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Raghav Singh

Raghav Singh is a partner at The A-List, a Minneapolis-based staffing services provider that specializes in global recruitment and building talent communities. He has previously been in product management and marketing roles at several HR technology vendors. His career has included work as a consultant on enterprise HR systems and as a recruiting and HRIT leader at several Fortune 500 companies.

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Mobile Engagement: Facebook and Samsung

by
Raghav Singh
Apr 4, 2013, 1:43 pm ET

Galaxy_note_II_Flip-Cover-PhotoThe fPhone is finally here. Facebook is launching its own brand of phones that put social networking front and center. With an estimated 650 million mobile users it was inevitable that Facebook would introduce mobile devices that integrate users more tightly with the site, allowing for faster posting, chatting, and commenting. They might even allow for voice calls (remember those?).

Facebook’s foray into mobile phones is a direct response to Samsung’s plans to develop a social network. Slated to launch this year, it is designed to rival Facebook. The project is codenamed Samsung Facebook (Brilliant! Who could possibly guess what that’s about?). The thinking behind the fPhone and Samsung’s network (I believe the official name will be Twitter Plus) is to control both content and the mechanisms through which it is created. Samsung dominates the mobile phone market and makes nearly a third of all smartphones sold worldwide — more than double what Apple does. All those smartphones are the source of huge amounts of content, which becomes the property of Facebook, Google, etc. This means that most advertising based on that content doesn’t accrue to Samsung. But the combination of mobile phones and a social network is a direct threat to Facebook’s business model.

The Mobile Recruiter keep reading…

The Last Social Network: The Future of Social Media

by
Raghav Singh
Mar 12, 2013, 5:27 am ET

Screen Shot 2013-03-05 at 11.05.11 PMWe are entering a time of social fatigue. A recent survey from Pew Research found that 61% of current Facebook users have voluntarily taken a break from using Facebook for a period of several weeks or more, and 20 percent of the online adults who do not currently use Facebook say they once used the site but no longer do so.

The forecast is for decreasing use: 34% of current Facebook users say the time that they spent on the site has decreased over the past year, and only 3% say they will spend more time on the site in the coming year. Meanwhile, 27% say they will spend less time. The honeymoon is over. Among the top reasons cited for decreased time spent on Facebook are: it’s a waste of time; bored with it; content is not relevant; and just didn’t like it.

This doesn’t mean that people are abandoning social media. Overall time spent in social networking continues to rise — up 38% over the previous year according to Nielsen Media — more than any other online activity. The growth in time spent on social media is largely tied to the spread of smartphones, sales of which are accelerating overseas but slowing in the U.S. as we reach near saturation. That just means that the same pattern of skyrocketing use of social media followed by slowing use will be repeated in other countries in coming years.

Why Didn’t the Mayans Warn Us?

So what’s happening? keep reading…

Getting Better Results With Twitter

by
Raghav Singh
Mar 4, 2013, 5:57 am ET

Screen Shot 2013-03-01 at 9.56.12 AMUsing Twitter as a recruiting tool appears to be deceptively simple: develop a large following and start tweeting. Simple enough, but success doesn’t come easy. The 140-character limit doesn’t allow for much more than broadcasting jobs. But just shooting of links to job postings means that only the most active candidates will respond. So what is likely to make a tweet more interesting to the passive candidate — i.e., the vast majority?

What to Tweet keep reading…

What’s Missing From Facebook’s Graph Search

by
Raghav Singh
Feb 27, 2013, 5:09 am ET

Screen Shot 2013-02-25 at 10.01.54 AMI’ve been using Facebook’s much-vaunted graph search for about a month now, having been on the list for early users. The feature was launched with much fanfare by Facebook in January at a press conference that proved to be distinctly underwhelming. Expectations were high that the company would announce a Facebook phone (The fPhone?) — a blue device capable of automatically recording all your activities and posting them publicly (privacy settings would be permanently disabled). But instead those watching found that the company was rolling out … a better search. Evidence of disappointment was the company’s stock price which had been rising but reversed course halfway through the press conference.

Graph search supposedly makes it easier to find people in your network and discover potential connections. Filters such as “place type,” “liked by,” and “visited by friends” make locating things faster. The feature can serve recruiters by allowing for better search of people’s profiles. It appears to be reasonably effective. As an example I typed in “People that are Java Developers and live in Minnesota” and it turned up 38 names. That’s a small number so I tried variations such as “People that like Java and live in Minnesota” — which produced a much larger number, but many of these were coffee aficionados. Putting in more complex queries, such as adding another skill, produced no results. Switching to finding .Net developers produced only 18 names and trying “People that like .Net and live in Minnesota” turned up three names of people who like to fish.

Seek and Ye Shall Find keep reading…

Every Step You Take, Every Move You Make, I’ll Be Watching You — Big Data and Recruiting

by
Raghav Singh
Dec 21, 2012, 5:21 am ET

In the movie “The Matrix” there’s a scene where Laurence Fishburne says to Keanu Reeves, “The Matrix is everywhere. It is all around us. Even now, in this very room. You can see it when you look out your window or when you turn on your television. You can feel it when you go to work … when you go to church … when you pay your taxes.”

That’s basically the premise of big data, where the potential in recruiting is in getting good candidates to respond. keep reading…

The Old Recruiting Lessons Don’t Apply to Mobile Phones

by
Raghav Singh
Dec 18, 2012, 5:24 am ET

The average smartphone user in the U.S. now spends a little over two hours a day on mobile apps. That’s a number that’s starting to rival the amount of time people spend watching TV — about three hours on average (who are these people?). To state the obvious, mobile is where we’re headed, as web access through desktops declines. Recruiting will change as a result, but a failure to recognize how mobile platforms are different can mean a long and arduous journey marked by hard lessons. keep reading…

Back to The Future: Social Media and Jobs

by
Raghav Singh
Dec 11, 2012, 5:05 am ET

When job boards first launched, they were supposed to be like stock exchanges — a clearinghouse matching jobs with candidates. This was the future: efficient, fast, and simple. Well, it didn’t quite turn out that way.

Job boards are not in the business of filling jobs. They exist to serve up job ads and get paid for that. One can only speculate but things might have been different had the job board model been similar to that of eBay, where a good part of the site’s revenue depends on the successful completion of a transaction. But frustration with job boards is one reason why recruiters so eagerly jumped on the social media bandwagon, despite much evidence or reason to believe that social networks would let them succeed in filling jobs where job boards had not.

There’s not a lot of definitive data on the effectiveness of social networks, but what’s there suggests that social media hasn’t been quite the silver bullet solution that many were expecting. keep reading…

Halloween and HR Conferences

by
Raghav Singh
Oct 10, 2012, 2:16 pm ET

libary of Congress photoIt’s that time of year: the start of the fall holiday season. Halloween will be here soon. Soon there’ll be skeletons, ghosts, monsters, candy being handed out, and people in weird costumes. There’s a lot of similarities with the conferences that dominate the fall. Go to any and you’ll see vendors that are skeletons of what they used to be; ghosts of vendors that have been swallowed up by others; one Monster (never more), and, of course, candy being handed out and people in weird costumes. I saw people dressed up as cows, pirates, Romans, and angels, in the expo hall at some recent conferences. Maybe it’s the silly season — this is why elections are held in the fall.

Deja Vu All Over Again keep reading…

End of the Dream: Expectations for Social Media Return to Earth

by
Raghav Singh
Aug 7, 2012, 5:28 am ET

from imdbLast week 21 Fidelity Investments fund managers announced they were reducing their holdings in Facebook, after barely six weeks. Some were bailing out altogether. The moves are unusual for a company like Fidelity, whose funds tend to be conservative and with a focus on the long term. But Fidelity was only the most recent large investor to have lost money on Facebook. What Fidelity’s move signaled was that the firm has low expectations that Facebook can generate the kind of money it was supposed to. I guess they don’t have much faith in Facebook’s new job board to succeed.

It wasn’t supposed to be this way. Social media is supposed to be this boundless source of plenty — sales, candidates, solutions for every problem. For some years now you can’t attend a recruiting conference without some guru expounding on what a dinosaur you are if you don’t buy into the hype. Expressing reservations was considered heresy. No criticism was acceptable.

It was like being in the old Soviet Union where anyone who questioned the communist system was automatically labeled insane since only a crazy person could not see what a great place it was. When I mentioned in an article that research on social networks suggested that some of the most active users were also people with low self esteem, one genius wrote a comment that if this was true then most of America must be people who were depressed. Well comrade, that’s certainly true of most investors in Facebook.

keep reading…

A Facebook Job Board — Yawn

by
Raghav Singh
Jul 12, 2012, 4:47 am ET

Someone I know who works for a struggling social media company recently asked if I’d heard about the excitement in the space. Not sure what he was referring to, I asked, and he mentioned Facebook’s plans to launch a job board. Oh, that. Yes — very exciting. I’m ecstatic — haven’t slept properly since I read about it. In case you missed the announcement, the board “will aggregate the job postings of third-party providers, making them available for search by Facebook users.” What an original idea. It’s not like one can find another site that aggregates jobs. Who says innovation is dead?

Given the less-than-stellar performance of Facebook’s stock and limited potential of the site to generate revenues, a job board looks like an easy solution to mop up some dollars that would otherwise go elsewhere. Given the perceived reach of Facebook, a job board is guaranteed to garner some interest from employers. The question for Facebook, or for that matter anyone posting jobs to it, is will it work? keep reading…

The China Syndrome: Recruiting Can Be Tough When There Are Only a Billion People Available

by
Raghav Singh
May 30, 2012, 5:46 am ET

I recently helped a client hire some engineers in China. The company had first tried to fill the jobs themselves, but had no success. When we started working on the job the hiring manager was shocked at hearing that candidates expected increases of 30 percent or more to accept a job, and even at that level there were not a lot of them. This was supposed to be easy — there are more than a billion people in the country. Chinese universities produce more than 2.5 million college graduates every year, including 30,000 doctorates and 650,000 engineers. How can it be difficult to fill any job?

CIA photo of entranceway to Shibaozhai complex via swinging foot bridge

Despite these amazing numbers, China is short of talent. Some of the shortage is the result of high demand from thousands of companies from all over the world setting up shop in China, to make, buy, or sell stuff. But much of the problem stems from two factors: education, or the lack of, and demographics. The World Economic Forum estimates that demand for talent in China will grow by 5% annually through 2020. Meeting that demand will require the country to spend 4% of GDP on education.

The government’s own estimates put spending at 2.7%, or an annual shortfall of $65 billion.

Demographics Are Destiny

There’s an old joke about China. keep reading…

Mixing Your Messages: Getting People on Social Networks Interested in Jobs

by
Raghav Singh
May 24, 2012, 5:18 am ET

Quick, what’s the last ad you saw on Facebook? Don’t start thinking — just say it. Can’t think of one? Well then, what’s the most interesting post you read in the last week? The one that made you click on “like.” I’ll bet you remember that.

There’s an object lesson on the reality of social networks. Just before the Facebook IPO last week, GM announced that it was stopping all ads on Facebook, citing poor results; in other words, sales. What wasn’t mentioned is that GM is just the most recent company to abandon Facebook, following the lead of Gamestop, J.C. Penney, The Gap, Nordstrom, and Banana Republic. That’s not very surprising. The social media ad platform company Mediabrix estimates that the click through rate for ads on Facebook is just 0.05%. It’s a little better on Twitter — the company’s estimates are that retweets of commercial messages are about 3% – 5%, but of course that’s among a much smaller user base than Facebook.

Many companies are finding that advertising and social media don’t mix well. While it’s still early, the evidence so far suggests that social media users respond more to engagement than commercial messages.

But engagement isn’t easy either. It requires having to develop a conversation with people in your network in order to get your message across, and that can be a lot of work. In a BusinessWeek interview a GM executive said that Twitter ads during the Super Bowl nearly doubled the company’s followers, but added that maintaining such a campaign was far too resource-intensive for the company because a company tweet “can’t look like it came from some corporate thing” in order to be effective. It’s very labor intensive and it can’t be automated.

Product Placement

If you’re going to try and sell people on social networks, then it should be like product placement in the movies — subtle, not intrusive. keep reading…

Great Expectations: The Reality of Finding Talent on Facebook

by
Raghav Singh
May 18, 2012, 8:15 am ET

As Facebook went public came two interesting pieces of news. The first was a CNBC poll that shows that about half of all Americans consider Facebook to be a fad that will fade away as new things come along. The second was an announcement from GM that it plans to stop advertising on the social network.

The auto manufacturer says it no longer believes that the ads produce much in the way of sales. This seems to be supported by the CNBC survey in which 8 out of 10 respondents said they hardly ever or never click on online advertising or sponsored content when using the site.

This has some implications for recruiters using social media as a sourcing channel. With users essentially ignoring ads, job postings are not likely to be effective. Even employers that have accumulated large numbers of fans for the Facebook pages are likely to reach only a small portion of them with their job postings – one analysis found that the average page post only reaches 17 percent of the page’s fans. Five out of six of a page’s fans never see it, unless supported by new likes and comments for every new post. So even if you have built up a large fan base of prospective candidates, the vast majority of them will never see your jobs.

It’s About Engagement keep reading…

Minority Report: The Role of Race in Hiring

by
Raghav Singh
May 8, 2012, 7:05 am ET

I started my professional career in recruiting when I was hired at a Native American casino to run the recruiting team. There was considerable consternation when I showed up because my boss had told people that I was an Indian, which had been interpreted to mean that I was Native American (I did wonder just how smart one has to be to think that someone with my last name was a Native American). Hiring Native Americans, especially for senior positions, was a goal of the casino and we were supposed to show preference in hiring to Native Americans. This was no easy task and my team was constantly berated for not hiring enough. Native Americans represent about 0.8% of the population, and of the ones that were qualified for senior roles had their pick of jobs.

This was when I learned just how much of a premium the claim to minority status can provide to a candidate. I had noticed that some of those who we hired didn’t look much like Native Americans, but more like Native Irish or Native Germans. Our only basis for classifying them as Native Americans were their personal claims about their ancestry, and apparently any claim was acceptable. I suggested that we ask anyone claiming Native American status for some proof, such as a tribal membership card, but was told that candidates would find this insulting — it was never explained why — so it went by the wayside. One of our managers was an African American individual who claimed that one of his ancestors, six generations back, was Native American. There was obviously no way to validate this and even if it was true it only made him 1/64 Native American but that was good enough for management and it got them off my back, so I didn’t complain.

The Diversity Dilemma keep reading…

Planet of the Apes: Narcissistic Behavior Allows Candidates to Ace Interviews

by
Raghav Singh
Apr 19, 2012, 6:45 am ET

A recent study on what makes a person successful in a job interview found that narcissists do much better than non-narcissists. Apparently, the tendency to promote oneself, by engaging and speaking at length, aggressiveness, and using ingratiation tactics such as smiling, gesturing, and complimenting others, gets interpreted as confidence and expertise, which impresses interviewers. Even trained interviewers are influenced by narcissists when it comes to selecting self-centered candidates with milder personalities. What this research suggests is that an interview can be a poor selection device, since there’s no evidence that being narcissistic makes a candidate a better performer. keep reading…

What Evil Lurks in the Hearts of Men? Facebook Knows

by
Raghav Singh
Apr 4, 2012, 5:34 am ET

What Facebook Reveals About Candidates

In recent weeks there have been a lot of stories about employers asking candidates for their Facebook passwords or accepting a hiring manager as a friend, apparently sanctioned by HR. This is the kind of behavior that so endears HR to others in the organziation, and why it’s true that no child grows up wanting to work in HR. I suspect this has more to do with some people trying to justify their existence and demonstrate that they belong in the 21st century than with accomplishing anything useful. The problem may solve itself since such acts are a violation of FB’s privacy policy – but never underestimate the tenacity of an HR professional determined to prove their usefulness.

But the more relevant question here is: what do they expect to find? keep reading…

Talent Communities: Come As You Are

by
Raghav Singh
Feb 29, 2012, 5:34 am ET

People love to talk about themselves, and they love to talk even more online — often to a fault.

Honesty is not the best policy, especially online. Most of us know that an inappropriate picture or comment posted online can derail a person’s job prospects. In my view, recruiters and hiring managers make too much of people’s online posts and using them in a hiring process is fraught with problems, but online conversations can work to a recruiter’s advantage, especially in a talent community. keep reading…

Death, Taxes, and Talent Communities

by
Raghav Singh
Feb 8, 2012, 5:29 am ET

The Internet makes talent communities inevitable

In recent weeks we’ve seen a lot of outpouring of grief over the now dead SOPA legislation. The law’s critics claim that, if passed, the law would end the Internet as we know it, threaten our way of life, and confirm the Mayans were right. We periodically experience this type of mass hysteria, whenever something seems to threaten the “promise of the Internet” — the last time was over net neutrality. That so-called promise has to do with the perceived “free” flow of information: articles, stories, videos, songs, or content. What’s gotten lost in this noise is that that nothing is free. The current business model of the Internet has simply shifted dollars from content creators to content aggregators. Advertisers sponsor content so users can pretend it is “free.”

A long time ago, about the time the last ice age ended, there was something called AOL. It seems like eons have passed, but those who remember that era may recall that after we returned from foraging for food we would turn on our dial-up modems and connect to AOL, having paid a monthly fee for access to all the content that was available, the forums, the news, etc. Connection speeds were 1,200 bits per minute — you could almost count those bits coming in. Now we do the same with Facebook and Google, which we experience as free. Perceptually, we ignore the ads — targeted ads based on all the information collected by the sites — ads tailored to our habits, our behavior, and interactions. AOL charged a fee and had no ads; Facebook doesn’t charge a fee but has ads. There is no free lunch. keep reading…

The Love Boat

by
Raghav Singh
Nov 30, 2011, 5:12 am ET

from Starpulse.comThe Role of Recruiters in Social Media

Recruiters often struggle with social media because the medium does not lend itself well to traditional recruiting practices. Recruiting is typically a highly transactional process — the recruiter collects information from a candidates, decides if there is a fit, and moves on to the next step. It’s essentially a one-way street, running from the candidate to the recruiter with little or nothing going the other way. Social media requires two-way communication (the “social” part): conversations, sharing, and engagement. This is how talent communities are created, and the same makes it difficult for recruiters who are accustomed to being gatekeepers and in-control of the process.

The difference between traditional recruiting and using social media is akin to being the captain of a navy ship compared to that of a cruise ship. In the former case, the captain is king. She decides where the ship goes and who does what. The passengers have no say. On a cruise ship the captain has much more limited power and has to behave very differently.

The Cruise Director

Fans of The Love Boat will remember Gavin MacLeod in the role of Captain Stubing. But the more interesting role was that played by Lauren Tewes – the Cruise Director Julie McCoy. She was the one who had to keep everyone happy and having a good time — i.e., engaged.

This is the role the recruiter needs to play when using social media. You can’t act like the captain on a navy ship. The passengers are not going to stay with you for the voyage if you don’t keep them happy. The members of a talent community are largely there because they’re interested in what the community has to offer in terms of content, not because it’s the shortest path to a job. That may happen but it’s not the primary reason that someone joins a talent community. Talent communities are designed to attract the vast majority of people who are not active candidates. If there’s a high level of engagement they will stay there and may be persuaded to consider the jobs you have to offer.

In this situation a recruiter can’t succeed with a transactional approach. A recruiter has to be social — facilitating conversations and fostering interest in the community. It works best if the members interact with each other, since it’s physically impossible for a recruiter to meaningfully interact with all. The pace can’t be forced — it has to be allowed to develop. You can’t very well order people to have conversations and build engagement. keep reading…

The Medium is Not the Message: Busting the Conventional Wisdom in Social Media

by
Raghav Singh
Oct 26, 2011, 5:57 am ET

Social media gets a lot of press. There seem to be millions of articles offering advice on how to succeed with social media, in business, in fundraising, starting revolutions, and of course, recruiting. A lot of that advice is as useful as a bicycle for a fish — since it’s often anecdotal or the wisdom of some self-styled guru writing about purple sheep or comparing anyone that doesn’t follow their advice to dinosaurs. So it’s great to read something that’s based on data and research, like a recent report from Gallup that has implications for recruiting.

The Medium vs the Message

There’s more going on offline than online. keep reading…