5. Twitter as a Recruiting Platform Continues to Grow

Melissa Shaw of ITworld breaks down The Top 10 social recruiting cities.  Says Shaw, “Twitter is the up-and-coming job-hunting platform, with 500,000 jobs posted to the network each month. And…24% of those are in IT.” It’s still not approaching number of jobs posted on Facebook, but it’s rising…

4. AngelList Shows Who’s Hiring and Who’s Raising

AngelList continues to be a great place to see what industries are heating up, and there’s no shortage of social recruiting startups on there — including SmartRecruiters and SmartRecruiters’ friends Ongig and InternMatch.

3. Still No Substitute for Some In-Person Networking (←that’s me)

It’s not too early to plan for The Future of HR (25 Hottest HR Tech Startups) January 8 or Social Recruiting Strategies Conference January 28-30, 2014 (featuring Craig Fisher, Maren Hogan, Jason Webster and William Tincup and more).

2. And What About Google+ for Social Recruiting?

Recruiter.com has some cool background materials on Google+, including a section on leveraging Google+ for your recruiting efforts.

1. Twitter vs. LinkedIn vs. Facebook

Lauren Dugan of AllTwitter (one of the many great MediaBistro resources on the web) asks “Will Twitter Surpass LinkedIn As The Top Social Recruiting Channel?” And what about Facebook’s 1 billion candidate profiles?  According to Dugan, Twitter “is estimated to reach a massive 2 million job postings per month by the end of 2014.”

Whether social recruiting is a key piece of your hiring strategy or not, the numbers don’t lie: it continues to grow, and companies continue to adopt it.  For a limited time, enjoy 50% off 30-day job posts at MediaBistro, a major hub for jobs and recruiting for social and traditional media professionals.

Vespa giveaways. Mad Men Costumes. Basketball hoops and Skeeball. Just another year at HR Tech.

On the week of Oct. 7, over 300 vendors and 8,000 attendees (customers, vendors, analysts) in the HR space converged on the Mandalay Bay Hotel and Casino for the 16th annual HR Tech Conference. But it wasn’t all candy cigarettes and Elvis impersonators. This year’s conference brought together some of the more innovative players in hiring, talent management and benefits.

Josh Schwede, Vice President of Business Development at HireVue, was quick to identify a trend: “What we witnessed loud and clear from visitors to our booth is the dynamic between the high number of candidates that companies have in their recruiting funnel, and the challenge they face in meeting the hiring demands of the business.”

The level of innovation in Recruitment Marketing Platforms and Social Tools — combined with job growth in the economy — has created a burden on recruiters, says Schwede. “This has made it hard to find the right candidate for the right role.”

WePow, another of the innovators in video interviewing, was also in attendance.  Says Co-founder and COO Imo Udom, “We got a decent amount of leads and built some great relationships with potential partners.”  Of course, Udom is being modest:  for those of us lucky enough to receive a pair of their signature-blue Chuck Taylors, the relationships crossed from a clear “great”  into “awesome.”

Of course, SmartRecruiters was also in Vegas this year.  Like HireVue and several other exhibitors, we decided this year to leverage the awesome power of our happy customers to communicate our value to potential customers and partners alike. Joanna Lawler, Head of HR for Moonstruck Chocolate Company, was on hand, as was Kostas Klokelis, Head of Personnel and Talent Acquisition for KarmaLoop and Katie Pontius, Director of HR & Recruiting for The Onion.  Both were invaluable to our efforts to spread the SmartRecruiters word – plus the time we spent in Vegas brought us even closer to three already valued customers of ours.

SmartRecruiters assessment partner Chequed was in Vegas to continue their battle against bad hires.  Founder/CEO Greg Moran was struck by the new generation of talent acquisition and talent management tools on display. “There is a clear movement from just the efficiency driven platform into technologies tied to clear business results where a company can easily attain the tools they need to identify and screen talent both easily and with a clear emphasis on quality,” says Moran.  “SmartRecruiters and Chequed.com are examples of this movement as well as many others exhibiting at HR Tech 2013.”

Chequed’s mascot “No Bad Hires Man” was a clear hit at the conference – but one with a serious message.  “We think that Chequed.com represents a new breed of data driven hiring tools, and our goal of ‘No Bad Hires’ was certainly present on the show floor,” says Moran.  “Attendees were looking beyond tools designed to simply make the hiring process faster; they sought out tools with an eye toward a clear, objective- and data-driven hiring process.”

Another of our valued assessment partners, Findly, had a big presence this year at HR Tech.  “The Findly team had a great experience this year at HRTech,” said Findly’s Alexis Stephenson.  “As always, it’s great to tell the Findly story in person and see how strongly our vision of On-Demand recruitment resonates with the industry. And we were thrilled to receive third party recognition in the form of HRE’s product of the year award!”  While I don’t personally need any more convincing of Findly’s amazing potential for candidate assessment, the espresso bar at their booth didn’t hurt.

Tuesday’s Awesome New Technologies for HR panel featured SmartRecruiters neighbor Entelo.  Director of Customer Development Vivek Reddy highlighted the launch of Entelo’s newest product, Entelo Inside (“a product that refreshes companies’ Applicant Tracking Systems or Candidate databases with fresh social data”).  The new offering further’s Entelo’s goal of keeping candidate data relevant.  “Lots of time and money gets spent to attract candidates to apply,” says Reddy, “but that data can become stale real quick as those candidates may obtain new skills, experience, etc in the future.”

As has been a growing trend in recent years, HR Tech featured a number of niche job boards and niche board networks. Beyond was on hand to promote their extensive network of job destinations. “Social features, talent communities, and social behaviors are becoming more a part of the core for talent acquisition as evidenced throughout the event,” said Beyond COO Jim John.  “Beyond, with its traditional focus on niche talent communities, is not surprised that other career organizations are focusing on these areas to improve overall recruitment quality.”

David Wieland, CEO at RIVS and fellow player in the video interview space, had this to say: “It’s clear that as HR aggressively expands its role in talent acquisition, it continues to shift from late to early adoption of emerging technologies that can give it an edge.  The energy at HRTech this year was unprecedented.”

Dice President Shravan Goli was attending HR Tech for the first time.  Said Goli, “It was exciting to see how the triad of big data, human influence and the art of successful tech social recruiting will continue to put tools like Dice’s Open Web as the new dream model for laser-focused discovery of the undiscoverable candidates.”

SmartRecruiters’ neighbor Reppify was also in the house. Said CEO Chirag ‘Chi’ Nangia, “the conference  exceeded our expectations. Some really quality conversations on both customer and partnership fronts, as well as great validation for all the work our companies are doing in the next wave of awesome recruiting solutions.”

Background screening solution provider Kentech Consulting traveled from Chicago to attend. CEO Kenneth Coats said, “the HR Tech show was exciting this year, with many new innovative tools to address total workforce management.”    Anthony Locke, Business Development Manager at big data player Inflection, was similarly impressed with the new tools on display: “The team and I had a fantastic experience and at HRTech; we were really struck by impact that some of the newer industry players were making through thoughtful refinements to the HR professionals’ toolset.”

HireRight‘s Praful Dabir was impressed to see “how a variety of HCM vendors are investing and innovating in key areas of Social, Mobile, Cloud and Video technologies to provide better user experience and drive results for HR teams.”  HireRight’s central theme for the conference was “HireRight is a recruiters best friend. Whatever you need, whenever you are, HireRight can support you any language, on any device, anywhere.”

Ravi Mikkelson, Co-Founder and CEO of Bay Area-based jobFig, reckons that HR Tech is among the best conferences each year to see where the future lies in terms of software and technology for the HR department.  “In just the past year,” says Mikkelson, “companies have taken tremendous leaps forward in terms of recruiting, interviewing, and on-boarding tools through the use of social and behavioral analytics. Systems for employees are becoming easier to use and coming into line with modern consumer applications, making them more beautiful and a delight to use.”

Christine Bird of Cream.HR summed it up thusly:  “The HR Tech conference was invaluable by providing a platform for knowledge gain and the ability to connect with HR leaders and growing companies; leading to valuable partnership creation and thought leadership exchange. All that and one big Vegas party – what more can you ask?”  What more? Indeed.

June 26 marked another successful SmartUp here at SmartRecruiters HQ in San Francisco, this time on the topic “The Art and Science of Talent Assessment.”  For the uninitiated, SmartUp is our monthly meetup focused on elevating innovation in hiring.  There’s always an engaging panel or keynote, preceded and followed by food, drink and networking.

We’ve had big turnouts for all 13 of our SmartUps to date, and this last one was no exception. As usual, there was a good mix of recruiters, HR pros and startup people of all stripes.  We especially like seeing startup neighbors of ours doing innovative things in other fields/industries.  After all, your company doesn’t have to be in the HR space to benefit from expert advice on hiring.

This month’s panel featured Michael Tanenbaum , CEO of ConnectCubed; Michael Gladden, Head of Technology at Chequed; and Scott Marsho, Director of Assessments Distribution at Findly.  Also on hand was SmartRecruiters Founder and CEO Jerome Ternynck (Oh yeah, and the famous reuben rolls from Morty’s made a brief appearance.)

In an amazing coincidence, all three of the companies represented on the panel are launch partners for SmartRecruiters’ Assessment Center, a one-stop shop for scientifically assessing the candidates in your SmartRecruiters candidate pool.  That said, each panelist brought a unique perspective stemming from their respective areas of expertise: reference check, skills testing and behavioral evaluations.

Some top tweets from the day:

79% of companies considered as best in class use talent assessments. #smartup

— Laura Hong (@laura2hong) June 27, 2013

“If you’re not using an assessment you’re just not optimizing your workforce,” says @GetFindly‘s Scott Marsho. #Smartup

— SmartRecruiters (@SmartRecruiters) June 27, 2013

 

So far, the NSA, guys with pony tails, Ferraris, and economic workshops all made it into tonight’s #SmartUp @SmartRecruiters . Love it!

— Nik Hristov (@nikhristov) June 27, 2013

Don’t wait with reference checks to the end @Chequedmktg says. Reference check early to speed up hiring. #smartup

— Jason Hegyessy (@hegyessy) June 27, 2013

@tbaums @DavidSmooke Great job tonight. It’s now a “renaissance” of testing and assessment. A whole new ballgame, with DaVinci at bat. — AndrewKarpie (@andrewkarpie) June 27, 2013 

The newest and greatest innovations in hiring. That’s what @BizDevBen is talking about. #Smartup

— David Smooke (@DavidSmooke) June 27, 2013

Don’t miss our next Smartup (August 14): The War for Startup Talent.

The Skills to Pay the Bills

“People are rapidly accumulating new skills every day,” says Jennifer Fremont-Smith,  CEO of Smarterer, a Boston-area startup offering “a seamless web technology that provides total clarity about candidates, quantifying skills in less than 120 seconds.”  Says Fremont-Smith, “Paper resumes and interviews can’t capture an accurate picture of a candidate.”  And that’s why “assessments are becoming a fundamental step in the hiring process, helping recruiters make more informed hiring decisions, and decreasing time-to-hire by surfacing the best candidates faster.”

According to Scott Marsho, Director of Distribution at Findly, “assessments are a cost-effective way to ensure that organizations are hiring the right people.”  Marsho lists the key benefits of using assessments as “streamlined selection process, decreased turnover, increased productivity, and increased legal defensibility.”

“Now more than ever people are getting degrees, credentials and learning from free resources that are inconsistent in terms of grading and content,” says Guy Friedman, CEO of HigherNext. “This increases the need for an adequate filtering system based on knowledge and skills relevant to a specific job.”

The Missing Piece

And while hard skills are in demand, so are soft skills such as the ability to adapt, collaborate and iterate creatively.  And skills like those don’t necessarily show up on a resume. Increasingly, companies are using online solutions to measure these abilities as well, tapping into a growing field of companies offering personality, cognitive and job fit assessments

“Resume review is one of the least accurate predictors of job performance,” says Michael Tanenbaum, Founder of ConnectCubed, a maker of gamified psychometric assessments.  “Even work experience comes in at a measly .18 correlation with future job performance according to some researchers. If you’re hiring based on a resume, you’re missing critical data – and that means hiring mistakes and lost revenue.”

So not only are the latest assessment solutions time-savers, they can lead to huge cost savings by avoiding bad hires.

“You can review a report in seconds,” says Tanebaum, “saving you years of stress and hassle by weeding out bad hires, and helping you capture great new revenue opportunities by weeding in perfect fits every time.”

Better Living Through Chemistry

And the science behind candidate assessments keeps getting better.  “Personality assessments have come light years in both quality and the ability to scale,” says Christine Bird, co-founder of Cream.hr.

“By combining high quality scientifically-backed assessments, scalable online technology and Big Data, for the first time, hiring managers don’t have to rely on the subjective hiring process — they can get the critical data to match the right applicant to the right positions.”  Cream.hr backs up their personality assessments with cutting-edge behavioral research, something the average hiring manager is not likely to be on top of.

Tom Janz, Chief Scientist at PeopleAssessments, stresses that “employers need to ‘science up’ to recruit smarter. Online assessments with a strong record of predicting job performance are the cost effective solution for today’s smart recruiters.”

According to Kerry Schofield, Cofounder/Chief Psychometrician at Good.Co, “the way things are developing, heavily automated, online psychometric recruitment is going to be standard very soon, and companies who don’t use this resource are going to be missing out.”

Trust But Verify

Another crucial component in the assessment process is reference checks.  Gone are the days of tracking down former employers on the phone to gauge a candidate’s suitability for the job.  Just as technology allows us to quickly and effectively assess a candidate’s skills, so, too does it now allow for effortless reference-checking. Products such as Chequed now automate what was once an old-fashioned, time consuming process.

Says Matt Gough, Co-Founder of Chequed, “Our solution empowers businesses to not only streamline their talent selection process but provide objective, consistent and predictive information about their candidates.”  Anyone familiar with labor law will immediately grasp the importance of objectivity in hiring, and, increasingly, the “predictive” part of the process is attractive to hiring managers looking to avoid costly bad hires — and to save time.

A New Standard

Assessment solutions are fast becoming an integral part of any smart hiring process.  The technology is there — and at an increasingly low cost to the hiring manager — so companies are starting to view it as a crucial step in the hiring process.  Given the high cost of a bad hire, it makes sense to do it right the first time.

“Is it possible to get great hires without including any assessments in the process?” asks Ravi Mikkelsen, Co-Founder and CEO at jobFig.  “Of course you can. But similarly to how technology helps to improve the  building of cars, houses, computers and just about everything we use, why not have it help build the teams we’ll spend most of our waking hours with?”

Honest Abe couldn’t have said it better himself.

This past month SmartRecruiters rolled out one of our most exciting features yet, our new Recruiter Marketplace. Henceforth SmartRecruiters customers will be able to engage the best 3^rd party recruiters directly from inside their SmartRecruiters accounts- and recruiters will have access to targeted reqs from our customers. It’s the latest step in our quest to ensure that our customers make the best possible hiring decisions.

What it Means to Customers:

SmartRecruiters is a true end-to-end hiring solution, and the Recruiter Marketplace adds one of the final crucial pieces to the puzzle.  Whether you engage an outside recruiter only once in a blue moon, or whether you manage multiple recruiters on a daily basis, you can now do it all from the comfort of your SmartRecruiters account.  Create job openings on SmartRecruiters as you’ve always done, and in addition to suggesting the best job boards and direct sourcing tools, our platform will now suggest the best recruiters to get the job done.

What it Means to Partners:

When any one of our 35K+ SmartRecruiters customers creates a job post, our system goes to work matching that job with the right recruiters.  More than a mere distribution channel, the Recruiter Marketplace is also a superior way to interface with clients:  in addition to easy online communication and negotiation of terms, the Recruiter Marketplace also features streamlined invoicing and record-keeping.  It’s only the newest way that SmartRecruiters is becoming THE online marketplace for the world’s best hiring products.

The Future of Hiring: 

Ensuring quality hires, says SmartRecruiters founder and CEO Jerome Ternynck, requires “casting a deep net – but also a wide net.”  The SmartRecruiters platform allows you to do both – and the Recruiter Marketplace makes the process that much easier.  “The technology to source smarter and faster is here,” says Ternynck, and “the smart recruiters will be picky in 2013.”  The Recruiter Marketplace brings one of the best and fastest methods of talent acquisition (the use of a quality outside recruiter) to your door.  If you’re in charge of bringing the best and brightest to your team, you can’t afford not to use it.

 Learn more about how to manage your recruitment agencies.  Or add your agency to the SmartRecruiters marketplace.

All these programs provide valuable seed capital, advice from battle-tested mentors, and some technical assistance (be it office space, legal help or branding expertise). But what about hiring? While incubators and accelerators are focused on growing a company’s customer base and marketshare, shouldn’t they also offer tools for growing a company’s team?

The companies of incubators and accelerators need fast, easy and free solutions. That’s where SmartRecruiters comes in.

Here are a few of the ways SmartReruiters is the perfect hiring tool for an accelerator or incubator’s startup companies:

It’s Fast

Incubators – and to an even greater degree accelerators – aim to get a viable product to market fast. The last thing these programs are interested in is a company that’s wasting time with a lengthy hiring process. SmartRecruiters has you intaking applicants in a matter of minutes, and making the right hire in a matter of days.

It’s Easy

The typical incubator startup is a couple of founders and an idea. The likelihood that they have anyone onboard with hiring experience is low – and the chances that they have a dedicated HR department is next to none! SmartRecruiters requires virtually no setup, and absolutely no training or HR know-how.

It’s Collaborative

The smaller the company, the greater the emphasis on collaboration. A lean startup makes big decisions everyday, and the entire team is very often involved in every decision — whether it happens to be that person’s area expertise or not. SmartRecruiters makes collaboration across your entire team easy, and ensures that you get the right input — and make the right hire.

It’s Free

Incubator programs typically grant $15-$20K in seed funding to their startups. For a company trying to stretch that sum to cover development, marketing, and everything else, recruiting is not high on the priority list. SmartRecruiters offers one of the best recruiting softwares on the market, and it’s free to use – forever.

Are we witnessing the death of the traditional resume?  With data about our interests, skills and qualifications proliferating across the web, can the four corners of a page still possibly contain enough data to help an employer make the right hire?

Jerome Ternynck, founder and CEO of SmartRecruiters, is not pulling any punches: “Resumes are dead,” says Ternynck.  “Our digital footprints reveal more about our talents, interests and experience than the traditional resume ever did — or ever will again.”  That’s why SmartRecruiters‘ users are invited to apply for jobs using their LinkedIn or Facebook profiles – rather than using a traditional resume.

Resumes Out, Skills In

Venturocket CEO Marc Hoag sees the limitations of the traditional resume.  Venturocket began with essentially the same idea that Ternynck expresses: “The job market is broken and everyone knows it.”  It is difficult to verify the honesty of résumés and cover letters, and there is no way to prevent unqualified applicants from applying.

“Résumés and cover letters don’t work,” says Hoag.  “Résumés are padded and exaggerated, cover letters are blatant hyperbole, and both make job and talent searching needlessly complex.” On Venturocket, users simply list keywords and short phrases describing the general professions, explicit skills, unique qualifications, and personal characteristics they possess or require.

“Resumes and job applications are great,” adds Hoag, if your goal is to spam every employer on the planet.”

Tapping the Social Web

Jon Bischke of Entelo wants to go beyond the resume, too – by harnessing the mass of candidate information on sites like GitHub and Stack OverFlow. “There’s all this data and all these sites that didn’t exist even a few years ago where people are going online and talking about things that they’re interested in,” says Bischke.  And they’re using these sites to prove their expertise.

Entelo aims to index the data from a wide variety of such sources, with the aim of going out and finding the best candidates  —  rather than waiting for the best candidates to come to you.  Instead of just looking at resumes, you’ll be seeing real-world examples of a candidate’s work and interests, giving you a better picture of their capabilities.  Bischke calls it ““Proactive recruiting.”

Resumes: Not Dead Yet

Adam Spector, co-founder and CEO of Virtrue, recognizes the limitations of the resume.  But Spector acknowledges what many don’t, that the resume is here to stay — at least for now.  The trick is not to ignore it completely, but to verify its’  information.

“The traditional resume is dying, but the information it provides – education & work history – is not,” says Spector. “Our digital life has become our resume, and managing, understanding, and verifying that life history is critical to a successful job search.”

Virtrue harnesses publicly-available candidate data from a wide variety of websites, including social networks.  Once a candidate is verified, an employer can hire that person with confidence that they are who they say they are.  “Transparency, in a verified way, is the key to trust,” says Spector.  “Virtrue makes that possible.”

 Come Meet the Founders

Want to learn more about the future of the resume?  Have a burning question for one of the founders?  Come meet Jerome, Jon, Adam and Marc at SmartUp: Beyond the Resume, taking place tomorrow, September 5 at SmartRecruiters HQ.  Registration and more information here.  Hope to see you there!

@BizDevBen is a native of San Francisco, practices martial arts, and is on a quest to partner with all the best recruiting services. Ben Klafter will be moderating the SmartUp: Beyond the Resume. Photo Credit ExactSource.

Editor’s note: We’ve recently updated our list of the Best Job Boards to Recruit Interns for 2018—check it out here.

Interns are the next generation of talent at your company. Internships not only provide great experience for college students, but they also empower your current employees to become mentors. Employers often struggle to recruit and hire ‘the best’ interns. If you’re looking at a stack of applicants with little or no proven experience, how do you make the right hire?

Mark Babbit of YouTern insists that an intern’s soft skills – like passion, independence, and versatility – are the attributes that hiring managers need to be on the lookout for.

You want the candidate “who will step in with some hustle, an entrepreneurial spirit and a great attitude – and make an immediate impact,” says Babbit. “After all, how do you know which is the best intern to pick when, by default, they have little or no work experience?”

Still, finding the candidate with those key intangibles can itself be a challenge. Nathan Parcells of InternMatch suggests to hone in on your detective skills when interviewing an intern:

“Recent grads, and especially current students, don’t typically have deep professional experience,” says Parcells, “so their ability to tell a story of why they’d be a good fit for your company is essential.”

To connect the smart employers with the best interns, SmartRecruiters partnered with the six best jobs boards for college students:

College.monster.com
Internship positions posted to Monster through SmartRecruiters are featured on this MonsterCollege, which helps recent grads and college students find their first career. Whether graduates pursue careers in government, non-profits, service vocations, start-ups, or the corporate sphere – MonsterCollege helps navigate the job-hunting process.

 

YouTern
YouTern is dedicated to matching the best young talent to leading organizations through high-impact, mentor-based internships. Visit their blog (The Savvy Intern, named to many “Top Blogger” lists in 2011) and tune into their Twitter weekly chat (#InternPro, Mondays at 9pm ET).

 

InternMatch
InternMatch.com helps companies find amazing interns using a  network of 250+ university and department level partners (ranging from Stanford to MIT) to ensure that every posting receives the right student applications.  For companies as large as Nestle and as small as 3 person startups.

CollegeRecruiter.com
CollegeRecruiter.com targets college students and recent grads looking for internships and entry level positions allowing them to apply to jobs, even on a mobile phone.

 

Internships.com
With over 60,000 internships in over 2,000 locations, Internships.com has a very active community that also consists of career prep resources and internship forums.

 

InternJobs
InternJobs.com is a global database of internships and entry-level positions for students, recent graduates and career changers. You can search their database by keyword or by location, and employers post internships and entry-level jobs for FREE.

How to Get an Internship

If you haven’t found a summer intern, it’s not too late. As spring concludes, remember, ambitious students will be searching these job sites for new internship opportunities.

Also don’t forget to check out top job sites by niche.

Ben Klafter (aka @BizDevBen) is a native of San Francisco, practices martial arts, and is on a quest to partner with all the best recruiting services. Photo Credit hnip.

One-click distribution to the top job boards is just one of the ways SmartRecruiters makes hiring easy. And while the Monsters and Careerbuilders of the world may have the breadth, niche job boards are increasingly adding depth to the job board market, focusing on ever-more granulated talent communities.  Job board sites focused on one or more specific industries — be they tech, media, construction — are increasingly attractive both to job-seekers and to job-posting employers.

“Narrow niche sites work,” says Om Malik of GigaOm.  We agree:  they work not only for the job seeker, who wants to rise above the fray of the bigger, more general job board, but they work great for the employer as well.  A poster to a niche job board knows they’ll reach the right audience.  US News and World Report suggests that “applicants from niche sites tend to be more qualified—because their skill set more often matches what the employer is looking for.”

The following are only the latest niche job boards to be added to the SmartRecruiters partner network.  Post to any of these boards (and more) through SmartRecruiters, and start managing your applicants through our free, easy ATS.

There will always be a value to the scope offered by general-focus job boards and aggregators like Indeed and SimplyHired. But a successful sourcing strategy will combine these with more targeted niche boards where employers know they can find the candidates with the specialized skills they seek. After all, the qualified candidates come to the niche boards because they know that’s where smart employers are looking to hire.  “Since niche job boards are focused and targeted to one industry, it makes it a lot easier for job seekers to find the jobs that they are looking for,” says Suvarna Sheth of Hcareers.com.  Find those job seekers by signing up to SmartRecruiters.

Ben Klafter (aka @BizDevBen) is a native of San Francisco, practices martial arts, and is on a quest to partner with all the best recruiting services.

It’s a dilemma familiar to all startups:  you have to build your team by hiring the right talent, but hiring the right talent often requires a good team to identify it when they see it, right?  Chicken, meet egg.

And it’s not just that you want to build the best team; it’s also a question of whether you’re even qualified to conduct the interview.  After all, interviewing for a position you yourself have never held (and may know little about) can be daunting.  It’s not as if YOU have any particular expertise in the field.  And yet here you are, evaluating a candidate for a position you yourself could never fill.  Worse yet – no one in the office has any expertise in the field.  In a startup with an engineer or two, a founder/CEO, and maybe a product manager, who interviews the business development candidate?  Or the customer service rep candidate? Or the data scientist?

The answer:  You all do. Practice collaborative hiring. So what if your Rails engineer has only the foggiest notion of what this potential account manager is supposed to do?  At the end of the day, he’ll be crammed next to the candidate just like you will, and will be sharing the same overflowing work space.  Will this candidate get along with the rest of the team?  Or are you going to want to throw his or her computer screen into the Bay after a week?

Remember: when a startup is small (and the office is crowded), the chemistry between team members is key.  So keep that in mind when interviewing that candidate – no matter what the position is you’re looking to fill.  Sure, in a perfect world your current Business Development person interviews your next BD person.  But what if you don’t have one?  What if the candidate IS your first BD person?  Or sales guy/gal?  Or your first interview for a project manager?  In situations such as these (which all successful startups will face at some point in their development), an open, collaborative hiring process is essential.  A team that doesn’t gel when small will never work well together once it gets huge.

Here’s where the social aspect of the interviewing process becomes so important.  We at SmartRecruiters are obviously big fans of social recruiting – it’s our business.  But we would like to see the interviewing process become equally social. A member of your team may not know how to do a candidate’s future job.  Indeed, he or she may not even understand what it is.  But that doesn’t mean he or she can’t play a valuable role in hiring for that job. A team that gels will.  What’s more, employees with a role in the hiring process will have a greater stake in the success of that hire.

Just to be clear: hire the most qualified people you can; there’s no substitute for experience and know-how.  But when your company is only 10 people (or even more so when it’s 2 people), team chemistry can make all the difference.  And deciding who would make the best “fit” between two similarly-qualified candidates is a social process, and a process in which the whole team can – and should – participate.

SmartRecruiters is the free social recruiting platform. Hiring Made Easy.

@BizDevBen is a native of San Francisco, practices martial arts, and is on a quest to partner with all the best recruiting services. Ben Klafter was hired by SmartRecruiters through a social and collaborative interview process that did not include a single business development professional.