Social networking = recruiters haven

Orkut, LinkedIn, Facebook and other similar popular social networking sites are fast doubling up as the modern day employment exchang>es with job seekers as well as companies and recruiters head hunting for talent.

The social networking sites, immensely popular with the netizens, especially the young, are having increasing number of 'communities' helping both job seekers and employers.

"Searching for the right person for a job is always a challenge," says Gauri Sarin of Approach Talent Solutions. "So, there is a rising trend among the companies and recruitment agencies to use social networking sites to look for the right person," she adds.

With 100 million Internet users in the country, E-recruitment is gaining ground as a preferred medium of hiring in India, according to Assocham. Especially for job seekers, the Internet has opened up the world of job searching, turning it into a 24-hour-a day market place. Internet is arguably the most immediate, convenient and comprehensive medium for employment seekers to research and prospect for jobs.

Upon a search for 'jobs', communities such as Orkut throw up about a 1,000 odd related communities such as 'IT jobs India walk-ins','Freshers','Retail Jobs in India', 'Walk in for Jobs', Job Sampark' etc.

Staffing services providers like Cloud 9 India, Pathway Recruitment Agency use such sites as a platform to hire and have links to their own websites.
Populated with thousands of members each of these communities have a huge database of job seekers and can reach them within seconds.

"Of all new services on the internet, social networking sites hold the most promise. The reason for this is that these community-driven sites have the ability to leverage their user base across other verticals," says R Sunder, President, Times Business Solutions.

He further adds," Most of the growth in the social networking space has happened in the last one year. It will continue to grow at an accelerated pace as more people gain high-speed Internet access. It has come down to mobile phones and with web 2.0 coming to market, the future seems to be limited only by the imagination."

Young people are making most of it. Says Neha Kapoor a fresh graduate from Kanpur, "I got a job in one of the best BPOs in Delhi thanks to a 'scrap'", a term used by Orkut to describe the messages that are posted on the Net.

B Sudhir, software engineer, 25, moderator of a community 'Walk in for Jobs' in Orkut says, "I started this community as an hobby, as I am Internet savvy and had gone through the grind of trying to find a job. I wanted to create a platform for freshers."

His community claims to have membership of over 30,000 members. Sudhir says, "Other than the recruitment agencies many corporate houses directly post their requirements on the site."

He also has a blog whose members receive job opening postings into their mail boxes. Although most of these services are free yet there are ways to monetise these communities by dividing the jobs into free and paid categories, in which the recruiter pays for some specific advertisements.

There are many networking sites other than Orkut such as Facebook, Myspace, Yaari and also very popular professional networking site like LinkedIn, Ecademy, Doostang, Xing, Plaxo, etc.