Affinity Circles, a provider of social networks for academic and professional organizations, has launched inCircle Recruiting, a candidate sourcing tool that allows employers to target and engage passive candidates.
Companies can sift through a network of more than 140 alumni and professional groups, including 15 million degreed professionals. About 700,000 of those professionals are registered users who could be potential job targets.
InCircle Recruiting, in beta since September, is a subscription-based service that features targeted media campaigns aimed at reaching candidates who are already employed but are open to being approached by employers. Subscriptions, which begin at around $40,000, arm recruiters with customizable tools to target members by region, occupation, academic degree, industry, current and previous employer, job functions, and more.
Chuck Taylor, VP of Marketing, spoke about the main function that sets Affinity Circles apart from competitor LinkedIn. “We encourage a lot of communication within the platform. I can send a message to anyone even if I’m not connected to them, which is one of the key differences between Affinity Circles and LinkedIn. There’s no requirement to go build out your network with a whole bunch of people before you can start communicating. Because we have these closed networks, we give every member of the community access to every other member for communication purposes.”
New features to the recruiting platform include:
1) The ability to run targeted media campaigns that promote employer’s opportunities to users meeting pre-specified criteria. Campaigns now extend beyond the inCircle community platform, in the form of emails that highlight opportunities waiting for users in the community. The system remembers the campaign criteria as long as the campaign remains active, and automatically promotes the corresponding opportunities to new users who join the network after the campaign is created.
2) The inCircle Recruiting candidate management system that enables employers to create talent pipelines for each of their job roles and to communicate with qualified candidates who have expressed interest in being contacted by a recruiter about those opportunities.
“Another big difference between Affinity Circles and LinkedIn is that we allow recruiters to specify what types of characteristics they are looking for,” Taylor said. “We have eleven different targeted parameters like current job role, current function, academic degree, and current employer. Candidates that meet those qualifications get a response from the employer for specific job opportunities. So we are defining a relevant audience for the employer, and then we’re measuring the degree to which we connected with that audience.”
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