Nov 8, 2012

Employer Branding, Recruiting in India and Social Media

A couple of days ago it was my pleasure to moderate a roundtable organized by LinkedIn India and People Matters on "Employer Branding" and how social media is impacting it.

There were about 20 HR and Recruiting leaders from Mumbai at the event, and my co-moderator was Irfan Abdulla, LinkedIn India's Director of Talent Solutions.

Irfan started off the event by showcasing the first India Recruiting Trends survey they had done, along with their annual global survey. Some interesting facts that emerged were:

  • 53% of respondents said they would hire more
  • 50% of respondents said they would have a budgetary growth in recruiting.
  • The biggest obstacles to attracting top talent is (a) Competition (b) Compensation (c) Location (d) Lack of awareness/interest in employment brand
  • Recruiting leaders are concerned that their competitors will (a) Invest in employer branding (b) Improve their referral program (c) Invest in new recruiting tools
  • Top last landing trends were (a) Utilising social and professional networks (b) Boosting referral programs (c) Upgrading employer branding
  • 81% agreed that employer brand has significant impact on ability to hire great talent and 90% companies are increasing or maintaining investment in their employer brand.
  • India is ahead of the rest of the world when it comes to regularly measuring employer brand.
So there was a healthy discussion on how the HR professionals present see these trends and what they are doing on the employer branding front. My insights were:

  1. Most organizations have defined an Employee Value Proposition, however very few measure their external brand.
  2. Most companies seem to be focusing on branding when it comes to B-School and Tech-Schools but very few seem to focus (or know) on employer branding for middle and senior levels
  3. Understanding of how sites like Glassdoor and discussions on Twitter are shaping employer brand was very low.
  4. About a quarter of the organizations in the room had some kind of social media policy.
Need help to leverage social media to understand what the perception of an organization's employer brand is? Contact me :)
If you want to go through the LinkedIn report here it is



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