Tomigo brings ‘help wanted’ to the social-media age

An Israeli startup is giving international companies a sleek way to fill job openings through the social networks of their employees.

What’s the best way to find the right person for a job opening: placing a want ad, contacting a headhunter, posting within the company, or asking current employees to recommend a friend? In the social networking era, the last option increasingly makes sense, says Tal Moran, CEO of Tomigo, an Israeli startup offering a customized recruitment platform to leverage the social-media connections of employees. Moran points out that leading companies realize every staff member has access to a database of personal connections, and many offer rewards for recommending a friend who turns out to be a good fit for the job. All that remained was to invent a sleek and efficient way for the data to be shared and maximized for everyone’s benefit.

This is why Moran founded Tomigo (a contraction of “to” and the Spanish word for friend, “amigo”) in mid-2011 with his twin brother, Nimrod, and Lior Atias. “I was working in a startup and saw how difficult it is to recruit new employees, especially when you are looking for specific skills,” Moran tells ISRAEL21c. “I saw that when companies asked employees to help, they did it in very simple ways such as email, but there weren’t special management tools for this.”

There was another motivating factor for Moran. “Because I am hard of hearing, I am familiar with a community of very talented people having difficulty finding new jobs, because usually recruiters call by phone and they cannot answer. So we have a pool of talented job-seekers, and employers needing to find talent that may be only a click away.” The company logo is sign language for “pay it forward.”

Friends’ recruits stay longer

Using Tomigo, in-house recruiters post job openings for which employees can invite friends to apply via social networks. Applicants are filtered based on employee recommendations; after all, who knows the applicants better than their own friends? The employee responsible for recruiting the person who gets the job receives a reward of the company’s choosing.

Moran says surveys show that employees recruited through friends stay on the job twice as long as other recruits, resulting in a 70 percent reduction in cost and a 30% reduction in recruitment time compared to traditional approaches. He also sees Tomigo as a trust-building tool between bosses and staff. It’s an open secret that many employees are already on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn during business hours, so why not provide a legitimate reason for social networking on the job?