all of which are already included in the CV – only after that the candidate begins to receive calls from prospective employers. CareerBuilder has eliminated all the base level preliminary hassles that first time applicants have to go through to apply for a job offer, with their product CV@CV. When an applicant submits his/her CV on CV@CV, CareerBuilder produces the profile for the candidate based upon the CV – in short the candidate’s profile is completed in two clicks. They have removed a major impediment from the process with the introduction of this simple yet effective solution. They are also the first in the industry to introduce a profile meter which is an indicator of the level of completion of the profile. With this tool, the candidate is always aware of the status of his profile. After the initial submission of the application for a job position, the candidate is largely unaware of the status of his application – whether it has been processed or has it been rejected or approved? Hire Insider is the tool that plays the game for the Job seeker. This tool rightfully empowers an applicant with the insights into the job that he/she has applied for. The product also alerts the applicant if their resume needs to be updated to better fare with the competition at hand. These insights and awareness of application related analytics can prove to be extremely crucial for a candidate to be the prime candidate for the job. Dias for Smart Employers With such varied areas of search and thousands of portals which list out candidates for a single position, a recruiter’s job has become anything but easy. With so many candidates pouring out of colleges and schools every year, it is quite easy for a recruiter to overlook a valuable candidate’s profile. To clear this cloudy maze, CareerBuilder has introduced recruitment spaces specialized for each vertical. Their database is acutely tuned to offer search results which are filtered to the last specification entered by the recruiter. They achieve this hair splitting task by introducing sub categories for specialized resumes and experienced professionals in the industry. This vastly increases the relevance of search results and also decreases the cost of resources deployed, for the employer by 18 -22 percent. “With CareerBuilder, the employers not only have a customized search engine at their disposal but also two equally game changing tools for talent acquisition,” says Machama. Work@ taps the age old resource of employee referral but on the ultra-modern social media platform of Facebook. Hiring via referrals still ranks first, according to staffing.org, therefore it is not a method that can be disposed of. Work@ is a simple referral application that harnesses the resources of the all-pervasive social media platform. It allows employees to share job listings with their Facebook friends and considering the fact that an average Facebook user has about 130 friends, widens the search parameters exponentially. Another innovative tool called Talent Network has the ability to revolutionize the entire process of job listing in companies. This application allows enterprises and companies to create their own organizational page on CareerBuilder where they can post job offers, company highlights, progress taking place within the organization and more. This page is also search engine optimized therefore when a person is scouring for jobs, he/she is automatically redirected to this page and is introduced to the organization. This not only eliminates competition from other enterprises that have similar job listings but it also allows the company to tap another huge well of resource called “passive job seekers.” These are people who are not aggressively looking for a job but are open to possibilities. For them exists a special tab within Talent Network called Join the Network. In plain sight, it is simply a process of building a community around the organization but from a recruiter’s perspective it is the culmination of all the aforementioned tools. This pool of resource can prove highly beneficial as it can serve as a reserve pool for future opening and perhaps someday be the foremost recruiting mode. Stepping into the Subcontinent The tools that this innovation driven company offers are presented with a vision for the future. CareerBuilder came to India in 2007, with a vision to disrupt the online recruitment industry, but due to inauspicious year that followed – 2008’s global economic meltdown – they were forced to cut down on operations. Not until 2012 did the Indian arm finally get the go-ahead. Today, CareerBuilder has introduced in India, all the tools that have been tested and tried in the rest of the world, with some of the biggest names in the industry, and have led to their large North American and European dominance in this business.The Indian arm of CareerBuilder aims to revolutionize the recruitment business in India to create bigger pools of talent that are readily available to head hunters and corporate recruiters of today and tomorrow. Their current operations in the country are mainly focused on the core aspects of recruitment i.e. resume database sales and their new core products which bring a breath of fresh air into the whole business. Future in the country for this giant looks quite promising with the balance in their favor as their inventive new products and two click solutions will take the job market by storm only to the delight of job seekers and recruiters. However, this is not the pinnacle of innovation for this experienced player. Newer products are under development and will be rolled out soon. Perhaps with this new player in town, our country’s job market will see the light of day. As the saying goes, “a step towards the future is the way to build your career.”