Business Recruiting 2.0

The world is changing. The technology has had a profound effect in the way we live our lives. From our personal habits like watching television programming to the way we do business collaboration to, if the Obama administration have their way, the way we can get the government to work for us, things are changing rapidly. All these technological changes make us more efficient and effective. Under this paradigm, two new announcements in the tech world today are important and has the potential to disrupt a business process called recruiting. Welcome to Recruiting 2.0 and, for businesses and job applicants, the life just got easier.

Finally, after a long wait, LinkedIn today announced that they are opening up their platform to allow third party developers build applications on top of it.

Over fifty million users entrust their professional identities and relationships with LinkedIn, helping build LinkedIn into the largest global professional network today. However, professionals around the world use a wide variety of applications and Web sites to get their work done, and they have spoken loud and clear that they want the ability to leverage their professional networks wherever they work.

Starting today, developers worldwide can integrate LinkedIn into their business applications and Web sites. Developer.linkedin.com is now live and open for business.

I am much more excited about LinkedIn’s platform than Facebook platform because LinkedIn offers a way for professionals and businesses to tap into the huge business ecosystem from whatever application they are using for their professional/business needs. Whether you like it or not, it is huge and more significant compared to the Facebook platform. This impacts the businesses in a profound way including

• the ability to take advantage of the data from LinkedIn network from within their own applications
• take their applications and integrate it closely with the 50+ Million strong professional ecosystem
• the ability to interact closely with professionals in the LinkedIn ecosystem and tap into their expertise
• a possibility to find channel partners from unexpected quarters
• overall, making the business more visible with those who matter
  

I am sure the next few months will usher in a wave of applications, some of them can be outright trash, that could affect the way we have been doing business till now.

The other announcement came from Zoho (Disclaimer: Zoho is the sponsor of this blog but this is my independent opinion based on the same information that is available to other bloggers). They announced a new offering called Zoho Recruit. Whether you are a HR or a recruiting agency, this is a very powerful tool to have. It completely automates the whole recruitment process and helps businesses save valuable time and hire the most valuable candidate available.

Well, these two announcements today are very interesting and significant but I see more disruptive potential in combining Zoho Recruit with the LinkedIn Platform. One is a network of 50+ Million professionals and the other is a highly automated way to do recruit employees for any organization. A combination of these two has the potential to transform long difficult hiring process into a more reliable fast track process. In the absence of a marriage between Zoho’s app and LinkedIn platform, the businesses will be spending their time on LinkedIn ecosystem separately before taking advantage of Zoho’s app. Similarly, since Zoho is a business productivity suite and not a social network, the treasure called LinkedIn Data is completely siloed from the Zoho’s application. An integration between these two has a potential to completely disrupt the way businesses carry out their hiring processes. Welcome to the age of Business Recruiting 2.0.

Disclaimer: This post of mine is completely independent of Zoho’s thinking. In fact, Zoho’s information is completely siloed from my brain and this post should not be construed as their own thinking. I am just throwing up this idea in air and it is entirely up to them to do the integration.