The networking company LinkedIn has acquired Toronto-based startup Careerify. Launched in 2009, Careerify has developed software that focuses on employee social network contacts to help professionals find that rare gem. A technological solution that combines the advantages of referal programs with those of Big Data.
Reaching out to employees to help recruit new ones. The idea is nothing new, since companies have already established extensive platforms encouraging their employees to put them in contact with potential recruits.
Discovering new talents
This has long been one of the top recruiting techniques for human resource professionals. In 2013, a CareerXroads study found that using references was the highest source of external hirings for US companies.
However, organizations using this method become dependent on the willingness of their employees to share information in an often-busy environment. Employees don’t always have time to respond to emails asking them to refer a candidate when an internal position opens. Careerify solves this problem by using employee’s Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn contacts to find and solicit interesting profiles within these networks. This process is completely automatic and allows the manager to target sources.
Another advantage of Careerify is that it provides opportunities for employees to be better informed about internal positions, thus improving companies’ retention rate.
The importance of data today and tomorrow
So far, this recruitment solution was made only available to Careerify customers, mega companies like Microsoft, Groupon or Deloitte. In order to become more accessible, it will now benefit from what LinkedIn has to offer, which is connections to more than 30,000 companies all over the world and nearly 350 million members.
Developing this type of recruiting technique is right in line with the evolution of recruitment, which is more and more influenced by huge amounts of data circulating in the world today. Mastering these data streams and making sense of all this information is key for recruitment professionals, as it becomes more crucial than ever to employ strong talent.
Last year, Jean-Baptiste Audrerie, the marketing director at SPB Organizational Psychology and an important Quebec observer on the technological evolution of the human resources sector, wrote a lengthy blog post about recruitment in 2025 on his company's portal. A text that makes evident the high interest of recruitment solutions like Careerify. “In HR as in other disciplines, the more technology becomes integrated, the cheaper and simpler it becomes and the less it differentiates between individuals. Thank goodness for digital convergence! Power will therefore lie not in connections, media or network access, but rather in the ability to acquire and exploit knowledge derived from data. The more information is collated by netware, the more transparency and intelligibility will provide free choice for economic agents, candidates and recruiters.”