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SwitchIdea: A New Way Forward For Social Recruitment
Social recruiting has been redefining how hiring is done these days with many newer companies and organisations deciding to go the social route to hire talented people. LinkedIn seems to be the major channel through which employers and potential employees can interact. However, there are many people on Facebook and Twitter who also do the same. So, in essence the whole social recruiting scene is fragmented. Navi Mumbai based startup SwitchIdea is one service which is trying to unify all these social platforms so that job-seekers and opportunity hunters can get the latest information about their kind of jobs.
SwitchIdea is fronted by a 20 year old student called Niranjan Yadav and has already received favorable reviews from many noted Indian blogs in the startup scene. SwitchIdea is a platform where you can receive notifications from employers based on your skill level. Many existing social networks are used by employers to seek out potential hires by manual searching and profiling. However, if the same employers post their jobs on SwitchIdea, the service matches the job requirements and skill with what you have outlined and gives you an alert on the same. This is a much better implementation and will help employers to reach the right kind of people without much hassle.
Central to the functioning of SwitchIdea is the ingenious concept of a VCard or a Virtual Card. Based on all the information that you feed to your SwitchIdea account, the service generates a slick VCard which gives everyone a quick look at your professional information and skills in addition to contact details and information. SwitchIdea takes in information from the social networks that you attach to it. It even imports your resume from LinkedIn in a clean way. Additionally, it also allows you to add your portfolio items. Graphic designers and artists will find this very useful.
Let us get deeper into the working mechanism of SwitchIdea.
As you can see in the above image, once an employer decides to post a job on SwitchIdea, the service matches the keywords mentioned in the posting to keywords that have been supplied by the users. The users then automatically get a notification and then can apply to the job thus minimising efforts on both sides of the spectrum. The employer can then review the VCards and decides who to call for an interview.
I signed up for the service and filled up all my details and this is the cool looking VCard it generated.
You can see my Vcard at https://www.switchidea.com/denzil
I think that theoretically the service is a win but since I could not validate it due to lack of time spent with it. I will not be able to comment on just how perfectly it works. I will however be checking out the service over the next few weeks and will be updating you guys about it.
I had to get in touch with Niranjan and find out how the 20 year old managed to come up with it. Read the interview below.
1. How did you conceive Switch Idea?
As every startup has its own story, we too have one. One fine afternoon, when it was a break-time at college, I was having a chat with few of my college friends over the tea and snacks at our regular hangout spot called “Tum-Tum Canteen” (A small but happy place outside the college).
It all started with a small question – We have Facebook and Twitter (the biggest social networks). But how easy is it to find someone with a specific skills or profession on these websites? Pretty burdensome, Right! This is because these Social Networks have their “Search Engines” work for few parameters (First Name, Last Name and Location). They do not filter the database using skills, profession or education. This is where – Switch Idea – was born. Since then, we have been working on this module of extracting real juice from social networking websites and turning them into channels of employment for job seekers.
2. What is the kind of traction you are seeing on Switch Idea currently?
As of now, Switch Idea has about 14,680 users (November 5, 2012). The maximum traffic that we’re fetching is from US, accounting to 60% of the total traffic. The next drive is from India!
3. Can you tell us about the technology that went into making this website?
It took us more than a year to build our product – not just because of its design, but due to its tangible conversion of cross-platform API’s. No matter, on which social networks the users is based at; Switch Idea makes it sure that they get the relevant job notifications on right on their social accounts instantly. To be more precise, we have focused on CakePHP, jQuery, mySQL, AJAX and developing tailored social media web-based applications using the API’s.
Apart from the above core technologies, there are many tools that we used over the time as everything seems to be interlinked when you work as a team. You need Skype (for easy communication, Dropbox (for compiling group database), and an android phone for instant communication. There are several tools that we’ve used, but my most favorite one has always been Sparrow Mail.
4. This vCard concept is very cool. Can you tell us what other features are planned in the future?
Yes, we’ll be coming up with applications for Android and iOS in our future releases. Users will be able to exchange their vCards (Virtual Cards) right from their smart phones. Employers can easily filter candidates based on their skills and education on-the-go. I think that’s all we’re planning for now.
5. What is your take on the future of recruitment?
We believe that our approach of Social Media Recruitment makes Switch Idea a highly innovative platform for job seekers and employers, as about 80% of the people around the world spend their time on some or the other social networking websites. Tapping this sector, our product can be scaled for both freelancers and full-time job seekers.
Check out SwitchIdea and let us know what you think in the comments.
Website | SwitchIdea
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2012-11-08 14:00:19
Source: http://www.watblog.com/2012/11/08/switchidea-a-new-way-forward-for-social-recruitment/
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