Tips to hire the right candidates through various social media networks

Online recruiting is fast catching up the attention of the recruiters of almost all the companies, whether big, small or medium. What was just a buzzword, a few years back has now become a trend for companies to hire and connect with the right candidates

Recruiting online is all about finding the best candidates and forging meaningful connections with them. And social media has become the best platform to interact and share ideas with each other. It is estimated that an average user has more than 5 social media accounts, wherein people easily share and express their ideas online and even make new connections.

With social media sites including LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter leading the trend for social networking, HR managers are exploring great opportunities to connect with the candidates, which otherwise would have been impossible using conventional sources. Though most organizations are leveraging social media to hire potential candidates, however, still some companies struggle to recruit via online sources. In this article, we will present a few tips that can help get the right candidates for your company, apart from the benefits that you can accrue with social media hiring.

Key tips to connect with the right candidates

There are no defined specifics for proceeding to hire via social media, though every company should develop its own social media recruiting strategy. Here are the few tips that help to connect with the right candidate:

1. Be proactive and send the right message: The main crux of recruiting on social media is to connect with the right people with the right message. You need to be active on various LinkedIn groups and post the job openings that can reach the right candidates. For instance, you can use keywords like #javajobs or #HYDhiring on Twitter to help connect with the Java developers, who are actively looking for jobs in Hyderabad.
2. Don’t be too informal: Instead of using a formal language to reach out to the potential candidates, be informal and friendly to promote your culture. It’s not just about posting the jobs from your company account. You should also share information highlighting your company’s achievements and also promote your company’s brand, culture and work environment to generate a good impression in the minds of the potential hires. People love to work in companies that value employees and hence this type of content garner maximum likes and shares.
3. Try to reach out to niche networks and forums: Another way of connecting to potential candidates is through niche forums such as GitHub and StackOverflow or even sites like Quora. These sites provide a rich pool of talented resources from where you can connect and choose the right candidate.
4. Make every employee part of your hiring process: This is a great idea, wherein you can share the job postings with your employees. As most of them are active on Facebook and Linkedin, it could help your fellow employees to connect with their friends and peers, thereby generating a positive social media presence. In fact, make every employee your company’s brand ambassador to help them get the right hires.
5. Make the best use of LinkedIn: Among all the social media networks, LinkedIn serves as the best place to get the potential candidates. Almost everyone with a strong career has a profile on LinkedIn, which is the world’s largest professional network. In order to let your page show up on LinkedIn, you need to fill in all the information of your brand without leaving even the minutest details. This way, candidates can search your page, view your openings and get a snapshot of your organization. When looking for potential hires, look for candidates with the combination of talent and passion. Reach out to candidates, who are passionate about their jobs.

Benefits of social media hiring

1. Track the complete history of the candidate: On LinkedIn or even on Facebook, you can get the complete snapshot of a candidate’s professional and academic profile, without even viewing his/her resume. This helps to easily assess whether he/she is the right fit for your organization or not.
2. Get the right cultural fit: Social media is not just about tracking the professional history of a candidate, but also helps you evaluate whether the potential hire is a right cultural fit in your organization or not. You can understand the hobbies and the overall personality of the candidate to judge whether he/she has the right attitude and can adjust in your work environment.
3. Filter out unsuitable candidates: Based on the behavior of the candidate on social media in terms of sharing the content, you can even filter the best candidates out of the worst.
4. Save money: The biggest takeaway of social media hiring is it’s absolutely free, unlike traditional recruiting platforms, where you need to spend a huge amount to post a single job opening.

The bottom line is what works for your organization may not be relevant to another organization. The secret of success is to have a strong social media recruiting strategy that is tailor-made to the requirements of your company and the jobs you are hiring for.  This way, you can build your brand in the market, hire the right candidates and also ensure they stick to your organization for a longer time.

Do you have the right talent acquisition strategy?

Talent Acquisition – current scenario

Talent acquisition is a long term strategic initiative to look for talented people, gain new relationships and convince them to offer their expertise to your company. In this digital age with blurring geographical boundaries, it has become a challenge for HR managers and recruiters to get the best minds on board. Hence, it has become imperative for HR managers to devise unique and attractive talent acquisition strategies to help attract the best talent and also retain them for a longer duration.

Generally, the HR department of a company looks for candidates only when they want to fill up a specific position, whenever an employee leaves the organization.  In this context, your talent acquisition strategy should focus more on the bigger picture of macroscopic hiring and set higher expectations from a long term perspective. In fact, it is a great challenge for HR and functional managers to find and hire the right candidates, particularly in certain key specialist and management functions.

In order to ensure long term success, you need to have a strategic approach for talent acquisition to ensure that the right candidates join and stick to your organization for a longer period of time. For this, you need to probe into your present talent acquisition data, analyze what your current goals are and zero on a forward-thinking talent acquisition strategy that you can implement to attract the best talent with the desired skill sets. Hence, this type of strategic plan that helps to prioritize retention is quite worthy, since it goes a long way in saving your employee turnover costs.

Now, let’s look into the greater details about devising the right talent acquisition policy and the key pointers that could ensure greater success.

Probe your talent acquisition data

The first step towards creating an effective talent acquisition strategy is to gather the data by calculating how much you would spend on employee retention and turnover. This will help you to clearly assess the changes that are required. In this regard, you can do thorough research about how many employees are actually leaving your organization and analyze if your present talent acquisition plan is really yielding any results or is it just a futile exercise, wasting your time and money.

Role of retention rate in devising the right talent acquisition plan

You can easily calculate the retention rate by dividing the number of individual associates hired at a specific point of time; say a year or a quarter by the number of associates hired at the start of the year or the quarter. Next, multiply this figure by 100 to get the exact retention rate. Unfortunately, if you find that the retention rate is very less, you need to analyze what went wrong, for which you need to look into the data of your exit interviews including your employees’ feedback. This will help draw a conclusion about why your current talent acquisition is not foolproof and why it has failed miserably.

For instance, assume a scenario where an associate leaves your organization just a few months after being employed. The pertinent reason could be either the employee might not be the right fit or he/she might not be properly on board. Another reason could be that the candidate couldn’t have been given adequate time to get adjusted in the new environment or worse, he/she might find the work environment sickening and uncongenial.

Let’s take another scenario, where an associate had left after working for a couple of years without being promoted. The primary reason could be either he/she wasn’t provided sufficient opportunity to grow in your organization or showcase his/her skills to let managers take note and offer a long term career path. This is also one instance of failed talent acquisition strategy, wherein proper learning and development are also equally vital, just as important as recruiting a new candidate.

Revisit your onboarding and training processes

After you know where you stand with respect to your talent acquisition strategy, you can make certain amendments to your onboarding mechanism. This implies you need to create a learning environment, where new associates get personalized training, based on their job expectations. As part of this process, managers need to define key goals, including establishing a continuous communication eco-system between line managers, mentors, and co-workers. Apart from that, they need to handhold the new hires, so they could meet those goals within the defined time period.

In fact, when you onboard a new hire, you need to ensure that they get incessant learning opportunities, so they get positive vibes that they are growing in line with the company’s growth.

This will, in turn, develop immense confidence in them that their work is being valued, thereby anticipating good growth prospects in your organization including promotions and pay hikes.

Talent acquisition goes hand-in-hand with training and retention programs when it comes to minimizing the turnover and increasing employee engagement. Hence, it's critical to emphasize your company's commitment to growth and training during the talent acquisition process.

Now you are set to devise an innovative talent acquisition strategy

When you have the key pointers, you are all set to devise a great talent acquisition strategy. To get started, you need to modify your onboarding process and devise a plan that includes all your learning experiences, right talent acquisition strategies, best onboarding practices, and retention models. If you have done your exercise well and put this exercise into practice, we are sure your organization would be on the right track to offer stupendous onboarding, training and learning experiences. This translates into employee loyalty, thereby helping in saving your precious time and money.

9 Tips to Trigger a Great Career in Machine Learning

Machine learning (ML) is a branch of computer science that provides the capability to the computers to learn without the requirement of any clearly formulated programming.

Machine Learning offers great career opportunities and is increasingly being used in almost all aspects of our knowledge domain – be it business, science, technology or even medicine and space research.

In order to start a career in machine learning, you need to have the passion to learn new things, as learning and the ability to solve problems on a day to day basis is the success mantra of this field. Before you set the foot in this segment, it is imperative to have a basic understanding of what machine learning is all about including the mathematical logic, alternative technologies used and hands-on-experience required.

This article is dedicated to all those professionals and students, who want to explore a career option in machine learning.

1. Be a Constant Learner

Machine learning in recent years has evolved rapidly with the adoption of new technologies, frameworks, business models and techniques. So, at the preliminary stage, you need to get curious about all these aspects and be a constant learner.

2. Develop a Logical Blend of Mind

Machine learning is a logical field and is best suited for aspirants who have a logical blend of mind. It integrates several disciplines such as mathematics, technology, and business analysis, making it an interdisciplinary job. Apart from a strong technological focus, you also need to need to be open to understand the business problems and possess the ability to interpret those problems into a machine learning paradigms, thereby adding value to the product or the project that you work upon.

3. Integrate with the Team you Work

Machine learning is more about working as part of a team, rather than being an isolated fragment in the big organizational picture. One of the success stories of being an excellent machine learning expert is to be proactive to work in a team, assimilate their ideas and put your thoughts into action. So, it’s necessary that you be a good team player.

4. Gain a Good Grounding in Data Analysis

Data is the new oil for any industry or technological segment. Hence, data analysts are the most suited professionals to make a perfect transition into a machine learning career as their next best career move. Of course, if you are not a data analyst, you need not worry; develop an analytical mindset and set your focus on data analysis and interpretation. This means you need to play with the data – dig the data, comprehend where it is most suited and infer the net outcomes from the data. Bottom line is you need to share the information in a prudent way, generate good visualization, and integrate information that can be easily understood by all stakeholders.

5. Learn the Right Programming Language to Get Started

The best programming language that is most suited for machine learning is Python. Apart from that, you also need to learn how to use machine learning libraries. If you feel daunted about how to get started, there are a host of institutes and courses online that teaches you the concepts of Python, apart from customized courses dedicated only for machine learning. It’s always better to connect with the experts to get going in this area.

6. Online Courses can Help you a Great Extent

As mentioned in my earlier tip, you can take up some online courses, apart from participating in learning competitions (kaggle.com is one such website) to gain good knowledge and showcase it to others. There are several online customized courses offered by learning platforms such as Udemy, Udacity, Coursera, which are dedicated only for machine learning. Hence, enroll in some good online course, read new articles on emerging technologies and connect with technology experts on various social media platforms to trigger a career push in machine learning.

7. Research about the Industry where you want to Work

You need to understand that every organization has specific and unique goals. Hence, it is better to do thorough research about the industry, where you want to work. For instance, it may take a couple of months to understand a financial product of a specific business segment, but the crux is to research and learn about it as quickly as possible to leverage your knowledge in this domain. Also, remember that you need not be an expert, but gaining some preliminary knowledge about the domain or the product that you are going to work really goes a long way in building a good career in machine learning.

8. Look for Small Companies

If you are interested to begin your career in machine learning, it’s always advisable to start small. Hence, don’t target big companies such as Amazon, Google, etc as they look for experienced candidates. Try to target startup companies, where you have immense opportunities to learn and apply your knowledge.

9. Showcase Some toy Projects

One aspect which helps a potential employer to take note of your skill sets is to showcase some good projects. Take the advice of your seniors; connect with experts and try creating and uploading a project in Github. This way, you could definitely gain an edge over other potential candidates, eying a career in machine learning.

Piece of Advice

Similar to any other career option, you need to have the passion, interest to try new things and above all the genuine aptitude of learning to make a mark in machine learning. Keeping aside the technical and analytical skills, you need to get motivated about solving new challenges, day in and day out and always proactive to learn new technologies to keep yourself updated. That is the key to success.

The Hard Skills Companies Need Most in 2019

January is the month of motivation and productivity, as you make an effort to keep to your resolutions and stay at the top of your game! Most working professionals are always on the look-out for expanding theirHard skill, and companies should encourage and guide their employees in this quest.

This is the perfect time for companies to take inventory of the pool of hard skills their employees already have and work towards bettering and expanding them. With an array of skills to cultivate in the arena, the focus should typically be on harnessing the benefits of the digital era and boosting the productivity of the company this new year…

Video Production 

The demand for video production is increasing exponentially since video-streaming now represents seventy percent of all consumer Internet traffic. Web Video for business, creating web series especially, is in huge demand at present.

Audio Productions

Much like Video Production, there has been an increased demand for audio production too due to the growing interest in podcasts and other audio-digital formats. Learning techniques for audio recording is imperative to have a wholesome understanding of Audio Production.

Cloud Computing 

This is the best time for companies to look for engineers with a specialization in Cloud Computing, as the whole world is now rushing towards the cloud. To accommodate the ever-increasing demand, it is essential for one to have an accurate idea of not just Cloud Computing but also Web Services and Advanced Security.

Scientific Computing  

It is very important to have knowledge of Scientific Computing since it can be used to solve problems dealing with massive amounts of data. As companies continue to collect data at an incremental rate to expand their database, it is essential to know Scientific Computing to store all the data.

People Management 

The approach of companies when it comes to dealing with employees has changed vastly throughout the years. Now, there are “leaders” instead of “bosses” and employees are not given orders and instructions, but are rather approached and coached. The management of human resources is a difficult skill set to possess but companies must attain this skill in order to achieve success. Managing the conflicts of the employees and motivating them to work more, and work better, should be the ultimate goal of people management.

Sales Leadership 

This particular skill is very common worldwide, but notoriously difficult to retain in a company, as it gets hard to find efficient individuals who also have good leadership skills in the sales department. But, a company ought to appoint good sales leaders in order to avoid the stagnation in the company’s growth as this skill is always in high demand. Sales Coaching and Sales Management programs can also be started for letting the professionals better themselves in this area.

Digital Marketing  

This is the digital age and digital marketing is undoubtedly one of those skills being extremely high in demand. It is not even a surprise to witness more and more companies working day in and day out to learn and perfect the art of digital marketing. Brand and marketing integration and marketing foundations are part and parcel of digital marketing and it is, therefore, imperative to be completely aware of these things.

Social Media Marketing 

With each passing day, social media is getting more and more relevant in everyday affairs. Social Media is an essential tool of communication in the present day and it is absolutely necessary to have a team allocated exclusively for Social Media Marketing. Marketing on Instagram and other platforms is essential to ensure the company is ‘trending’, which is the modern-day synonym for ‘growing’.

Translation 

In today’s times, the entire world is globally connected. With a proper translator, the language-barrier in this otherwise global environment can easily be overcome. This skill can be used to communicate across cultures and develop cross-cultural intelligence.

In huge demand, yet not difficult to achieve, these are a few skills that companies might want to cultivate in 2019 in order to sail through the new year at the top of their game.

Top trends that are transforming the recruitment process in 2019

The year 2019 is going to be a remarkable year as far as the recruitment scenario is considered with new trends emerging in the HR domain. In light of the above statement, this article assumes significance and hence we have listed out some of the key recruitment trends, which are going to shape the IT industry.  These trends would definitely help enhance your current recruitment strategy, aimed to attract the best talent.

Let’s have a look at the top trends:

• Recruitment marketing

Recruitment marketing is mainly meant to actively implement the right marketing strategies in recruiting, aimed to nurture and attract the best talent to your company.  This is one of the top recruiting trends in the market and companies that embrace this trend would be the top gainers this year.

• Inbound recruiting

This refers to the marketing strategy, aimed to attract the talent to ensure that they select your company as their preferred employer. The primary objective of inbound recruiting is to attract, convert and engage candidates so that they stick to your company for a longer period. This trend is applicable for companies looking for a matured hiring strategy that is going to earn rewards in the long run.

• Employer branding

Employer branding refers to the trend where you showcase the reputation of your company from a recruitment perspective and how much value an employee could gain working in your organization. This trend is gaining steam as generating a good employer brand is required for attracting the top talent to your organization.

• Candidate’s perception & experience

This refers to the current, past and future candidates’ opinions about your organization’s hiring process. It is measured in term of the candidates’ feelings, attitudes and actions they experience during the complete hiring process. This is important because a candidate who shares a positive experience in the entire recruitment process would certainly accept your job offer, likely to make a comeback if he or she leaves or even refers others to your organization.

• Good talent database

Maintaining a good talent pool is a great asset for a company. And whenever there’s a new opening, your recruiter can easily search the candidate from the talent pool, interview and subsequently hire him/her, saving a lot of time and money. Hence, this one trend is rapidly picking up and most of the employers are channelizing their resources to generate a good talent database.

• Candidate’s relationship management­­

Managing and improving good relationships with current and future candidates refers to candidate relationship management. This trend is relatively new and is gaining rapid traction since you can devise innovative ways to attract the best talent.

• Social recruitment

This refers to leveraging various social media channels for hiring the best talent. This helps you to search the right candidates, forge a good relationship with them and encourage them to apply for your job positions.

• Automation tools in recruitment

Automation tools refer to the software that can be used to automate the complete recruitment cycle. The current trend is to leverage the right automation tools to pick up the perfect hires among the pool of eligible candidates. In other words, these tools help in searching, attracting, engaging and hiring the applicants. This way, your entire recruitment process gets simplified, while saving an enormous amount of time and resources.  ­­

• Analytics-driven recruitment

This trend refers to taking recruitment decisions, based on the data generated through automated HR tools such as applicants tracking system (ATS) and recruitment marketing platforms (RMP).  This trend is gaining importance since the recruitment data can generate great insights about guiding you where your hiring strategy has failed and how you need to improve. This way, you can improve your hiring strategy, in line with your organizational objectives.

• Employee referrals

This is one of the most effective ways to attract the best hires and fill open positions. Research has proved that HR managers spend less time to hire and onboard the referred candidates than candidates, hired through conventional methods.

• Collaborative hiring

This type of hiring is not confined to your HR department only, but teams from other departments also actively take part to search and recruit the best talent. This provides more transparency in the recruitment process with a greater chance of getting the right candidates at the right time to fill your open positions.

Based on these trends, the HR teams should plan their hiring strategies, which are aligned with the overall organizational and business growth of a company.

Key factors driving the success of the IT industry in India

Overview

One industry that has been growing at a rapid pace is the Information Technology(IT) industry. Unlike other sectors, which have seen turbulent times, this is one sector which has been meeting or even exceeding the expectations of the industry veterans and trade bodies. This brief article examines the trends and the growth of the IT sector and the major factors, which have contributed to the growth of this industry.

Two important segments of IT are software and hardware. In fact, the software sector has risen as a key industry in the field of electronics. To be precise, it was only from the 1990s; the IT sector has achieved a major breakthrough and is now considered as one of the major industries in India. One of the key reasons for its rapid growth is the huge ocean of technically skilled manpower that has provided a great boost to transform India into a major software power. 

The rapid growth of the software industry

With a compounded annual growth of around 52% between 1991 and 1996, it is interesting to note that the sector has doubled and has gained a respectable position in the software industry. Several multi-national giants like Microsoft, Google, and Amazon, to name a few have established shop in India, along with a host of other domestic giants like Infosys, TCS, Wipro and more. This is complemented by a host of medium-sized and start-up companies, which is immensely contributing to the growth of the IT sector in India.  All these developments are quite significant and have literally transformed the Indian economy from an agricultural based economy to a knowledge-driven economy. 

Some of the positive aspects of why the software and services industry outperformed several other sectors in the country are its strong fundamentals and core value position. It’s interesting to note that the exports have risen by 26.3 percent in 2002-03 with revenues clicking around Rs.46,100 crore. In fact, the Indian software and services industry is one of the very few industries in the country that has witnessed double-digit growth. During the last decade, several IT hubs have sprung up in tier I cities such as NCR region, Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Chennai, Pune, and Kolkatta that are contributing immensely to the growth of our Indian economy. Though the major market for software exports is the US, the Indian IT industry is also tapping the potential of other non-US markets including the European Union, Japan, and China to become one of the leading IT exporters of the globe. Not just tier I cities, even tier II cities such as Coimbatore and Indore are also contributing their bit in the growth of IT sector in India. 

And above all, IT has had a significant impact on the lives of common people, wherein it has helped people, who have settled in remote areas to integrate with the other parts of the world. 

Key drivers to IT growth

• Low cost of operation and tax advantages
• Supportive government policies
• Availability of technically skilled manpower
• Rapid introduction of IT technologies in major sectors such as telecom, BFSI and more
• Strong growth in export demand
• Adoption of new technologies like cloud computing, Artificial Intelligence, Big Data, etc
• Government established SEZs

Future prospects

Based on NASSCOM’s research, the IT sector is likely to generate revenues running into several billions of dollars by the end of 2020 that will give a big push to the Indian economy. Apart from that, the Government is also expected to increase its e-governance initiatives.  However, the key driver for the IT industry is innovation, which means companies need to respond to the requirements of the dynamic environment by developing and deploying new products and solutions. Technologies like Big Data, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Blockchain, and Cyber security are some of the innovative technologies that are shaping the current IT sector and would do so in the coming years as well.