Category Archives: Social Software

Jobvite

There are a ton of companies moving into the use of social media for recruiting. None are as advanced and focused as Jobvite. The Burlingame, CA startup, is the industry leader in the development of innovation and functionality in Social Recruiting.

The company began its life as a referral driven Applicant Tracking System. As it began to catch the social media wave, its market presence began to include social media features from Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. Ultimately, the market wanted to be able to have just the social recruiting functions.

While Jobvite will easily perform various job board placement functions, the core idea of the service is to build solid referral networks using social media. In other words, Jobvite competes easily with traditional job placement services and the new emerging social media recruiting tools. But it has an astonishing difference.

Where most of the other tools are built on a series of scripts, Jobvite is a standalone software application. The development team is a polished Silicon Valley startup crew with deep industry experience. The application is data savvy and uses the client’s recruiting experience to make the client smarter.

It’s easier to think of Jobvite as great referral recruiting than as a social media dashboard (although it certainly offers the social media dashboard functionality). The real value of the system comes from using it.

Every member of a client organization gets a Jobvite account. The idea is that employees use their referral networks to generate hires. Jobvite provides widgets and tracking tools. Employees evaluate (with some very smart Jobvite automated matching support) which of their friends and connections might be interested in a job. The invitation (a jobvite) gets sent and the system tracks and follows the recommendation.

Over time, you get a picture of who’s connected to whom; which connections are most productive and how hiring works in your particular ecosystem. Jobvite does what I’d call ‘on the fly job matching in the social media ecosystem’. It’s not just a job publishing tool. It gives intelligent guidance and collects data that improves its guidance.

There’s also a great widget that allows a user to have an app from their company on their facebook page. The app offers jobs from the company, edited as appropriate by the user. One of the goals at Jobvite is to make real the idea that every employee is a recruiter.

At Jobvite, the vision is that the Internet is the Job Board. While the tool capably optimizes traditional job posting, its core intent is to harness the power of social networks; not by brand name but as an emerging reality. The platform operates on the assumption that any job is better filled by a trackable recommendation and that clear metrics are essential elements of knowing whether or not your efforts are effective.

Where others provide publishing tools, Jobvite provides an integrated recruiting framework and toolset rooted in the power of referrals.

There are two basic packages you can by from Jobvite: Jobvite Hire and Jobvite Source. JHire is an ATS with social media recruiting capabilities. JSource is a fully functional social media recruiting campaign execution tool.

Since the firm itself resides in Silicon Valley, it has an easy time building smart integrations with various local vendors. The team is composed of seasoned Valley technologists who are well connected in the emerging army of Valley based social media empires. As a result, the company is a good corporate citizen in the areas of privacy and Terms of Use compliance. You’ll never see Jobvite’s accounts at data providers getting pulled for the overenthusiastic use of spidering.

Regular readers will certainly have heard about Jobvite before this piece. My recommendation, though, is that you get a demo sometime soon. The Jobvite toolkit will improve your recruiting effectiveness.