When a group of students from the city’s premier media/advertising studies institute, the Xavier’s Institute of Communication were vying for an internship with the ad agency JWT, they didn’t have to undergo the dreaded “GD/PI” — group discussion and personal interview. Long the norm for any candidate selection process, the GD and PI are now being replaced with something far more new age: WhatsApp chats and Facebook contests. The XIC students, for instance, went through a fun round of challenges in a WhatsApp chat with Bodhisatwa Dasgupta, a senior creative director with JWT Gurgaon. The students had to create memes along the lines of the “Be Like Bill” viral sensation, talk about their likes and dislikes, take funny selfies, and generally show off their creative, spontaneous side.
In yet another quirky recruitment tale, Chennai-based ad agency The Pixelate put up a Facebook message asking candidates for a copywriter’s role to post their best stories, in six words or less, on their page.
While recruiters have been looking at the social media profiles of prospective candidates to get a better idea of their personalities/’fit’ with the organisation’s values etc, for a while now, the trend of using social media in place of traditional recruitment techniques is new, and just beginning to catch on.
Bhisham Sahi, the founder of The Pixelate, told us that most of their agency’s hires have been via social media. “We are a young team and we are constantly looking for young people to work with. Recruiting through social media isn’t boring and we get to understand the thought process of the people. For instance, we were looking for copywriters and told people to post their stories in the comments section of our Facebook page and hired them accordingly. A similar exercise was conducted to hire designers where we told youngsters to design a ‘We Are Hiring’ poster and mail us. After the initial process we do a background check and see their LinkedIn and Twitter accounts to gauge their social media presence,” says Bhisham, who has brought in designers, social media managers and copywriters for his agency, all through social media.
Bhisham said that what prompted him to start looking at social media as an avenue for recruitment was the unsuitability of more conventional methods. “When the agency had started off, we would do campus recruitments as well, but there, I did not get a chance to see their actual problem solving skills. But on these platforms there was spontaneity, and I was looking only for freshers, so this worked well. Once we like the design/story, we call those candidates to our office and follow it up with an interaction,” he explained.
JWT’s Bodhisatwa Dasgupta recounted how every year, the firm would be inundated with the resumes of students looking for internship opportunities. The problem that JWT then faced was this: A regular resume couldn’t serve as a good enough gauge of a potential candidate’s creativity — a must in a field like advertising. So Bodhi promptly took the numbers of XIC students who wished to intern with JWT, created a WhatsApp group and added them all.
“I introduced myself and told them that this is probably the world’s first WhatsApp screening!” Bodhi said. “They didn’t know (beforehand) that we were going to do this; even on WhatsApp, they were conducing themselves like they would in an interview. But after a while, they loosened up and you can see that this is actually their comfort zone. They were posting pictures from their dorm rooms and their environment and that is really conducive for creativity. I ended up hiring four of them and while I don’t know if this would work in other fields, as far as my field is concerned, it was a roaring success. I would definitely do something like this again and I hope that others too make use of WhatsApp and Facebook more in this context.”
The students who got the internships with JWT were quite excited about their unconventional hiring method. “I have seen companies who simply ask you questions and never get back,” said Sai Padwal, who is currently pursuing his PGD in Advertising and Marketing Communication at XIC. “We were all very nervous (when the interaction with Bodhi) started, but the fun involved made us comfortable. Besides, the interview was very relevant to the industry: It tested us on our wit, quickness, and we were constantly on our toes. We were given a task and a time frame and we had to get going. We all thought initially that it was a prank and this can’t be the actual screening process. When we told our parents about this, they thought that someone was playing a prank on us!”
Sai’s classmate Shubham Gune was also picked for the internship. He reiterated Sai’s point, that they all believed the WhatsApp screening process was a prank. “Our college had told us it would be a telephonic interaction and the next day we saw ourselves made part of this WhatsApp group called ‘The Internship’. We weren’t prepared at all and it was very intelligent of him (Bodhi) to come up with something like this. When you are in front of a recruiter, you tend to get nervous and mess up but here it was all so cool.”
But while such methods may work in start-ups or for the creative industry, will WhatsApp screenings and Facebook comments actually become part of the recruitment protocol of more established/conventional sectors as well Pratiksha Pradhan, who has been overseeing recruitments for a leading private bank for over a decade now, had a rather surprising perspective. She said that these new age recruitment processes are something she has seen come into common usage over time. “It’s simple really. The youth is more active on social media platforms and for us recruiters, they provide easy access to reach out to them. Social media platforms also give us a reference point to reach out to individuals who ‘fit our bill’. It saves on time and helps us reach potential candidates a whole lot quicker,” she said.
Pratiksha said that recruiters have their own in-house WhatsApp groups, where they circulate messages about openings, get references etc — although she did add that the personal interview would not be on its way out anytime soon: “The huge advantage of a conventional interview is that we can study body language and gauge the candidate’s attitude, which you may not be able to tell on his/her social media profiles.”
Of course, some industries will always need a personal touch during the recruitment process, and that will not change. Archana Sawant is in charge of recruiting candidates for a leading hotel chain and told us that the “old school system” was what the industry follows. “The dynamics of recruiting change with the industry. For Sales and Marketing, we are always looking for individuals who are grey-cell driven, for Housekeeping and Front Office we want people who are labour driven and when you are catering to a mixed crowd of people, it gets difficult to hire candidates on social media platforms. Yes, for entry-level positions we can still use them, and have been conducting interviews via Skype to select candidates from Nagaland and Bhutan,” said Archana. “But for a skill-driven profession — like a chef for example — we need to see how he/she cooks, taste the dish and then decide if they are eligible.”
Inputs by Arun Venkatraman
