Job boards are so yesterday.
To help discover the best and brightest candidates, a flurry of new social recruiting services are emerging that hope to serve as talent treasure maps for companies, including banks. One of the most recent startups to utilize a social media site as a resource talent pool is
"We want to bring friends and jobs together," says Co-Founder and Chief Executive Dominik Grolimund. "We are trying to be different from a job platform."
That objective is why the startup, which emerged out of pilot last month, uses Facebook as its talent pool resource. The service works like this: A hiring company posts an opening on Silp's site and the service will find candidate matches based on members' profile details, such as work experience and interests, as well as through data gleaned from users' Facebook-linked online resources, such as Twitter or LinkedIn profiles. The app also makes use of the Facebook "social graph," a graph that depicts personal relations. The feature will help employers decide which of their co-workers, friends, and friends of friends might work well in the open roles. If the employer thinks a person is a good fit, he can recommend a job to him.
Currently, Silp is only available to candidates seeking technology-related openings. The job posting capability is expected to be widely released to employers within a couple of weeks, says Grolimund. Even so, a large bank is already testing out the tools. Though Grolimund wouldn't reveal the name, he says the financial institution wants to use Silp to help fill its IT job openings as well as to better improve its campus recruiting efforts.
Silp is not the only social media-enabled tool that banks are -- tapping into for sourcing talent.
TweetMyJobs pushes jobs into Twitter, among other social sites, and segments the opportunities by geography and job type. It also released a Facebook app earlier this year that leverages the social graph to match job seekers with available positions.
Since the company first launched three years ago, TweetMyJobs says it has inked deals with four large banks. "There's been a massive rise across the financial industry," Yair Riemer, vice president of global marketing, says. "It's one of our largest growing sectors."
Beyond sourcing talent, there's an added benefit to social recruiting efforts for banks, too: it helps shows off their cultures.
"Everyone knows Google is a cool place to work," Riemer says.
"What we tell our clients is that they need to think about recruitment and sourcing, but they need to show the human side," says Reimer.
Some banks have been working toward achieving just that.
Take BBVA Compass, for example.
"Social media is a powerful play in how we go after and recruit candidates and show our culture," says Ryan Kraynick, executive director of employment services of BBVA Compass.
In fact, Kraynick says the Birmingham, Ala.-based bank plans to post more company culture videos, such as a day in the life of a bank teller, on YouTube and push out the content to its entire social network footprint.
"We have the culture on the inside," Kraynick says. "Now it's about showing the outside."
In the interim, BBVA's virtual campus website drives most job applicants, while direct recruiting efforts have worked best through LinkedIn, he says.
LinkedIn, which has more than 175 million members worldwide, has played a large role in recruiting for companies nationwide for years now. More than 12,000 companies use LinkedIn for recruiting, according to Dan Shapero, vice president of hiring solutions.
USAA, a San Antonio-based bank, is one of them.
"We use LinkedIn to find experienced professionals and Twitter campaigns to secure our college recruiting goals," said Michael Runyan, assistant vice president, USAA People Services, in an email interview. "In 2011, we expanded one of our specialty skills, [and] 40% of those hires came through the use of targeted social media efforts on sites such as LinkedIn."
But social sites aren't limited to helping banks find new hires. Indeed, online services are also springing up to help facilitate other career-related functionalities, like mentoring.
"Our greatest assets are our members," says Elena Bajic, founder and chief executive Ivy Exec, based in Manhattan.
"It's a way to give back to the community," says Gerhard van der Poel, a mentor and director in structured finance at ING Capital. "You get to know how other people in a completely different market."
Ivy Exec is a career and recruitment site focused on executives. The company curates who can join its network. Of its more than 140,000 members, 86% hold MBAs, 10% are C-levels and 25% are VPs, says the company.
"We're going in the direction of alerting members to social interaction," says Bajic. "Even as we look to add more social components, they will always be meaningful. .Our member is busy. Time is the one thing they don't have enough of."
Though bankers are slowly experimenting with new ways to reveal more about their brands, insiders say banks still have a long way to go with the initiative.
"The workforce is changing. You have to engage a person in a brand," says Bradley G. Leimer, vice president of online and mobile strategy for Mechanics Bank in Richmond, Calif. "Banking traditionally doesn't have as much openness in culture but will be forced to."
Leimer suggests that banks better brand themselves by hosting meetups and putting video testimonials up on what it's like to work for a company on their websites, for example.
"The more transparent you are with what it's like to work at a company, the more likely you'll attract the right people," he says.
