Shine.com: Connective strength

The job portal has launched a new television campaign highlighting its social recruitment feature.

This is the era of social media and even jobs are getting social these days. Shine.com, the job portal from HT Media's subsidiary FireFly eVentures, has launched a new television campaign highlighting its social recruitment feature. Earlier this year, Shine.com announced a strategic partnership with social recruitment platform MyParichay, which enables a recruiter to reach out to the personal networks of their employees, match the skills and requirements to those in the extended network, and use the referral feature to connect with potential candidates.

Conceptualised by Denstu India, the core proposition of the TVC is to highlight that a friend can now help one get the next job. The campaign shows a story of two friends and the way one helps the other in getting his dream job through a social network.

Targeting the job-seeker, typically a working professional in his late 20s who is working in one of the metros, the TVC starts with one friend, Govind, asking the other to help him in getting a job in the latter's company. The other friend then takes him through a human pyramid that symbolises a social network, with 'Govinda Ala Re' playing in the background. Govind is then seen climbing the pyramid and landing in front of the company's boss, who says that he has heard a lot about him.

The TVC ends with a voiceover highlighting the feature of the product.

According to the company, this will be a multimedia campaign comprising TV, print, digital and unconventional media. The campaign was launched in the first week of June and will continue for about six weeks.

Shine.com states that hiring through social media has now reached mainstream recruitment as a credible tool in a savvy recruiter's toolbox. "Eighty five per cent of Indian jobseekers use some or the other online social networking platform for finding a job, and find both Facebook friends and LinkedIn connections useful in finding jobs," the company informs.

Speaking to afaqs! about the objective and idea behind the campaign, Rajan Bhalla, group marketing head, HT Media, states, "The objective of the campaign was to build awareness for Shine.com's new feature that allows a candidate's Facebook network to assist him in his job search. We believe that job search is going social in a big way. Our surveys suggest that 65 per cent of candidates are more likely to use Facebook over LinkedIn for their next job search. In such a scenario, we have invested ahead of the curve to create a product that brings a candidate's Facebook network into play. "

The social bar, in partnership with MyParichay, has been live for a couple of months now and according to Bhalla, the plan was to start advertising at the peak season - June and July - which is what they did (as per Google search trends, job-related keywords start peaking from the third week of May).

"On the other hand, our active user base has gone up substantially in the last two months that the 'social bar' has been live. Engagement and usage of the new features have been impressively high. We expect this to grow even faster now that the communication is on mass media," Bhalla informs.

Dual approach

Shine.com has not advertised much on TV. What changes now? Bhalla states that the company is actually reaching out to audiences through two screens - TV and internet. "Our media campaign (executed by Maxus and Blazar of GroupM) takes into account our TG moves seamlessly across these two media and targets them through one integrated approach. TV is our lead medium in terms of spends but we are also using online in a pretty big way to showcase our commercial. The combination of these two is the best way to reach the young, internet-savvy working professional."

Competitor Naukri.com is a big advertiser on TV. With this campaign, Shine.com is trying to address the immediate challenge of educating the job-seeker on the power of their social network and how Shine.com can leverage it to get the next job. Simultaneously, a B2B marketing initiative is also being carried out to convince the recruiters that Shine.com provides a differentiated solution to their hiring needs.

"We have a differentiated product and we have clutter-breaking advertising. We believe this combination will get us several new users. In fact, we have seen increased activity among our existing users ever since the product went live. We feel that we will become the "most preferred" job-site among the TG as getting jobs will become definitely easier on Shine.com than any other jobsite," Bhalla adds.

Improved look

With this new feature and the launch of the new campaign, Shine has also revamped its entire website, especially to highlight the 'social' aspects a lot more and visually, give it a fresh, young look. "The new design puts a lot of emphasis on job search and finding the friends' linkages. This is to support our new product feature and showcase our strengths," Bhalla adds.

Shine.com claims it has 1.2 crore registered candidates on its database and its immediate priority continues to be to establish its product differentiation through the Facebook connect. Apart from the consumer initiatives, the company will reach out to HR professionals through Shine HR Summits - a series of panel discussions featuring industry stalwarts and attended by senior HR leaders.

HT Media launched its job portal Shine.com in June, 2008. For the record, HT Media publishes three newspapers in English, Hindi and business news segments including Hindustan Times, Hindustan and Mint. The company also has four FM radio stations - Fever 104 FM in Delhi, Mumbai, Bengaluru and Kolkata. It also made a foray into the internet space through its subsidiary, Firefly e-Ventures, and has launched www.Shine.com, www.HTCampus.com and www.Desimartini.com, in addition to its existing news websites livemint.com, livehindustan.com and hindustantimes.com.

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