Also, with something like e-commerce, there tends to be a bigger proportion of people who have profiles in LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Spoke or some of the other places where people put information about themselves. All those resources give us access to the information we need straightaway. If we can get it there, we won't need to go to a third-party recruiter, who will give us about the same amount of information before we start our recruitment process anyway.

When someone applies for a job with you and posts you a resume or a CV, the information you get there and then is still at face value. What we do as recruiters is we don't just take the information off a LinkedIn profile and make our hiring decisions based on it, just like we don't just take the information off a resume an applicant sends to us at face value. We actually take references in the marketplace on people and start to connect the dots.

Walmart hires people from a lot of different organisations. Sometimes we might talk to someone who we recently hired from an organisation, and we ask him or her for opinions on certain people. We were doing that before social media became commonplace. Now social media has made it somewhat faster and easier.

Walmart, and most other organisations, rely on referrals as one of its biggest ways to recruit people. Something like LinkedIn actually helps systemise some of the processes for finding people and generating referrals.