Open-source intelligence for HR: reducing time loss and company’s risks

Today, every company is interested in high-quality human resources. After all, employees implement the primary development strategy of any business. And where there is an effective personnel policy, the tasks set are carried out more efficiently, which means that the main goal is achieved faster. Finding a worthy specialist who will meet all the requirements is not an easy task. New search technologies are developed every year, entire HR departments are created, or recruitment agencies are being contacted.

Those, in turn, understand the importance and uniqueness of their direction and try to do the job qualitatively, constantly expanding the possibilities of search and guarantees. But of course, some problems arise that need to be addressed promptly and systemically.

The Internet and social networks are becoming vital tools for HR Managers during a screening of potential employees. This resource helps find additional personal information about the candidate, which he will never indicate in a resume or application form. But there are specific difficulties that managers face when performing screening tasks:

• A large number of social networks, where the same person may be hiding under different names or have several profiles;
• Many other professional flows of information in which you need to check the source by source.

And the most critical problem is that data retrieval requires a considerable time resource. And it takes even longer to process the amount of information received, visualize and search for relationships or “risk points” (red flags and other potential conflicts of interest).

Because of the task of pre-employment screening, it is essential to ensure that the candidate has ties and experiences, which says, check facts of biographies, identify risks (cultural, personal, professional, conflicts of interest), or on the contrary, to assess what are the additional benefits provided by the employment of this candidate.

What happens if a recruiter solves the problem of pre-employment screening traditionally? He spends a vast amount of time on non-core tasks such as data collection and analysis. Meanwhile, good candidates get tired of waiting for an answer and go to work for a competitor. Or another situation where the recruiter did not reveal the critical risk in the manual analysis of the collected information was that the hired employee did not take root in the team (cultural fit), and the search begins again. The company at the same time in a double loss - no employee and lost precious time.

And at this moment, to solve all the above problems, to help the recruiter to collect information from numerous sources on the Internet, the subsequent analysis and visualization of data comes social Links – a tool for Open Source Intelligence and Social Media Intelligence.

What are the advantages for a recruiter with Social Links?

First, the endless transition from source to source is no longer required when checking a single candidate. Social Links allows you to collect data from the Internet in a single workspace. The sources that we use are the most popular social networks. This data will be enough to build a complete social media profile and get the right idea about the candidate.

Secondly, the recruiter should no longer keep in mind a large amount of information, draw links between facts and events manually or scroll the Facebook pages down to infinity. All data collected in the workspace is automatically visualized in a graph format, and the program itself determines the chain of connections between people, groups of people, companies, and events.

To conclude a candidate, simply look at the graph resulting from the study. The depth of social networks analysis allows you to reveal the risks associated with the candidate’s employment and assess his lifestyle. For example, learn about his bad habits, political or personal views, communication with employees of competing companies, participation in undesirable groups and organizations for a company.

And also no longer need to search for all the social networks of the candidate manually. The Face recognition tool processes critical social networks in a matter of minutes and by name and photo gives all candidate profiles in the Internet space, including alternative accounts in the same social network.

As an example, the analysis of Facebook user’s affiliation with two companies was carried out. The graph shows people’s profiles, one way or another, connected with one of the competing companies. In the middle between the two groups, a person’s face is revealed that relates to both the first company and the second one. This person may become a potential point of information leaks or, conversely, a point of primary interaction between companies. This graph is built in real-time; all profiles and connections are automatically detected by the program based on available Facebook information.

Social Links tools for human resources and recruitment quickly and effectively solves all the problems in collecting and analyzing personal information from social network of a potential candidate. It helps to discover what's hidden and provides a quality decision on hiring. The HR department can focus on selecting qualified candidates who are guaranteed to meet all the company’s requirements. And for a particular recruiter, this means that he performs his work as efficiently as possible and receives a deserved interest from each successfully hired candidate’s annual income.