Making Facebook a powerful hiring tool

HireRabbit offers a software-as­a-service (SaaS) platform to build customized job sites on Facebook pages.

 

Hire Rabbit has an attractive pitch. Its co-founder Pipalayan Nayak says companies are two minutes away from hiring bright bunnies through their Facebook and mobile career sites, provided they use a preset template to get started. "That's less time than it takes to munch a carrot!" he says.

HireRabbit offers a software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform to build customized job sites on Facebook pages. The job site sits within the company's corporate Facebook page and it works on smartphones and tablets. "Traditional channels of recruitment including job boards are becoming obsolete. Though firms allocated significant hiring budgets annually, social recruiting was not even a blip. But Facebook is now one of the most trafficked, and the social recruiting landscape has taken off very well," said Nayak, an electronics engineer who graduated from National Institute of Technology (NIT) in Rourkela.

Nayak started HireRabbit in 2012 with Prafull Sharma from NIT Surathkal. The two had worked together at IBM Software Labs in Bangalore for five years before starting the venture. The company has over 200 customers including CitiusTech, Aditi Technologies and US-based Choptank Transport. HireRabbit was incubated at Microsoft Ventures in 2012.

Firms needn't do the grunt work of manually posting jobs on their Facebook page. "A company's Facebook page's jobs listing will be automatically synced to its applicant tracking system (ATS) using our platform. It can redirect candidates to apply for jobs through the existing application flow and it allows the firm to track candidate source data inside its ATS. Candidates can also apply for jobs from Facebook and the company can receive applications in its ATS, thanks to our powerful API integration," he said.

The company also helps design customized Facebook pages to influence passive candidates and to position the company as an employer of choice.

"Our platform powers the microsite by integrating Facebook APIs," Nayak said. The company optimizes tweets to include hashtags, job title, location and a short URL with its Twitter integration platform. HireRabbit measures key metrics like job site views and number of applicants using its analytics dashboard.

The company offers a 14-day trial, post which customers can switch to a subscription-based model. It offers a flexible pricing model across three levels —master, black belt, and blue belt. Companies opting for a black belt package pay $119 monthly for posting 15 active jobs and $8 each for an additional job posting. The blue belt package comes at a monthly subscription for $39 per month. "Customers can upgrade, downgrade or cancel the monthly plan any time," Nayak said.