Zalp: A socially intelligent employee referral tool

Recruitment is all about communication, which has traditionally played out through informal employee referrals. However, modern communication patterns have shifted the focus to social media for doing this job. While there are platforms like Linkedln which specifically cater to professional networks, sites like Facebook and Twitter are being increasingly used to network 'for business'. Connecting the dots of social media and recruitment is Zalp, the newly launched ‘social recruitment software’ which can help organizations efficiently source the highest quality of candidates through their employees’ social circle.

Zalp is a product of Pebstone (we have earlier featured another product of theirs, imlee), a technology company focused on products in the social media and mobile space. Pebstone was founded by Aatish Dedhia, an alumni of IIT Bombay and Intel Corporation in the United States (at Intel, he was part of the core design team on Pentium II processor). Aatish, the mind behind Zalp, is also the CEO of Zycus Infotech Pvt Ltd (provider of Procurement Performance Solutions), who are the primary investors in Pebstone.Why Zalp

The idea behind Zalp is simple - most Indian companies, no matter how established or huge, are still using the age old traditional methods of manual employee referrals, thereby staying unexposed to the potent combination of employee referrals and social network. Zalp, which integrates the two, serves a dual purpose of ‘making the job easy’ and, like all product/service that simplifies a process, makes it cost effective. Aatish elaborates on this, “A strong employee referral program can directly impact the business by increasing turnover, reducing costs, and improving productivity in the recruitment process”.

Is it just about tapping into social media?

Is Zalp based on the assumption that recruiters are not tapping into social media effectively? Actually, no. According to the team, while the growing popularity of social media in recruitment cannot be debated, most recruiters are not able to use it to their advantage, mainly because the social media integrated recruitment tools do not have a single point focus. Aatish explains, “Zalp is a specialized SaaS (software as a service) based social recruitment tool, that exhaustively exploits the potential of social media with a focused approach towards reducing the cost per hire and time to fill. In other words, to unleash the true potential of an employee referral program, the organization needs to embrace online tools.

The SaaS model ensures that the product can be seamlessly used by organizations of varying sizes, without the hassles of integration and implementation and global organizations can adopt it through a single interface.

The product, built on the basis of two strikingly contrasting facts of recruitment- that employee referrals are the most valuable and the most underutilized source of recruitment for every organization, helps accelerate employee participation in the recruitment processes.

How does Zalp work?

Some of Zalp's features:

- employees get easy and convenient ways to refer jobs to their connections,

- Zalp suggests the most relevant referral matches for a job out of the employees' social network connections,

- the ‘share’ feature makes it possible to share the job with thousands of passive candidates present on the social platform, and

- the products allow integration to social platforms like LinkedIn and Facebook.

Going forward

Zalp was launched in the US market in Feb 2013, and is now ready to hit the markets in India, UK and the Middle East. The marketing team is currently focused on customer feedback to enhance the product and the company is also building an after sales service team.

Leveraging the power of social media and using socially intelligent tools that use employees as recruitment ambassadors is definitely a build up to a great product. And no doubt, if organizations open up to this potential, several costly sources such as consultants could potentially be eliminated from the hiring process, not to mention the ‘time-cost’ that it would save. However, the success of the product is based on a basic premise that employees would make these referrals for no added benefit, whereas traditionally, an employer-employee relationship has been largely driven by incentives.

Like all new products challenging the rules of the game, Zalp will first have to test the markets to realize what it’s true potential is.

Website: Zalp