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As #truMoscow is already in a week (18th of July), we decided to plunge into the Russian market to get ourselves more familiar with what is going on in this huge and diverse social recruitment space. We are sharing our findings with you.
Russians are the most avid social media junkies in the world, spending on average 9.8 hours per month browsing each other’s profiles, commenting, liking and sharing. And they are interacting with much more than just Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter, which are popular in western cultures. Russians have developed local equivalents of global social networks and internet communities that can prove to be an effective ingredient of any social web recruitment strategy.
Russia has quite a variety of local social networks, VKontakte being the leader of the market (more than fifty two million Russians are using it). Whether you are looking for talent, distributing job announcements or crafting your employer brand strategy in Russia, you should definitely consider using VKontakte. It has a broad spectrum of groups and many of them are based on professional interests. For example, you can find approximately 2,000 Java related groups, the biggest of which can provide you with exposure to 9,200 people interested in Java. Be aware, though, that some unwritten rules of engagement might exist in some of the groups. For example, in several of them, especially when considering the more popular groups in the network, you might need to pay a group administrator if you wish to publish commercial content. While that might seem like a bribe, since it is not an officially sanctioned business model, the reality is that the way business is conducted in Russia, this is probably no different than the western world’s equivalent of paying to advertise on sites like Google, LinkedIn, and the like. If you have a problem with conducting business the Russian way, niche social web channels might remain off limits to you.
Facebook has almost thirteen million users in Russia and one third of them are in the 25-34 age group. While many compare the growth of Facebook vs. VKontakte, in reality their usage is quite different. For example Facebook users tend to like company pages more than Vkontake users, and Facebook users like applications and check-ins.
LinkedIn is a relatively new entry into the Russian market and has already attracted more than two and a half million members, having a goal to become the market leader among professional social networks as it did in manyother countries. anyhow it’s already the biggest professional social network in Russia. Most of the users come fromIT, Banking and Telecom industries.
Moi Krug is a professional network provided by Yandex, the Russian internet company which owns the most popular search engine and email provider in the country. Currently Moi Krug has nearly one and a hald million members and is considered to be the most popular social network among local HR managers. Moi Krug imports jobs from the largest job boards and can synchronize them with VKontakte, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. It is more complicated to reach a wider audience with Moi Krug because there are three layers of personal networks, which means you need to spend a lot of time “friending” people. Posting jobs and company related content in Moi Krug is effective because it improves our search rankings in Yandex, which owns 65% of all search engine traffic in Russia.
Professionali.ru is another Russian professional network with more than 5 million users. It is in many ways a copy and paste of LinkedIn [not an uncommon approach in Russia to copy and paste western technology]. Groups and targeted advertising is the most common way to reach potential candidates.
Twitter in not well established in the Russian culture, like it is in the UK or US, partly because Russia has a comparable micro blogging service called Futubra. Only 6% of Russian Twitter accounts are active on a daily basis, which currently does not make it an attractive recruitment tool. Typically only the most technologically advanced and trendy people can be targeted on Twitter in Russia.
LiveJournal is one of the most important platforms to consider because it represents a community blogging site, and Russian internet users over the age of 45 are more mainstream. Even though it has social networking features, its primary function is to allow users to create content that others can read, essentially a user generated content media site. Users can write their personal blogs, and also join interest groups and contribute to the existing content with their own posts. It is a great way to reach a targeted audience, which you can do by creating and maintaining your own blog, and finding active blogs where people are already engaged.
Finally – don’t forget to search for some relevant professional forums. There are so many of them in Russia that it’s hard to keep track. If you can master Google, and in some cases Google translate, you can easily find forums for Elevator Masters, Foresters, SQL programmers, and Food Scientists, to name just few.
If we can offer you one piece of advice before you start publishing your content in Russian social networks, it would be that you need to become thick-skinned and prepare yourself for comments and questions you don’t have answers to. In the beginning such provocative reactions to your postings might be frightening, however this is a cultural nuance, and these kinds of communications will actually help you create engagement.
To discuss more about the topics of social recruitment as well as about the latest innovations and technologies used in making HR easier, let’s meet in unconference organized in Moscow on 18th of July. (More info)
We still have some guest tickets for our friends that will be in Moscow these days. Contact us if you would like to participate.
