A 1969 painting entitled Street Corner http://bit.ly/rH8hw , by artist Richard Killeen http://bit.ly/dJD2E that I saw recently got me thinking about what constitutes social recruiting and a social recruiting platform. In the painting you will note each person in the crowd appears disconnected from those around them, or as described by the painter himself “… the paradox of being anonymous but part of a group.” Does there actually need to be conversation, and a sense of community, between members to be called social recruiting and a social recruiting platform? Or does direct conversation between employer and recruiters constitute social recruiting? I don’t know the answer, but the picture has got me thinking deeper about all this stuff.

To me, recruiting is an end-to-end process that culminates in the presentation of a slate of screened, assessed, qualified and interested candidates to a client (internal or external). Merely getting candidates to populate an ATS or inbox as they apply for a position they found on LinkedIn, Twitter of Facebook (or any other social venue) does not ease the recruiter’s burden of sifting through the digital piles of resumes – hoping to find a presentable candidate or two. I’ve seen this first hand when I ran Talent Acquisition at AOL. I can tell you first hand that this is especially true as you move up the organizational chart.

What we’ve done with BusinessElite is build a Social Recruiting Platform – one that not only leverages the recruiter’s social/professional networks in a more strategic manner but also those of recruiting “stakeholders” (and yes, I like using that term as it adequately represents the interests of hiring managers, et al). But, we’ve moved beyond the social sourcing aspects by integrating into our platform our own matching technologies that stack-ranks candidates based on scoring their backgrounds against a scored position spec and also using our own leadership impact assessment to help make the best matches.

I will be blogging about this in more detail over time. In the interim you can see how BusinessElite works by visiting our site.

@Sean Good reminder that social recruiting isn’t as ubiquitous as those in the bubble might assume. I keep hearing that F100 companies want to see more than just social media strategies: they want to understand how their systems and processes will comply with OFFCP standards, the ADA, jobs for veterans, affirmative actions plans, etc. They want a big company to get audited and cited so they can learn from that company’s mistake. Oy!

What do you think?