Jim Milton Interview Transcript, TotalPicture Radio

SelectMinds provides social recruiting and community management solutions -- helping companies source talent and new business through the online connections of their current and former employees.

With SelectMinds' technology, companies can automate and scale the benefits of enterprise social networking for recruiting, branding and new business development.

For over a decade, SelectMinds has been powering the corporate alumni networks and social employee referral programs of the world's best brands.

Peter: Welcome to a Talent Acquisition Channel Special Edition of TotalPicture Radio. This is Peter Clayton and I'm at the SelectMinds Headquarters here in New York City with Jim Milton who's the director of Product Marketing at SelectMinds. Jim, welcome to the show.

Jim: Peter, thanks for having me. Thanks for coming.

Peter: We had a very interesting SelectMinds Client Conference, and you were telling me that the night before the conference began, there was an advisory board meeting where you and your clients were discussing a lot of the trends and I'd like you to just kind of give us a little if you would, overview of some of the things that some of your largest clients were talking about, what some of their concerns were, what some of your top priorities are for 2012.

Jim: We did, we sat down and had a nice dinner and meeting with some of the early adopting clients of some of the social technologies that SelectMinds offers and other products out there. These consist of heads of talent acquisition and other managers inside of large companies. I think some of the feedback that we got was that a lot of clients are looking for really ways to mine networks and including social networks in a non-manual way. They're looking to be able to do this in more of a kind of automated way. We're hearing that a lot of our clients really want to figure out how to get to the next step in engaging communities of talent so that those communities eventually become pipelines of perspective talent.

I think the third kind of twist on the feedback that we got, and this is sort of in our wheelhouse when it comes to our own R&D efforts is clients are looking to put social networks to work. In other words, hopefully to let people and their connections kind of go viral and spread messaging out for the client. It's not such again, back to the first point, not such a manual effort where just the recruiting team has to be the one to do all that messaging and connecting.

We're hearing some from a pain point of view - if you want to put it that way - I think a lot of our clients are saying 'gee, I wish we had more resources to figure out how to do all that,' which kind of leaves us with the big question of what kind of resources does that mean? Do you really need to hire more recruiters to do that? Do recruiters have to be more like marketing specialists to be able to do all that or are there lighter weight ways to engage communities and do networking that are maybe less obvious?

That was helpful for SelectMinds to hear as a vendor because then we can understand ways to work with our clients, but I think it's also just a good barometer for where a lot of folks are at in talent acquisition trying to grapple with these issues.

Peter: One of the words that I kept hearing at the conference was engagement and how companies are really trying to engage with their perspective employees so it's not just a one-way conversation and I know you also spoke a lot about that in this advisory board.

Jim: Engagement seems to be really important. I think it's been well understood for a number of years that engagement internally with your employees is certainly very important because an engaged employee performs better and so forth. I think now we're starting to think about external engagement in a more serious way. It's a struggle though sometimes to think about who should we engage externally, how much time to do we spend doing that and why. What's the payoff, for example, in engaging a talent community, are we really going to hire very many people if we do that... is it worth our time and effort, and what's the appropriate way to do that given on the social networks things are open. So you engage folks and then what are they going to say.

Peter: Right, so you've got all the legal implications there, especially with publicly traded companies.

Jim: Exactly, publicly traded companies, highly regulated companies.

Peter: Which are a lot of your clients, like Swiss Re's of the World and Credit Suisse and hospitals and pharmaceutical companies are all highly regulated organizations.

Jim: That's right, and it's an interesting problem to solve in that you want to leverage the power and the reach of social networks but you'd like to be able to do it obviously in a way that your brand is protected and conversations don't get out of control. We can talk maybe later about some of the ways that SelectMinds does that but yeah, interesting problems to solve.

Peter: You had mentioned to me that in looking for the ROI in doing all of this stuff which, of course, all of these organizations are doing it. If we're going to invest all of this time and effort and money in doing this engagement on Facebook and Twitter and LinkedIn, what's the return and what are we going to get out of that? How many hires are we actually going to get out of somebody sitting there tweeting?

Jim: Sometimes it's more fuzzy, and when I say fuzzy meaning hard to calculate, but that hard to calculate doesn't always mean not worth doing. I'll give you an example.

We've talked to some smaller companies - and I say smaller because again, SelectMinds works with large global enterprise. Let's say we've talked to some 5,000 person companies that tell us, "Jim..." or whoever they're talking to, "...we need to compete against Microsoft, hundreds of thousands of employees, much bigger brand for talent. If we can engage networks to get our jobs top of mind, we might not be able to outspend Microsoft on job posts or banner ads but maybe we can do things like get our employees to share jobs with their friends or get word of mouth viral videos going, that might give us a fighting chance." So that somebody who would have never heard of XYZ Co. or ACME Co. might have gotten a link forward to them by their friend. So the next time they go to Indeed.com or LinkedIn and they start browsing through job posts, the name of the company ACME will be more familiar because somebody virally sent them something.

We're seeing that heads of talent acquisition are saying we know we have to do it for competitive reasons. When we talk about employment brand, I think a lot of times, head of talent acquisition really means to fight that competitive "war for talent". If the brand is recognizable, at least you have a chance to get some of those candidates that would have normally skipped over your application.

We're seeing on the one hand, it's just a box that has to be checked. It's hard to measure ROI but there's something that just has to be done there.

One the other hand, companies are starting to look for if they're going to try to do boomerang hiring and engage a community of former employees, can they measure what percentage of total hires turned out to be boomerang or rehires, what was the cost per hire on those? You're seeing platforms like Jobs2Web and TMP's TalentBrew that are another layer in that puzzle that try to help folks measure the return on investment for all these channels, which is another interesting point of this, it adds to the complexity, right?

Peter: Right.

Jim: You can try to do all this stuff and then you end up needing to turn to five or six vendors to give you the full picture into how well it's working, which is another trend. There are lots of systems out there. That might not stay that way though.

Peter: Speaking about Indeed and LinkedIn, I had a corporate recruiter tell me recently we've stopped posting on job boards. We put our jobs up on our own career site and Indeed and Simply Hired scrape the jobs and we don't have to post on job boards because then they're everywhere.

Jim: Right.

Peter: Do you see things like Indeed and Simply Hired and specifically LinkedIn now, disintermediating some of the larger job boards, the Monsters and the Career Builders of the world?

Jim: Yeah, there's a slide that I saw during one of the presentations at our client conference, and I can't recall which one, but it really resonated with me. It showed kind of a five-year trend where companies are essentially swapping out job board spend with SEO in a big way. Swapping out with SEO and getting natural traffic, and that's interesting from the standpoint of saving money but I think what we're also hearing anecdotally at least is the quality of the applicants coming in are the same, sometimes worse, sometimes better but by and large, the same.

Although, everybody's rallying on the job boards and saying they're no good anymore, I think one the one hand it's true to say that there are certainly less expensive sources that companies are investing in SEO, SEM but we're still hearing that it's hard to fill positions that require skilled candidates. We haven't solved the quality problem. We have SEM and SEO and Indeed, we haven't solved the problem of getting those passive candidates. We haven't solved any of that. We've reduced costs but we still haven't done the hard part, which is get these hard to fill positions filled. I think there are things happening along the way, and SelectMinds is trying to drive some efforts to use social media to get hard to fill positions filled, to do pipelining and stuff like we mentioned before for passive candidates.

To answer your question, yeah, I think that we're seeing a displacement of job boards with some of the pay per click and SEO channels. I think the next step though is social in a really impactful way to go that last mile to make the hardest hires happen. That's what everybody's excited for.

Peter: Something else that you mentioned that I think is very interesting, most people are aware that there are companies out there like Radian6 that go out and monitor all of the social networks, what's going on, what's being said about their company out there. You mentioned that you see that these companies are now going beyond listening into aggregating this data in a meaningful way that companies can act on.

Jim: I think it's interesting, if you look at some of the social listening vendors if you want to call that kind of a space, you'll notice the evolution in their product marketing - and I say this as a product marketing person, I kind of pay attention to these things - evolution in their message goes from telling companies, espousing the virtues of listening to the people out there that talk about your brand and then kind of now going a step further and acting up on that insight and then engaging with people.

For example, if you're able to determine some folks that speak very loudly in a positive way about your brand, you would think the next logical step would be to get those folks on your side to seed them with some messages that they can spread for you and help grow a positive influence throughout the social graph. You would also think that there are people speaking negatively about you, there could be some community management strategy or some PR strategy to get out there and kind of ease the impact of that negativity. I think that everything starts with having insight and visibility but from there, if you're going to get something done, you've got to act on the insight.

I think social listening is definitely here to stay and now we're at a place where we want to put influential people to work and let them talk for us and we want to kind of mitigate some of the bad stuff that's being said too.

In talent, I think it's really relevant because there are going to be a few movers and shakers that are really well connected to some of the top talent you're looking for. Here in Silicon Valley, there's a talking head or a blogger or there's somebody who's a real kind of Twitter maniac who's connected to everybody, wouldn't you love to have that person kind of talking about the new product that you're launching or the cool work environment that you have? Of course you would so systems for making that happen, for getting people to speak for you are, I think, a part of the next step in all this.

Peter: Let's talk about your products at SelectMinds. You have Community Connect and Talent Find; just give us a brief overview of both of these products and what their purpose is.

Jim: Community Connect helps solve the external engagement problem that we started to talk about before. If the opportunity is there are people out there, it could be former employees, could be just brand enthusiasts, could be customers, could be just experts in an industry. I'll give you an example.

One of our clients is a large pharmaceutical company and they wanted to engage industry experts and not just industry experts but people that actually had applied for positions at this company who weren't able to be hired right away but who were potentially a good fit... the timing was off or so forth, so we're seeing used cases out there where companies really are seeing a lot of value and engaging non-employees and keeping a relationship there so it could be converted into something useful later.

The question is how do you do that? What's the proper container to kind of put those folks in? What kind of community to put them in to sort of have your cake and eat it too; meaning let them engage, let them talk to each other, let them do social things but then do it in a branded environment where there are some boundaries and rules so things don't get chaotic and you don't have to worry about legal issues and things being said about the company that are not good.

Community Connect is an external community platform. It could be used broadly for engaging a talent community. It could be specifically for engaging a corporate alumni community or former employees. Every time one of them leaves, they might be able to get automatically invited to this place so they're not in your HRMS system anymore but they're in another container where you can keep track of them, push out messaging to them, give them content that's interesting, let them engage with each other. Once you have that engaged community, again there are a lot of things you can do with that engagement to convert it into result. Hiring people back to your company, getting them to spread word for you. If you have a really cool recruitment media video, maybe they'll share it with their friends. That's the Community Connect platform.

The other product is more of a referral engine. It's called TalentVine and TalentVine says if you've got an engaged community of any sort, whether it's an external community like what we just talked about, or whether it's your own internal employees, TalentVine can essentially bolt on to some community and really drive social, viral, referrals of your job opportunities.

Back to again, one of the things that we started off with, companies are looking for non-manual ways to use social networks. If you think about it, one of the most automated ways to use social networks is to get a network of 10,000, 100,000 people to spread the message for you, and TalentVine will really help your communities, including your own employees, understand what your open jobs are and spread information about those open jobs for you without any recruiters doing anything to their friends.

Again, Community Connect is a container for a community. TalentVine is an engine to tap that community on the shoulder and have them do things for you or make referrals.

Peter: Do these two products work together?

Jim: They do, they're pre-integrated. We have some customers that use one product or the other and both at the same time. Again, if there's a use case for engaging people that you've interviewed or corporate alumni, you can have that community, you can bolt on TalentVine and then automatically mark it to that community and make your jobs go viral through that community so they can work together, they can work standalone. A lot of our customers are simply looking to revamp their employee referral program.

One of the big predictions made obviously at ERE this year was that in 2012, we're going to really see the coupling of social media and employee referrals so companies are really starting to dust off their employee referral programs and go beyond looking at them as just a bonus and a policy and seeing them more in a three-dimensional living, breathing, growing community.

A lot of our customers that use TalentVine, they do use it for their employee referral programs but they think about it kind of transforming the referral program into a referral community. They've got all their employees really engaged and sharing jobs with their friends and the employees can see what each other is doing, who the top referrers are so it almost spurs a little bit of competition within a company so it really let's a company use social media for a specific business process. A lot of our customers just use us for our employee referral programs standalone but you can always again integrate efforts and have internal and external referrals. There's all sorts of things you can do.

Peter: That's some interesting insight because I think you're absolutely right; most companies had employee referral programs for years... "We'll give you a bonus..." and a lot of these organizations haven't really gone back and visited their referral programs for five or ten years and the world has changed, right?

Jim: I'll go back to the ERE, and I think John Sullivan said it very well. There's a real opportunity to turn employees relationships that they've built into referrals. They're sitting right there. Think about one of the employees in the accounting department. If you go look at them on LinkedIn, they've got a hundred connections on LinkedIn. So your employee is already on LinkedIn. He's already got a hundred friends on LinkedIn that he went to school with and studied accounting with, that he worked with in other accounting departments. It just makes so much sense to let your employee click a button or two to get your open jobs in front of his friends or her friends.

I think Sun Microsystems said years ago, the network is the computer, and I think the metaphor now is the network is the recruiter. It's really about thinking about the network as the thing that can go out and come alive for you and do the recruiting, and I think we're going to see a lot of people re-imagine how recruiting is done, not as an individual sport for just a recruiter or a sourcer but for the whole team, the whole company to take part in, every employee. There's a huge vision there. SelectMinds with TalentVine is certainly trying to crack the code on really how to make every employee or recruiter, every alumnus or recruiter. There's a real opportunity there, I think.

Peter: One of the sessions at your client conference was with Chad Godhard at Sage Software and it was Employee Referral Program Best Practices. Can you share with us some of the things that you discussed and perhaps some very specific things that Sage has been able to experience in adopting your software?

Jim: It's an interesting situation with Sage. We've got a really thoughtful kind of early adopting leader of talent at Sage and he saw an opportunity to really pinpoint outbound referrals. We're going to get a little technical for a second, I won't go too technical.

Let's think about how referrals happen. Usually, Peter, let's say you work at Google and I want to work at Google so maybe I'll call you up and say, "Peter, can you get me in there? Do you know anybody in HR you can pass my résumé to?" That's the classic referral scenario.

We call them inbound referral. It's the jobseeker really trying to get in and kind of network her way in. Well John Sullivan again, once again, one of the thought leaders over the area will tell you, "That's 70% how referrals happen that way." It's the jobseeker coming inbound. I think what Chad at Sage saw was the opportunity to do other type of referral better, the outbound, where your employee actually proactively decides, "I want to market jobs here. I want to get my friends to come work here." Totally different.

What we've been able to do for Sage with TalentVine is increase their outbound referrals by about 83% and in doing that, we've increased their overall referrals by about 25% so it gets a little again technical but if you do the algebra one, you figure out that if 30% of your referrals are outbound and you increase those by 83%, you're increasing overall referrals by 25%.

It's an interesting thing. Again, if you're using your imagination, we're not doing my usual live demo so for the listeners, you imagine Sage's employees proactively pushing out and sharing out Sage jobs with their friends and that wouldn't have happened before had they not used the social referral platform like TalentVine. People are busy. Frankly, the last thing people are thinking about is doing the recruiter's job. With our system we've made it so easy and almost fun that these outbound referrals are happening. That's kind of what happened with Sage. We're proud of the results so far. They're a newer client but we'll see where that goes. We're excited so far.

Peter: One of the things I heard at the conference was that TalentVine is just absolutely easy to use, very intuitive, no training needed, very easy to integrate into the systems and that to your point that people really like using it. They enjoy using it.

Jim: That's not by accident.

Peter: Right, it never is by accident when it's easy, right?

Jim: I can't take credit for it. Our head of product is phenomenal but beyond the point there was a strategic decision to really make sure it was easy to use and that's a reflection of the fact that we can all admit that the ATS companies out there is their number one strength is not user experience.

Peter: No kidding. [Laughing]

Jim: I've never heard anybody tell me that it is. Not only for HR but in terms of applicant experience and employee experience, we decided to flip that on it's head and make that our number one strength and we knew we had to because there's no way you're going to roll out any kind of end user system to thousands of employees and then have to train them and help them use it. That doesn't scale. It just has to be intuitive. They have to be able to use it the first time without any questions, and we think we've done a really good job with that and that's been good for us.

Peter: Someone I interviewed last year at your client conference and who spoke at your conference this year, Myrta Barell from Swiss Re and she got up and her presentation - and I think this is a really important part of this whole thing. She said, "I work for a very conservative company in a very conservative industry from a very conservative country." When a company like a Swiss Re can adopt some of these technologies, the TalentVine's, to me there's hope. [Laughing]

Jim: Here's the trick. There's a secret sauce to this. I mean part of it of course is going to be Myrta being a great internal salesperson but it's not all salesmanship. If you have a specific business goal that you're working backward from and if you can not invite too many risks then you can get this done inside of a very conservative organization. If the company relies on employee referrals as the life blood for quality talent and that's already well understood, it's not a huge leap then to have a social referral platform.

It could be a bigger leap to have a wild west open forum community for everybody to put out slanderous comments on. That's scary for an organization but if you look at the vendors out there of TalentVine and SelectMinds being one of them, there are applications that are conservative business friendly. It's not open for wild conservation; it's really just to get one or two things done, namely like a referral. Swiss Re was able to do that and again for their alumni network, it's that balance of having a closed network where you can kind of monitor things and mediate things still with an open social network feel so they again, get to check off all the boxes and get their business goals done.

Peter: What's the adoption rate, Jim, of people joining these alumni networks? I would assume it's rather high because they want to connect with their friends.

Jim: The adoption rate when the chips fall, it's generally the right people joining and self- selecting and I think that's one of the important points here because you can't force a conversation, you can't force affinity for a brand. If somebody left a company on bad terms, you don't want them joining the alumni network if you fired them for a certain reason.

What we're finding is we're seeing 15%, 25%, 30%, 40% adoption rates. It's going to range based on the company but those are healthy adoption rates where you have the people you want and not the people you don't. There's enough critical mass. We have enough alumni networks with tens and tens of thousands of members, hundreds of thousands of members which is a good enough of a crowd that you can really use that to create a ground swell but again, having the right people I think is the most important thing.

Peter: As you know, there was an article in the Wall Street Journal recently called Boomerang Employees, More Companies Tap Into Alumni Networks To Re-recruit Best Of Former Workers. It seems like there's a real trend here that companies like boomerangs. They like bringing these people back in and we've heard for years, Gerry Crispin and John Sullivan and everyone talk about the fact that referral employees usually are a better fit culturally for an organization and usually stay around longer.

Jim: I'm going to say I like to look at an umbrella and I like to think of it as managing your people channel. If you're doing talent acquisition and you're doing it online, you've got job board channels and social channels but really if you start with your people channel, you're going to get like 70% of your hires done. What I mean by that is we already know that companies hire like 35 or 40% nationally in the US of their employees just via internal hiring, mobility and then promotions and such. On top of that, if you add employee referrals, you've got another 25, 27%, on top of that if you add boomerang hires, you've got another maybe 5% so that all starts to add up.

Without spending a dollar on a job post, you get the most quality hires, you already have been through your training process and proven themselves again, without spending a dollar on a click or on a job post or on a campaign. I think it's really especially with shrinking budgets over the years and more pressure on HR, it's really like I said earlier, people are really dusting off these old almost semi-managed/unmanaged programs, mobility, referrals, boomerangs and now making them managed and tightening them up so that maybe they have half a dollar is necessary to spend on job boards and so forth. There's a lot of urgency around it, we see.

Peter: Back to what you were talking about earlier about a candidate coming in and being a really great candidate but you don't have that job for that person at that particular time but you've invested in bringing that individual in and so it makes sense to try to find the system to really stay engaged with them.

Jim: That's where this is all very... it's a numbers game. If you start with your people channels and make your quality hires just naturally and organically and you use some of these tools to do even better, then what you say is okay, as you're getting referrals, as you're having boomerang hires, you have some people who aren't ready to apply today as you're doing all these efforts, the word of mouth. I tell my friend about a job. He's not ready to apply today so you do need that container of sorts somehow to put these people somewhere where they're not interested today because you don't want to lose them in the future. You've done half the work of getting them engaged, whether that's because you've got a great brand or because you've got a good word of mouth campaign; you've done half the work so let's not let that go to waste by not keeping connected with these folks.

That's one of the huge questions and I think, what's the right way to do that for companies with different sized budgets and different amounts of staff and resource? What's the right way to stay connected? Of course, not to make this a total commercial for our product, but obviously TalentVine and Community Connect are two options there.

Peter: In your advisory board meeting, Anne Berkowitch, your CEO asked her advisory board members if they had one wish, especially in the area of technology for 2012, what would it be?

Jim: The interesting part about the answers we got were although we had asked the question in terms of technology, the answers we got were, "we wish we had more staff, more resources." Whether it be more recruiters or more recruitment marketing specialists.

Peter: I think that's universal, don't you?

Jim: I think so.

Peter: Companies have cut to the bone. There's nobody left to cut.

Jim: If we believe in what we say when we say people are our most important asset, of course we all wish we had more good people around us to help us out.

On the other hand, if you don't know what's possible with technology, you're always going to think I just need more people. Didn't Henry Ford say that if people didn't know about cars, they would have asked for faster horses. I think there are things that you can do in an automated way, in a scalable way, without spending a lot of money so that if unfortunately you can't hire another headcount in HR, you can use technology to go far.

Peter: A press release came out recently that talked about your partnership with Taleo. Can you tell us a little bit about that? One of the things Anne said in her keynote address and she was talking about the amount of industry consolidation that's going on out there and she specifically mentioned SAP acquiring Success Factors and then a couple of days later, acquiring Jobs2Web. There really seems to be a trend in the industry and I think clients want this too. They want products that are integrated that work together. They are not on 15 different platforms and having to do this and switch over to that and nothing talks to each other.

Jim: Yeah, it has to happen and it's happening. Products have to be integrated and companies are going to become integrated because from a user experience point of view, if you're an applicant, you don't want to get bounced around between too many systems. You don't want to start on Jobs2Web and then go to TalentVine and then go to an ATS page and then go to another page.

From an HR administrative point of view, you don't want to manage different terminals interfaces and have to train your team on different systems. It's just bound to happen. It's already starting to happen.

With our partnership with Taleo, this was kind of recognition of this idea that systems really should mesh whenever they can. Taleo having probably the biggest market share in the ATS was our natural kind of top and first choice. We're really privileged to be working with them. They've got a really large number of customers of all sizes. We're integrated with all of their versions of their enterprise product and their Taleo Business Edition for small businesses so that means if you're a Taleo customer, for example, you don't even have to login to the TalentVine product.

TalentVine can provide you with an entire portal to totally dust off and revamp your employee referral program, make it social, make it viral, help you get more hires and it's a beautiful experience for the employees and the applicants. But then from a recruiters point of view, they don't have to login to Talent. They just login to Taleo which is already their system of choice because of our integration. We're just serving up and hard coating official referrals and sending them right into Taleo. You don't have to reconcile between two systems so it's really a win-win for everybody, for the users of the product and user bases and for the HR administrators just to make sure everything flows smoothly. It's what the market is asking for. This was a good I think first step for us and you're going to see a lot more of this kind of stuff.

Peter: Speaking about that, what kind of things do you see are coming in 2012? What are recruiters and HR folks really trying to accomplish?

Jim: Anne Berkowitch, our CEO talks about this a lot and I'd have to agree, I think we're going to see the notion of CRM in terms of candidate relationship management become more concrete and more settled. In other words, if you ask three different companies what they think about what does candidate relationship management mean and how should we do that - you'll get three different answers.

I think now as companies are saying 'the ATS isn't providing a lot of value aside from compliance and just basic tracking.' What we want is and what we our systems that help us track the management of relationships of these ongoing social conversations but again, what does that mean? It'll be interesting to see the roll up between SAP, Jobs2Web who has some CRM capability and Success Factors. It'll be interesting where this shakes out and where smart companies end up doing alpha and beta testing with key customers and then where product marketing follows to kind of then take what we know and then go to market in a really big way with whatever the new version of CRM is going to be.

By the end of 2012, I think we predict you're going to have a real point of view at the talent leadership level about what they want to do with CRM because we've been hearing people ragging on the ATS forever saying they want CRM. LinkedIn obviously moved into CRM with a lot of CRM features. Avature has been around, so interesting to see what they'll do and how that will roll up somewhere or not. That's going to be one of the mysteries I think that will be revealed probably by the end of the year. That's potentially at the center of all this because any activity you do, you have to be able to keep track of obviously, any of the channels you manage socially and CRM is probably at the center of that.

Peter: I think it's so important for people to understand that these applicant tracking systems when they initially came out, it was all about compliance. That was their purpose, to create a funnel for all of these candidates to come in and a way to make sure that they are complying with all the rules and regulations and laws that exist out there. It had nothing to do with the candidate experience. That's something else Anne mentioned in her keynote address is she thinks 2012 will be the year of the candidate experience and employer branding comes back to the forefront.

Jim: Absolutely, and the other thing that she mentioned and I think one of our clients from IBM mentioned was 2012 being the year of the individual. One of the things that we all have to think about now with, whether it's CRM or whether it's talent communities, these are consumers who are going to choose whether or not to use these systems. HR can administer these however they'd like but if consumers don't adopt then nothing happens, nothing works so individuals has a lot of power now in enterprises software. Recruiting maybe as a whole is going to be more peer to peer in many ways.

Again the individual theme, employees helping you recruit with their friends, peer to peer. Alumni talking to current employees peer to peer where engagement happening at a peer level so if engagement happens at a peer level, the systems have to facilitate that. We all know that technology vendors don't always get user experience right the first time, so another prediction is we're going to see many more initiatives that don't work out, that fail and that's okay. We'll learn from failures as well.

Of course SelectMinds hope for 2012 is that given our investment and commitment to user experience, I think understanding these trends we hope we'll be in a great position to create a lot of value for companies that want to solve these problems. They want to create pipelines. They want to engage. They want to do things like get social referrals. They don't want to spend a ton of money to do it. Maybe they can't hire a ton of people to do it and so we're excited to kind of carry on and help them do that in a lean way.

Peter: One comment I would like to make, and this is specifically for the job seekers who may be listening to this interview, Gerry Crispin at Career Crossroads said to me that a candidate today should never ever, ever apply for a job without a referral. With things like LinkedIn and Facebook and Twitter, it's easy to connect with people and to find someone that you have a shared experience with out there that is working at Google or at a company that you may want to try to get into and why not make that connection?

Jim: I can help end this with a personal story to back up Gerry.

Peter: Sure.

Jim: I have a friend who works for a very prestigious law firm. He's a partner at the firm and he wanted to go work for Apple computer. He rushed to apply for a job to work for Apple and kind of forgot that he knew somebody there. He knew somebody he went to high school with who he had kind of kept in touch with over the years and just didn't take that extra step to give this guy a call and get the résumé passed in through referral. To my knowledge, he never heard back. We talk about the ATS black hole, it's a nightmare for jobseekers.

Peter: Absolutely.

Jim: Absolutely use the referral every time you can, every time you can. We're mindful of that. We're excited not only obviously to help HR but we're excited to empower job seekers. If you have a first or second degree connection to a company, you absolutely use it. It's going to be a huge revolution, I think, in the job seeking experience.

Peter: Jim, thank you so much for speaking with us today on TotalPicture Radio.

Jim: Peter, thanks again.

Peter: Thank you.

Jim: Great.

Visit Jim Milton's feature page in the Talent Acquisition Channel on TotalPicture Radio. That's TotalPicture.com for resource, links and a complete transcript of today's interview. With SelectMinds Technology, companies can recruit top talent from within their employees' social networks and from their own private secure employee and alumni networks. These referral based environments drive recruitment, new business development and lead to great new hires and substantial business growth.

Visit SelectMinds.com to learn more, or call 877-276-3978 to set up a free demo today.

This is Peter Clayton reporting. Thank you for tuning in to TotalPicture Radio, the voice of career and leadership acceleration. Join our Facebook community to join in the conversation and subscribe to our newsletter on our homepage TotalPicture.com. Our interviews link your business with your customers, prospects, employees and passive candidates.