In the previous post I talked about a new mobile app in the pipeline from Asurion Mobile Technology: AddressBook. This app allows you to integrate social networking services with the address book on your smart phone such that one can track all of the SNS-based (social networking service) interactions with a particular individual from one place.

Of course this provides a number of benefits, including time management and better relationship management. In this post, I would like to move on and take a look at some options for integrating SNS with ATS. Specifically I will take a quick look at MaxHire’s Social Networking “footprint” feature, and the more SNS focused Jobvite.

MaxHire has incorporated a fairly straightforward search feature into its latest offering. It takes the email on record for a particular person and searches a number of SNS sites to determine whether that individual has an account with that service. You can find more information about this feature in MaxHire’s help pages here.

Jobvite, in contrast, is essentially based on SNS. The idea behind the service is to integrate SNS with a company’s recruiting process, focusing on employee referrals and thereby cutting costs. Jobvite will create job listing pages for a company, and visitors to that page can send a “jobvite” to individuals in their social network via a number of different services with just a few clicks.

In addition, Jobvite offers a Facebook app that allows employees (or anyone associated with a particular account) to post job openings on their profiles. They can also include job opening information in on their walls and/or updates. Jobvite also offers a number of other services typically associated with ATS’s, but of course they are based on SNS as their backbone. Applicants can apply for jobs by submitting their LinkedIn profiles, and of course the candidate database includes links to SNS profiles, just as with MaxHire’s SN footprint feature. Scheduling and referral data/analytics features are also included.

The potential of integrating a Jobvite style ATS with a mobile app like AddressBook is pretty exciting. Imagine something like this: You select which individuals or positions to follow on Jobvite, that syncs to your AddressBook and suddenly you are tracking the bulk of your company’s referral activity from your smart phone in real time, in addition to tracking your interactions with potential candidates not already in the Jobvite db. Information overload? Probably. Something that is going to happen in the near future anyway? Yup.

At this point I am content to point out the fact that it is no longer a matter of when comprehensive SNS integration will arrive, it is pretty much here. In the next post I will spend some quality time with the pro’s and con’s of integration on this level.

From: $ apropos

Chuck