Yesterday’s static webpage has become today’s dynamically changing content and de facto social network. Search engines index that content, and prospective candidates find it, forming a private talent pool. Those candidates have no use for recruiters who penetrate their social networks by doing the online equivalent of asking “the engineers that worked for [them to] hand out business cards to their friends.”

Like Moliere’s Monsieur Jourdain, employers delight in finding they already run a social network. Rather than interrupting people all day, they let the talent come to them.

As far as non-anonymized employee-originated company information: I also believe there should be a “Miranda-type” warning:
“Anything (interesting) you say, write, or show online can and will be used against you, now or anytime in the future, whenever you least expect it.”

IMHO, it would be a better use of recruiters’ time and effort to operate under the belief that everyone you actually hire will need to be recruited.

Cheers,

Keith

“What lies behind us and lies before us are small matters compared to what lies right to our faces.”-

Despair.com

“”

Good examples of using social media for recruiting.

Spare a minute for this wonderful blog that we received, it’s simple but perhaps can help in these terrible economic times created by a few greedy individuals !

Enjoy, reflect, react !

http://jobs2ireland.com/jobs2ireland-blog/signs-that-job-market-is-slowing-down/comment-page-1/#comment-18

John

The corporate reaction to social media has been predictable – since it has something to do with web, let’s put up a website.

If you visit the Facebook page of most employers, what you find is a community of believers – these people are, for the most part, already sold on that particular employer. As for the posts from the employer – it’s hard to distinguish those from the corporate website. You see the same press releases and other information. On many of these pages the discussions are virtually undistinguishable from the support forums related to their products.

The point of using social networking for recruiting is to expand your sources beyond what are already accessible. You’re mistaking activity for community. What you have is the converted preaching to the converted. There may be some ripple effects but not much. The fact that someone is a fan of a particular company does not mean that their network of friends will automatically gravitate towards it or be favorably disposed to seek employment with that employer. I’m a fan of the Treo and participate forums about Palm’s technology but I don’t have any interest in working for Palm. Unless someone in my circle of friends makes the effort to evangelize working there I’m not likely to do so either.

As for the content management systems – the amount of interest a content management system generates in an employer depends on the content being managed, not the system. Your faith in technology is remarkable.

Incidentally, your remark about recruiters fully integrating social media with their website and private talent pools is rather simplistic. What exactly does “fully integrate” mean? Having a link to the website on the Facebook page and vice versa? How much time does a recruiter have to integrate social media into their recruiting efforts. As I mentioned in the article – you cannot show that X amount of time spent on Facebook generates Y number of hires. What is a recruiter supposed to share with their “friends” on facebook that will convince them to take a job with the their employer – assuming these friends are viable candidates in the first place?

Online social media are just an extension of offline media, best taken advantage of by tapping other’s networks. In the pre-web days I used to frequent local technology forums. I didn’t have much success at recruiting anyone from there until I started asking the engineers that worked for us to start handing out my business cards to their friends. The fact that we have online networks now doesn’t change those fundamentals.

He writes that “corporate pages on Facebook…prove ignorance of online social media”, but the reality as any 21-year-old can tell you is that with a facebook page a business instantly creates a hub for the conversation that employees, customers, and others participate in by posting photos, RSS feeds, comments and so on. That you can do all that for free and instantly and have a place that people can link to each other and propagate the network make it a no-brainer.

He also writes that “corporate web pages” are “essentially static” and play no part in the social conversation. Nothing could be further from the truth! Witness the rise of the content management system as the platform for the website with the very purposes of creating a social network.

Recruiters that fully integrate social media with their website and private talent pools will emerge as winners, and those that relegate it to anointed non-enterprise ’social networks’ will lose.

Gregg Dourgarian
CEO, Tempworks Software
blog: http://www.staffingtalk.com