LinkedIn rolls out two new killer applications for their users called as “Referral Engine” and “Jobs for you”.

LinkedIn recently announced the new launch of their new product offerings to the LinkedIn brand. Called as “Jobs for You” and “Referral Engine” by LinkedIn, the products were a super success right from its first day of implementations.

Being targeted exclusively for recruiters and employees, the products pre-populate the persons work experience and only displays relevant contextual jobs in his profile as a page called as “Jobs you may be interested in” offering jobs specifically targeted to end users.

The perception after customizing this page was tremendous. LinkedIn revealed the fact that after the application was installed, they saw lots of success with passive candidate’s clickthroughs applying as active job seekers. The success behind it was simple. They placed this offering in the home page of the employee’s profile.

LinkedIn’s “Jobs for You” directly helps companies, recruiters, individuals to directly share job openings. The advantage is that it uses the information directly from their LinkedIn profiles to target users with relevant job opportunities.

While LinkedIn’s concept of finding and delivering relevant job opportunities is not new. LinkedIn has taken professional networking to a new level. Their intention is to target active job seekers, who run specific job searches in their database.

They plan to capture the audience by a strategic method called as “Geotargetting”. Here individuals are targeted within a specific location.  With the data gathered by LinkedIn from individual profiles, the Jobs for you console will deliver the most relevant opportunities based on your LinkedIn profile information.

LinkedIn users will be able to opt out from these options if they don’t want to participate in it. But who wouldn’t want an occasional interesting career opportunity to be displayed to them. However from a recruiting perspective it takes targeting passive candidates into active ones to a whole new dimension.

Referral Engine

LinkedIn went a step ahead in terms of their new product and brand development by launching “Referral Engine”, slated to be in beta mode until 2011. But the buzz is that it’s going to be the killer app specifically for “employee referrals”.

The intention behind this is to assists companies in hiring top talent from their employee’s referrals by involving more employees in making potential referrals, and thereby helping them make more quality referral closures.

With Referral Engine, any company posting a new job through LinkedIn will now make automatic job suggestions to potential employees who can be a good fit for that job. This thereby helps employees to “pre-screen talent” in their own network to make quality referral suggestions.

To promote this service, LinkedIn has planned to launch “Referral Engine”, as a free service to its “Recruiter” customers. They opine that, the more jobs posted by the company, the better this service will work in a viral mode.

More Information about LinkedIn’s new product Lines can be read on its Talent Advantage website.

 

 

Measure your Quality of Hire

Quality of hire is directly interlinked to the measure of how well a new person meets the performance needs of the job. The performance management process of the job and the candidate involvement is very crucial here.

When should you measure quality of hire?

Try measuring your quality of hire in 3 interval stages mainly

• Before
• During
• After

Based upon this we can know, whether our hiring decisions were accurate or not and is comparable to measuring the hiring quality as per the industry standards. Compare a candidate’s past accomplishments to what needs to be done on the job across a rating factor scale.

Some of the factors include technical competency, emotional intelligence, and motivation to do the required work. The evaluation is based on asking candidates to provide detailed examples of accomplishments that best relate to the actual performance objectives of that position.

This performance based approach to measure and control quality of hire is possible as it meets a lot of organizational key needs. The biggest advantage is, that it’s not that difficult to implement and can be easily tracked from a process control and feedback standpoint.

So plan out your hiring objectives and go for it.