Recruitment agencies; Why not learn from the best...
It was announced last week that Amazon and Facebook would be engaging in some ‘technological partnering’. By linking Amazon and Facebook accounts, Amazon users will now be shown recommendations based on their Facebook interests and activity.
Ingeniously this will also help users find gifts for Facebook friends, reminding them of their birthdays, and show interests users have in common with their friends.
The benefit to Amazon is an incredibly targeted way of reaching users. This saves users’ time when searching, therefore increasing the chance of purchase. Moreover it can also help to reach those “passive customers” who may be browsing and are then reminded of things they like, or that their friends may like and encourage them to purchase.
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Admittedly Amazon’s technology represents a sizable investment and this technology may be a little way off for some recruiters. However there are potentially other ways.
Passive candidates – traditionally a much harder group to find relevant and interesting jobs for. They are unlikely to be proactively visiting recruitment websites or overly responsive to recruitment calls. How can this group be targeted?
Many recruitment agencies already have functionality (such as similar jobs, RSS feeds, email me similar jobs etc.) on their websites as well as their own consultants recommending potentially relevant or interesting job opportunities to passive candidates. 4MAT see this evolving however.
Consider ultilising Facebook’s data in the same way as other advertisers do already. Facebook ads is already in place but not utilised by recruiters. Recruiters have the potential to target Facebook users with relevant jobs based on their interests and activity. This would allow recruiters to target those who may not be actively looking for jobs but could be seduced by a testimonial, salary or location or blue chip opportunity whilst on Facebook.
For example:
Undoubtedly some recruiters may have already considered this and some plans may be in place already. Who will be the first to utilise this effectively?
Source: Mashable, 27th July 2010, A Perfect Storm of Recommendations, (http://mashable.com/2010/07/27/amazon-facebook-recommendations/)
