Social Media Meritocracy and the Future of Tech Recruiting

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Social Media Meritocracy and the Future of Tech Recruiting

Dice’s launch of Dice Open Web earlier this week signals the official start of the social media meritocracy. The product isn’t substantively different from Gild Source or Remarkable Hire, but it marks the first major entrant into the space of aggregating social data as a proxy for a resume. The change seems small, but it’s a significant mindset change in the way companies think about finding talent.

Open Web, Gild and Remarkable Hire all search IT-related social sites such as GitHub, StackOverflow, or BitBucket and seek to aggregate the data to produce a ranking. Well written code on GitHub or answers on StackOverflow that are voted up and seen as authoritative add to your score. In aggregate, it helps recruiters source from social sites based on the quality of the member’s contributions.

The result is a reversal of the current workflow for sourcing tech talent. As it currently stands, recruiters start with a resume or Linkedin profile that describes a person’s work history broadly. After contacting them, generating interest and perhaps a round of interviews, there’s often skill testing that determines technical ability, either formal or informal. This often ends up wasting time and resources when you find the technical ability lacking. Frankly, recruiters aren’t typically very good at evaluating technical ability and the resume and interview process aren’t particularly good places to gather the data. Using social data, the script flips, putting the technical validation up front so that recruiters can do the work they’re good at – engaging candidates and generating interest.

Dice OpenWeb

While tools that aggregate social media are interesting, they’re certainly not required to utilize social media to recruit technology. The spirit of the innovation here is to source social networks for influencers, technical talent based on the quality of their contributions and knowledge. For IT jobseekers and those who coach them, the obvious point here is that they need to be on relevant social networks making contributions to be found.

IT recruiting is the obvious place to start for aggregating social media data as they tend to be early adopters of technology, the work is somewhat objectively “gradeable” and there’s a tremendous shortage of talent. The piece to watch for the future will be the idea’s spread into other fields and uses social rating systems to gather additional non-technical data. It’s another step in the decline in the relevance of the resume. If I’m going to hire someone to paint my portrait, I’d rather see their paintings than their resume.

What do you think? Who wins in the battle between social media vs the old school resume? 

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