Social recruiting guru Riges Younan is our ‘lucky last’ speaker at RecruitTECH 2009 in Canberra on 18 September 2009.  Riges will be speaking about the 7 secrets to a successful employee referral program.

Riges’ current company Peerlo (http://www.peerlo.com) is a job referral technology systems developer and recruiting advisory business. He is a career recruiter with over 12 years of experience in executive search and recruiting. Riges has been responsible for 5 successful start-ups in Australia, London and New York such as http://2vouch.com and http://jobgenie.com.au. Riges is an evangelist of Social Recruiting and has a passion for using technology to efficiently drive talent sourcing.

Come and see Riges Younan speak at RecruitTECH 2009…

Your job?

Recruiting Strategist at Peerlo

Where do you live?

Melbourne

Give us a quick elevator pitch for your business…

Peerlo is a recruiting services and technology company that assists employers and recruiters to better utilise social media and web 2.0 to attract and retain talent and build a talent communities around their brand.

How old is your business?

In its current form about 4 months but Peerlo and its team was born out of a referral recruiting platform we built called 2Vouch.com which was incorporated in September of 2006.

Why are you passionate about your business?

Recruiting has always been social and the beauty of the world us recruiters live in today is, we now also have a whole bunch of tools (in addition to the phone and face to face meetings) to make the “social’ piece more scalable and the relationships we develop more meaningful. They are more meaningful because of the extra context and visibility we now get of our clients and the candidate community we engage with.

I am passionate about the value of technology driven talent sourcing and we at Peerlo aim to build technology and services to help recruiters and employers do it better.

Name your three favourite business-related websites - the ones you visit religiously in your business

Linkedin, Atlassian’s product Jira and Twitter

Name your three favourite websites?  The ones that you visit in your spare time

When I have spare time, it’s usually filled with chasing my two and half year old boy around and being a husband. I occasionally peek at peoples photos on facebook.

How many hours do you work in a typical working day and do you work weekends?

I try and be disciplined enough to take Saturdays off, but as a startup entrepreneur that is very difficult. So if I’m not on my laptop, meeting people or on the phone – I am always thinking about how we can build a better business.

What do you do in your spare time?

I am a huge football ( soccer ) so I take my son to watch a local team we support every Saturday, I am a die hard Carlton supporter and I like to cook. So spare time typically revolves around sport, beer and food. I would say that’s typical Aussie male behaviour

How many followers do you have on Twitter?

Hmm, let me check. (back) 744 people following me. Hi followers! I promise I’ll become more interesting soon.

How many friends do you have on Facebook?

I have 90. Most of my time is spent on Twitter and Linkedin

Do you blog?  Where is your blog located?

Yes – I blog at http://peerlo.com/blog and at http://rigesyounan.com

If you were able to invite any three people to dinner, who would they be and why?

CEO of Twitter Evan Williams: He has executed a few successful start-ups and I would be interested to learn what his formulae is.

Bill Clinton: Really interested to hear if Monica Lewinsky is as good as rumours say she was he he. On a serious note, I think he is one of most inspirational political leaders of our time. He’s obviously made mistakes but he would offer a wealth of knowledge.

Reid Hoffman Founder of Linkedin: We have been trying to integrate our application with Linkedin and they are not returning my calls. It would be hard to avoid me over a dinner table.

Do you have a business mantra or favourite saying?  If so, what is it?

Focus, fail fast and iterate.

What is the biggest mistake that you have ever made in your business?

Putting all of my personal wealth on the line for a tech start-up. I’ve learned that you need to take some money off the table, launch early with a focused product that executes your core offering, be the best at that one thing and one thing only. Test the business model and automate later when customers arrive and revenues flow. Be agile and iterate.

In your eyes, what are the three top trends in the recruitment and technology space?

1- I am seeing employers becoming more sophisticated in the direct candidate sourcing activities, they are using tools like Linkedin, Twitter and Facebook to connect directly with the candidates, build relationships and start a conversation.  With this increase in knowledge employers are also increasing the expectation of what third party recruiting firms do for their fees. This is a big challenge for recruiting firms as they must continue to evolve their business and ensure they have the capability to augment the employers direct sourcing activities with bundled services or demonstrate that they are executing a thorough sourcing strategy to deliver value and justify their fees.

2- Increased use of Social Media in Recruiting to do the following things:

1. Build deeper relationships with Employers and Candidates
2. Increase the scale and reach of recruiter networks.
3. Create a much more transparent and accountable recruiting process.

3- Increased referral hiring for both recruiters and employers. (it would be remise of me not to discuss referrals.) I think the use of technology platforms and CRM will enable both employers and recruiters to leverage of their connections and contacts to increase the amount of referrals they receive when searching for a candidate to fill a job.

What are you going to talk about at RecruitTECH and why is it important?

I’ll be talking about how to implement a world class candidate referral program. There has been a lot of research about referrals as a source of hire and I’ll be discussing 7 steps to ensure your candidate referral program is world class.

Come and see Riges Younan speak at RecruitTECH 2009…