Resumes lose shine as social media profiles, video interviews preferred

Be cautious when you tweet or re-tweet anything next time as your prospective employer might be watching your social media profile — your ‘performance’ on Twitter or Facebook could make or mar your job or promotion prospects.

With social media profiles and video interviews being increasingly used by corporate recruiters to filter out undesirable candidates, hiring this way is expected to grow by over 50 per cent this fiscal compared to 2013-14.

“Although traditional resumes are still around, recruiters now prefer, also, to scan the candidate’s social media profiles and video-interviews before inviting them for face-to-face interviews,” Sanjoe Jose, CEO and Co-Founder, Talview.com, told BusinessLine .

Talview, an online video-hiring platform for corporate clients, has, since its inception in 2012, organised nearly 12 lakh video-interviews and 10 per cent of these candidates, on an average, were subsequently selected, he said.

Among Talview’s clients are corporate majors, including Fortune 500 companies, across sectors that include ABB, Aegis, Cognizant, Cipla, Hero Motors, Hinduja Global Solutions, Jindal Steel Works, Mastek, Motilal Oswal, Wockhardt, and NGOs like UNICEF.

Asked about the difference between job portals and the online video-hiring process, Jose said job portals often provide only rudimentary data. “Social media profiles now reflect the candidate better as they update it regularly. But social media profiles also involve issues such as privacy; so, we take the permission of the candidate before submitting social media profiles to the recruiter.”

Recruiters are increasingly digging social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter, apart from professional networks such as LinkedIn, as reference points in the recruitment process. Social media profiles are maintained by candidates across platforms. From employers’ perspective, profiles in these networks provide more accurate information about their likes, interests, social life, etc, validated and even recommended by peers. Also these profiles give users the ability to showcase their portfolio in a diversified manner.

A critical factor behind this trend is the NextGen’s speed, comfort and adaptability on the social media, which recruiters, many of them from the same generation, find more comfortable, scanning online social media profiles rather than going through the old school resumes, he said.

LinkedIn, a business-oriented social networking site mainly used for professional networking, now has over 300 million users, while Stack Overflow, a question-and-answer site for professional programmers, has over 32 million users. Behance has a million users. These and similar vast networks enable head-hunters to screen profiles of potential candidates before hiring them.

The Bengaluru-based Talview, which assists corporates screen candidates, was founded by four friends from IIT-Bombay in 2012 to reduce the time and cost involved in the recruitment process by more than 50 per cent and to provide a faster turnaround time. It recently secured series-A funding from a leading venture capital fund and Venture Nursery, which Talview plans to invest in building an effective sales team, improving technology, and new product development.

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