Intellectual property of social recruitment

By Alex Douzet

In the old days, the company owned the Rolodex. It was a pretty simple concept, really. If a sales person or business development executive left their company, their soon-to-be-former boss would keep their Rolodex of contacts. And it’s not an unreasonable request. After all, the company paid the former employee good money to build and nurture those contacts.

Of course, these elements of intellectual property (IP) were always challenged as an employee could simply copy their list of connections, but nonetheless, the former employer had the Rolodex as a starting point to manage existing contacts.

Today, the Rolodex now exists online and has been replaced by Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. We’ve moved into an era of the ‘shared Rolodex’ where connections with customers, clients and, in the case of talent acquisition, candidates, are fair game as everyone is sharing from the same source. So, one would think that ownership of the coveted Rolodex is no longer an issue, right?

In HR, the goal of CRM (candidate relationship management) is to build a pipeline of pre-screened candidates. There are various technologies and websites that will help recruiters and hiring managers build and nurture their talent pipelines. But technology is simply the tool by which those pipelines are formed. At the end of the day, people build relationships with people.

And that brings us to the key dilemma facing hiring managers and recruiters today when it comes to social recruiting: who owns the intellectual property? When you get down to it, these connections with potential job candidates are human relationships that exist with the individual. Can these relationships be monetized like so many other forms of intellectual property? How do you put a price tag on such a valuable commodity when it’s not even clear who is the true owner of these relationships?

The good news for companies is social networking and recruiting does have its advantages. The instant connectivity of the world we live in has been beneficial to the process in general. Social recruiting has made a profound impact on employment branding. Prospective job candidates can find out what a company's corporate culture is all about simply by reading about it on Facebook. Social networking tells candidates what it’s like to work at your company and as a result makes the recruiting process much more efficient. Companies are also using social networking tools to research the backgrounds and qualifications of candidates. 

Today, most companies do not own the ‘connections’ or ‘followers’ that could lead to that next great hire – they lease those connections. Should an employer part ways with an internal or external recruiter or hiring manager, those ‘connections’ and ‘followers’ leave with them. It’s a tough pill to swallow for companies because they have not only paid a recruiter or hiring manager to build those connections, but now those valuable candidate relationships that have been built over time may be on their way to a competitor.

Social networking isn’t going anyway any time soon. As we move forward, one thing is for sure – companies must have a thorough understanding of how fragile their talent pools and pipelines really are and keep a watchful eye on how they are managing their candidate relationships. They’re not as secure as you might think, and there’s a lot riding on them.

Biography

Alexandre Douzet is co-founder and President of TheLadders.com. In this role, Douzet is responsible for global business operations, product development, and helping to lead the company's ongoing global expansion. Over the past six years, Douzet grew TheLadders.com subscription base from zero to over four million members.