Social media and recruitment - the perfect marriage?

An interview with Jörg Kress - Head of Product and Technology at FindEm

The world of recruitment continues to evolve at a rapid pace, with the introduction of new tools and practices to benefit both companies trying to attract new talent and candidates themselves. One of the challenges that recruiters face at present is the difficulty to cut through all the online noise and be heard. Candidates are already looking well beyond the traditional job boards and companies are having to put a lot more effort in to reach them before the competition. Here’s where our client FindEm comes in. We spoke to Jörg Kress - Head of Product and Technology to discover more about the product and the company’s plans for the future.

Welcome Jörg. Could you give us a brief overview of FindEm and what you have set out to achieve with the product?

FindEm is a platform to find and attract potential candidates on social networks and pre-qualify them using a customisable chatbot. It opens up a new source for candidates to complete your recruiting pipeline.

We provide all this in a simple web application that will only expose the details that recruiters care about. You don't even need a Facebook account in order to use FindEm. We do all the heavy lifting.

​How has recruitment evolved over the past few years? And where does your product fit in?

Recruitment has changed a lot, together with almost every aspect of people management. I sometimes use the phrase "the department formerly known as HR", because they have to do so much more. HR today has to perform at the top, starting from recruitment to onboarding to working culture to offboarding, delivering a top-notch employee experience throughout.

We help by offloading some of the work to discover and source new candidates, so the recruiter can focus on more effective work in later parts of the process.

But that's not all.

Today most available candidates do not actively look for a new job for various reasons. We call them passive seekers and our goal is to seek them out using technologies that have already proven themselves in product marketing.

The job you offer can be viewed as ‘the product’ and things such as the perks, the company culture, etc define the product experience. What we’re doing is essentially trying to find a ‘customer’ for this ‘product’.

Since not everyone in HR is a social media marketing expert, we provide a simple way to allow recruiters to use social media advertising to source new candidates - candidates they would otherwise never get.

Could you tell us a bit about the technology used in FindEm? Did you always know what software and frameworks you wanted to use? Or was this something that was decided further in the product development cycle?

Sure: we use Python, Django and Vue. This was set from the get-go and it has been an obvious choice. They hit the sweet spot of being mature and flexible. If you create a platform like FindEm, you don't want to constantly fight the technology, either because something is flaky or because it's inflexible.

For me personally, in addition to the technical hard facts, I also take the communities of those technologies into account. It often will tell you more about the experience you will have than some feature list.

Another reason which made this decision easy: I knew that 10Clouds had expertise in those technologies and beyond. We’re at our fourth product cooperation now. I’m always impressed by the quality and experience of the team.

​We're not using machine learning (yet), beyond what the target platforms offer for ad placement. This is by choice, since too many of our competitors get carried away with marketable buzz-words like machine learning and artificial intelligence and either have a dirty little secret (lots of human intervention) or struggle to prevent their AI from developing unwanted biases. The last thing you want is a racist or sexist recruiting technology.

What role do you think digital solutions like yours will play in the future of recruitment?

It will be a standard part of the recruiting pipeline, in some cases maybe even the dominant way to attract new candidates.

​We will see the same development in recruiting as we saw and continue to see in marketing and sales: inbound activities have more or less replaced outbound activities, with cold calling dead in the water. The same is happening in recruiting, although we are currently at the beginning of this process.

Can you tell us anything about your further plans for FindEm?

We are currently expanding our target market from personnel consultants to the needs of recruiters in all companies.

Also, We look into supporting additional social networks, if they will give additional benefits to our customers and experiment with other ways to pre-qualify.

And as already mentioned we will carefully extend the application of machine learning to make the application experience easier and more enjoyable. 10Clouds will be crucial to tackle this part as well, as I know the strong expertise they have and I’m looking forward to extending the partnership.

Thank you for your time and we hope FindEm goes from strength to strength!

Want to discuss an idea for your own digital product? Get in touch with our friendly team on hello@10clouds.com. We’ll let you know how we can help you bring it to life.