jobs…. portals and more portals

During the early days when I had just started with my recruiting firm , thats little more then three years back. Me and my partner were listing down what all we need ,to start off . Job portal subscriptions came at the top of the list. How much ever any recruiter claims that he works through references and have their own internal database of resumes, trust me it doesn’t work .

You just don’t need portal subscriptions for resumes alone. There is a plethora of information out there , provided you are smart enough to figure it out. A smart recruiter can spot trends, develop a network among the talent pool and also find out who’s hiring and a lot more info.

But portals like naukri.com and monster have remained more of repositories and job boards. There is not much to be found there . As a job seeker you go there to post your resume. As a recruiter you hunt for the resumes. No-body’s complaining as long as they are getting what they are looking for. And the Job portals are happy selling subscriptions.

But with the talent crunch looming large it becomes imperative for a recruiter to go seek-out for the passive candidate. Somebody is there who fits the bill well but is not looking out. Happily ensconced where he is . He has not listed his resume in the job portal and neither sent you his resume. So do where and how do you find him. You find such people in college alumni sites , community sites . I remember Orkut , yahoo groups were a huge hit. In fact, Orkut still is. Then you had linkedin, zoominfo etc. I am new to Facebook and haven’t explored it much. But I am sure your scrapbooks would always have at least got a few scraps talking about a “Sizzling hot” job opening in an “MNC”. Or got a mail from a recruiter on linkedin. Perfectly fine again. As long as you don’t mind a few irrelevant mails in your inbox.

Then came the school of thought that job boards should be where the community hangs out. Rather then list jobs and expect people to turn, why not the jobs reach them. I had read an interesting post on how social networking sites are giving a new turn to online recruitment. Linkedin is an interesting example.

Somehow I personally don’t endorse this. I go to a particular site for a purpose. If I am on Orkut, its because I want to hang out wiht my friends, on Linkedin I maintain my professional network. I may not always like to see something apart from that. Please treat this as a totally personal view. Lot of folks may not have a problem to this.

I also have been following whats happening in the referral based recruitment portals. I am aware of quite a few. TechTribe , Toostep, Wisestepp, Careerknight, Zubka and Reffster . I am yet to explore Shine.com . They seem to be quite aggressive with their ad campaign. I intend to cover all these sites in seperate posts. So you will have to come back to it . Meanwhile some food for thought. I have this from Alexa.