HirePlug, Recruit Top Talent from Social Networks

Looking for a job? Spend more time on social media! Pune based entrepreneur Rajan Chandi tells all about social recruitments and his venture Hireplug to Swati Maheshwari, exclusively for YourStory.inWhat is Hireplug all about?

Hireplug works in the social media space. It enables social hiring. Facebook in India has double the number of employable users than Monster or Naukri.com. Hireplug is built with the aim of recruiting top talent from social networks. Companies can leverage social graph of their employees’ to recruit top talent and drive employee referrals. Considering 500 friends on the average for a 1000 employees – the target audience is half a million. This number is good enough to recruit from.

When did you start HirePlug?

We started to build Hireplug in August 2009.

How has the response been so far?

Response has been amazing. A few thousand recruiters from over 22 countries are using the service. We serve over 50 GB of web pages monthly and more than 2.25 million requests to our servers.

What are the biggest challenges in the field?

The Social Recruiting is a new and upcoming field. New start-ups have to find ways to make it financially efficient for HRs to use the new technology. It is not possible to gain adoption without a clear value proposition. We believe we have been able to offer it.

Do you have any direct competition? How do you deal with them?

We have competition with millions of dollars funded companies. We’ve been able to get better traction with brands than most of them. E.g. Yahoo!, Capgemini, Microsoft etc. use Hireplug for social recruiting.What kind of outreach do you do for Hireplug?

We use blogging and social media a lot.

Did you invest own capital to start with?

Yes. It’s all my own capital invested so far.

Are you looking to raise funds from external sources in future?

We’re talking with top VCs and would like to explore possibilities.

What are your expansion plans?

One executive from over $1 billion Company in USA is interested in joining us and taking our services to US markets. I believe we can get really big there soon.

What is the biggest learning from your experience with Hireplug so far?

Sales are very important for any product company. I learnt sales the hard way and I am still learning about it.

Know more about this innovative offering at http://www.hireplug.com

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