1. Technology seems to be in beta
2. The Internet has turned from informational to social
3. People (customers) are in power

In the April Journal of Corporate Recruiting Leadership, I’m going into more detail about this. But for the abridged version, let me say that technology is changing at a mind-numbing pace. An interesting phenomenon is that solutions are being released in beta, as opposed to waiting for the final version of a product. In beta, the solutions are continually improved until another better solution is developed. And then the cycle continues as the new solution is offered in beta release.

At Microsoft E&D, we began a three-year program with a hypothesis that we could use technology to enhance the human touch and create a better experience for prospects and candidates. We found a vendor partner that offered a potential solution, but we understood we were in uncharted territory and needed to be nimble with respect to change.

In the second year of the project, we switched vendor partners because a broader and more powerful solution became available. Fortunately our new vendor partner was nimble and flexible because our solution in year three is very different than in year two. And I do not expect to have a final version of this vendor’s solution because year four will offer some exciting new opportunities. The truth is that we do not know what we don’t know. When we shifted vendor partners two years ago, we did not realize that a different situation existed until it was introduced to us. I am not certain we even had the words to ask for that solution. I suspect technology solutions are going to appear next year that not imagined today—and they will be released in beta.

The Internet has made a well-chronicled transition from being a place to obtain information to a place to engage in social activities. The places people gather are called Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter. People are aligning socially with their interests and share publically their personal information. Information that used to only be obtainable by the black ops researchers and sourcers is available to all with some Internet research. Each of these virtual gathering places has rules of engagement, and community members are expected to respect them. If the migration of people to the virtual social sites continues, most of the target audience that we need to reach out to will be online and visible.

Looking at recruiting in the 21st century requires an understanding of how the traditional components of recruiting have changed. Sometimes I think that if we had a new pair of glasses, then change would be easier. We tend to see things though our old glasses. The frames fit our face well and feel familiar and comfortable. The lens may be scratched, but if we hold our eyes just right, we miss the flaw in our vision. But the new glasses offer a challenge: what if things are not as they appear? What if the clarity in our vision makes us uncomfortable? What if we see we have been wrong and made mistakes? What if? What if? What if?

I invite you to put on a new pair of glasses and view recruiting. You will see a bit of old school — some major influences and a number of components that make up recruiting in the 21st century. These glasses can correct our vision to clearly see the recruiting opportunities.

In a moment of frustration (or epiphany) I quipped that candidates were seeking relationships and our recruiting technology offers them the equivalent of a one-night stand (or more accurately a chance to complete an application). Looking past the potential off-color nature of the comment, the truth is there is a gap between what people in this world of Web 2.0 desire and what a typical recruiting operation allows. That gap is the williness on the part of recruiting to have a conversation with you unless you are part of the chosen few that meets with requirements of a specific job.

Jeff Jarvis writes in his book–What Would Google Do?—about the first law he learned on the Internet:

“Give the people control and they will use it. Don’t and you will lose us.”

Think: It Is Not About Us!

Giving up control is scary, but the alternative is downright frightening. If you would like to see that picture, just read Jarvis’s famous blog post about “Dell Hell.”(Use keywords “dell hell” in Bing.) It is the story of Jarvis in a moment of frustration with Dell that caused a groundswell of public opinion and caused Dell an amazing amount of pain (i.e. lost sales, bad PR, etc). Dell eventually got the message, but at what cost? To say that this event has caused a sea change is an understatement.

Think Distributed, Not Destination

Jeff Jarvis (What Would Google Do) suggests that companies (like Google) that act as a distribution system have been more successful in the Web 2.0 world than organizations (like Yahoo) that have focused on building portals and destination points. When you build a destination site, it is as if you are taking the prospect where you want them to go, as opposed to using the site as a method that they can go where they want to go. The Microsoft Talent Engagement Model (see graphic below) is more of a marketing distribution system for our jobs and jobs-related content than to a single talent community site. In fact, as you dig into the model, you will notice that activities and information flow in a myriad of directions as opposed to a single web site.

Not Creating New Communities!

We joined existing communities (LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook) and used their platforms to engage the appropriate segments of their membership. Not only do these social networking sites have a large number of active participants, the very audience we are trying to reach contained in their ranks. Forrester’s Technographics research indicates that a Groundswell has occurred and the majority of adults in our society (especially the best educated, highest-paid professions as well as the new entrants to the job market) have joined social networking sites. It is very apparent that our target audience is online and in these existing communities or social networking sites.

We are creating community, but not necessarily creating new communities (if that makes sense). Perhaps a way to good way to think about it is that we are organizing a community in way that can make the community function better to better meet the interests of our target audience. For active job seekers, we can provide a higher quality experience and help them navigate Microsoft. For the more passive individuals, we can provide the “inside scoop” on technologies; what it is like to work at Microsoft; and engage current employees in conversation.

An Alternative to Goodbye!

At Microsoft, we are pipelining talent in communities as an alternative to saying goodbye. These communities are located on social networking sites (LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook) as well as our vendor’s (Jobs2Web) platform. We use communities to

1. Offer an alternative to prospects who are not ready to apply
2. Offer an alternative to prospects who are screened out
3. Offer an alternative to prospects who do not complete the application process.

The Microsoft Talent Engagement Model (see graphic) illustrates that there is a lot going on in our approach to pipeline and creating community.

The pie chart in the upper-left hand corner is a reminder that the talent supply is comprised of active, casual, passive, and non-job seeking talent. And it points out the active job seeker is only about 14% of our potential audience. That leaves approximately 86% of the potential audience—causal, passive, or non-job seekers that could be part of the talent engagement equation.

The center of the funnel illustrates that we feed our SEO results; our SEM activities; our TalentStream (A CRM-based pipelines/community engaging approach that maps a target audience’s behaviors, attitudes, and interests to our outreach) campaigns; and the prospects generated from live and virtual events. Previously, I argued that SEO Is Not Enough: that tactic alone does not reach a large percentage of the potential talent supply. So we add TalentStream campaigns, events, and other outreach strategies to reach deeper into the potential talent supply toward where the more passive prospects are. We use a variety of approaches that are based on an understanding of our target audience’s behaviors, attitudes, and common interests.

The left-hand side of the Microsoft Talent Engagement Model depicts how we use a number of different opportunities to distribute information to active, as well as some casual and active prospects. In this way, we allow the prospect to decide how they want to engage or hear from us. For example, the passive job seeker might want to subscribe to a job agent that will alert them when a certain type of opportunity becomes available. The casual job seeker might have been referred by an employee to a specific job and we want to move them forward in our process. The prospect that is not looking might show up at a virtual event that has a Microsoft leader discussing an important new technology.

Not ready to apply? Not the right fit? Came in second? Regardless of the reason, the right-hand side of the Microsoft Talent Engagement Model graphic illustrates the ability to offer the prospects the opportunity to remain engaged. If they join a community, we will listen, answer questions, and converse with prospects. If they are “non-applicants” at the present time, we offer a variety of ways a prospect can decide how to receive information. For the person who is screened out of an interview process, we can offer them the opportunity to stay engaged while they wait for a better job fit. For the candidate who came in second in an interview panel, we can actively assist them in considering other opportunities within Microsoft. And for the person who has left Microsoft for other opportunities, we can keep in touch. In many instances Microsoft Alumni wish to return after a short length of time in their new venture.

This behavior of not allowing for conversations with prospects is going to catch up with the recruiting profession—and it is not going to be pretty for some of us. But we still have a chance to get in front of this. Apply or Goodbye is no longer the only option.

The THX commercial tickles our ears in the movie theater, loudly proclaiming the “Audience Is Listening.” The lesson of the Web 2.0 is the “Audience Desires a Conversation” and recruiters had best join in the dialogue.

One purpose of this article is a preview of a presentation for the Fall 2009 ERE event, where our talent community pilot will be discussed in the broader context of Web 2.0 Beyond the Social Recruiting Hype: Microsoft’s Approach to Building Talent Pipelines and Communities. While the presentation will be much broader than a discussion of “apply or goodbye”—one of our core beliefs is that Web 2.0 demands that we have conversations with prospective employees at all phases of the job search cycle. Failure to do so will result in our recruiting the best talent for Microsoft, and that significantly impacts our business.

In her book The Truth About Search Engine Optimization Rebecca Lieb defines Search Engine Optimization as the art and science of making content attractive to the major search engines engines (there are over 300 million searches for jobs, careers, and employment on just Google each month) to look for a job (as opposed to job boards, which only get 10 million searches per month). So for recruiters, that would mean making our jobs or jobs related content “optimizable” by Google, Bing, and Yahoo. And I have to wholeheartedly reinforce that an SEO platform does a great job of targeting job specific keywords that are ranked by the major search engines.

For example, our partner Jobs2Web’s dynamic SEO platform has already accomplished its objective — getting our jobs content on the first page of Google (the search engine that enjoys a 70% market share for jobs searches). In the screen shot below, you will notice that 97% of our jobs (Microsoft Entertainment & Devices) are on the first page of Google.

And most of the jobs are listed “above the fold,” which is where the majority of eyeballs will notice your content and where 80% of search engine users click on links in the “organic results.” To see an example of this, search Google for “Seattle Developer Jobs” and you will see our site on the 1st page (#2 position). If you press on the link, it will take you to the landing page. We have similar landing pages for each keyword search that is performed.

And we are getting a significant increase in traffic to our respective jobs. But, it is still not enough. SEO alone will not allow you to source from all of the available talent pools. It is because (depending on your keyword targeting strategy) SEO primarily attracts job seekers who are active in their search and seeking “jobs”-related keywords. While that segment of our target talent audience is important, it actually is the smallest part of the job search cycle. The graph below reflects the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (circa 2006) overview of the talent supply in the United States. I think of this as a “job search cycle,” as it reflects where the respective segments of talent supply are with respect to changing jobs at any point in time.

Before you think that I am trashing our SEO partner Jobs2Web, I need to explain that our initial approach with the Jobs2Web platform focused on “jobs” and became the distribution system for our jobs and jobs-related content for search engines, as well as the leading social networking sites, blogs, and any relevant sites that we can connect with both active and passive talent. In an upcoming article, I discuss the idea of a Web 2.0 Recruitment Marketing Platform in greater detail.

If we relied on just SEO, our jobs-related content (per the above graph) would be seen by the active job seeker, as well as some of the casual looking talent (the ones who engage in web activities that mirror an active job seeker). And on a scale of easy to difficult, the active job seeker certainly is at the easiest level. And the most difficult (or nearly impossible) would comprise the part of the talent supply that is “not looking.” What I find interesting is that most organizations tend to work at both ends of the spectrum. We post jobs to attract the active job seeker and we engage in one-off sourcing projects to attract the part of the audience that is not looking. No wonder the ideal results are not being obtained: we are missing about 50% of the potential talent.

If you sat in on a Web 2.0 team meeting at Microsoft Entertainment & Devices, with my colleagues (John Phillips and Mira Aboulhoson) and myself, the conversation nearly always involves a discussion of the ramification of “human touch” vs. “technology touch.” We use both methods in our Web 2.0 Recruitment Marketing outreach to reach each segment of the target talent audience.

The current state of technology offers a prospect a choice that could be characterized as “apply or goodbye.” For the casual or passive candidates (which may not be ready to apply) we are offering an alternative to “goodbye.” We offer an array of choices that have built in some “human touch” and allow a prospect to choose how they want to engage with Microsoft.

For example, we reach deep into the active, casual, and passive talent pools with a “technology touch.” We augment technology initiatives with a “human touch” in social networking sites, talent communities, and by direct outreaches to micro-segments of our target audience. It is at the intersection of human touch (art) and technology touch (science) that success is realized.

Human touch, or Guanxi, is a critical element that makes our approach more successful than just a successful than a technology touch solution. I believe that every recruiter (at least every out-of-work recruiter) knows that a conversation with a prospect is very important. If our target audiences are moving online to social networking sites, at the very least we can observe that people are seeking relationships. More than just relationships, Web 2.0 uses a place for user generated content and conversation. These online sites have become virtual third places where relationships are built. And as a tenet of recruiting dictates, recruiting is about building relationship with potential talent, so that when the time is right, you can discuss your opportunities with them.

The challenge for recruiting comes when we attempt to integrate that Web 2.0 human touch into our transactional recruiting processes. While we acknowledge that getting to know a prospect is important, we just do not want to engage in a conversation until a hiring manager is interested in a prospect. And yet, we realize that community and conversation is the cornerstone of how we develop prospects into candidates. And while we are stuck in the tension between what we are doing (filling jobs transactionally) and what we need to doing (building relationships), we miss about 50% of the potential talent pool (causal and passive target audiences). By offering an alternative to goodbye, we can convert a much higher level of visitors, increase the yield of our Web 2.0 marketing efforts, and reach into previously untapped talent pools.

I am going to pause this discussion at this point — thinking about the 50% of the potential talent pool that you might be missing out on — and insert a commercial. For those attending the ERE Conference in Florida, I will illustrate our approach of reaching that causal and passive target audience as an integral part of our Web 2.0 Recruitment Marketing platform. This topic will be discussed in the broader context of Web 2.0 Beyond the Social Recruiting Hype: Microsoft’s Approach to Building Talent Pipelines and Communities.

To suggest that recruiters are control freaks is not an epiphany or an “ah-ha moment,” as being controlling is one of the traits that make recruiters good at our jobs.  We are managers of a set of projects called search assignments or requisitions and are required to direct a volume that easily reaches the double digits. And we need to control as much as possible to be successful.

Recruiters like the idea of community and having a relationship with prospects and/or candidates. But when recruiters take a deeper dive, they begin to understand that some of the conversations that transpire in community are outside of their control, they lose some enthusiasm. So why advocate community if one cannot control the outcome?

In my upcoming Fall 2009 ERE presentation, I am weaving five topics/questions/discussion points into the storyline. One discussion point is “Web 2.0 solutions proclaim that this is the new way to pipeline candidates into a private talent community. What is a talent community and how do I build one? In this article, I will deal with the “why” of talent communities.  And if you are in Florida in September, I will discuss the “how to” at length.

So why advocate community if one cannot control the outcome? There are several reasons why community and the relationships that are formed and built are essential in the 21st century Web 2.0 model of recruiting; they include:

Communities Can Be Influenced

Most community experts indicate that while a community is not controllable, it can be influenced. On a brand level, thought leaders argue that conversations about your brand are going to take place with or without you. The question becomes: Do you want to participate in the conversation? Participating in the conversation allows you to have some influence over the opinion of a given community’s members.

Communicate With Your Audience Where They Are

The growth of social networking sites is staggering. Sometimes the size of a social networking site is larger than smaller companies. How long do you think it will take Facebook (225 million members) to eclipse the population of the United States? If our target audiences are joining Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, MySpace, and communities on Ning, shouldn’t we want to join them? 

Your Target Audience Has Moved Online

If you target audience has not formed a online community or affinity group, they will do so in the very near future. The growth in social networking sites has been accompanied by a growth in all sorts of online groups and communities. Most of us have a segment of the labor market that includes the talent we’re interested in and has migrated online. These affinity-driven communities segment themselves naturally into ideal groups in which to build relationship and share your organization’s story.

Transparency Is a Byproduct of Community

One of the biggest results of Web 2.0 and social networking sites is a move toward transparency with respect to process and conversation. With everyone watching, it is better to be a truth teller. With everyone watching, it requires us to engage in the conversation. With everyone watching, it makes us better citizens of a group.  And above all, it enhances the experience of the prospective employees who engage in our recruitment process.

The question on everyone’s lips can often be answered by having just one person comment.

Leverage is an important aspect of community. It allows us to communicate one thought and have it seen by many. In a previous article, I discussed the aspect that most members are in the crowd and do not engage in conversation. But they are listening. That is why it is important to engage the members who are asking questions or making comments.

Community Makes Navigation of Enterprise-size Companies is Easier

In a company the size of Microsoft, the inner workings are somewhat of a mystery to a job seeker (and to some employees as well). The transparency of the connections that are seen in a LinkedIn Group make it easy to reach out and engage. Questions can be answered; issues clarified; and relationships built.

Community Is Counterintuitive

Community isn’t intuitive. Previously, I compared the counterintuitive nature of community to learning how to snow ski. It took a while for me to get my head around “leaning away from the mountain.” Talk about counterintuitive. If I lost balance while turning, my instructor said to lean away from the mountain; away from apparent safety; away from the natural pull of gravity. Every instinct told me leaning away was wrong. Yet, I could not move off the bunny slope until I stopped trusting my instincts and listened to my instructor. I had to change my mindset. In the same way, we must move from a transactional recruiting process, to get closer to community, regardless of what our recruiting instincts suggest.

Community Is Guanxi (and that is a good thing)

Guanxi [guan-shee] is the basic dynamic in personalized networks of influence in Chinese society and seems to be most fitting when we think about community.  Guanxi suggests that the relationship is more important that the transaction itself.  So when one considers Guanxi in recruiting, it opens the door to the following possibilities:

• Exploring ways to begin and capture a relationship with desired prospects even if they aren’t currently looking for a job
• Developing a longer-term relationship with prospects during their entire careers
• Discovering ways to bring value to your prospect community even if they do not take your job
• Becoming more transparent to target talent and enhance prospect experiences
• Moving away from transactional recruiting and into relationship recruiting

So why is community so important in recruiting? At an elementary level, the move of our target audience online mandates that we meet them where they are. And the rule of the road in Web 2.0 is that people online must have the capability to have a conversation. Gone are the days of Web 1.0 and static content and organizations just creating content. At its heart, Web 2.0 is user-generated content and creating conversation. Conversation is expected by our target audiences who have moved to these online communities. And for the most part, we in corporate recruiting have disappointed our target talent (by necessity third party recruiters engage in relationships to a greater degree than corporate counterparts). And if we don’t change, we will not be successful.

Why community? If we are going to attract the best talent in the world, we must connect with them where they are visible — online social networks and affinity groups. How do we build community? That is a discussion for September.

This scene played out over and over. Sometimes the candidate would even be looking over the interviewer’s shoulder without noticing the poster proudly displayed behind the Microsoft hiring manager. Yes, after 25 years, we were still getting those questions.

That was two years ago. Since then, we have changed the perception of Microsoft Hardware. We have changed the brand Hardware@Microsoft. Hardware@Microsoft has become a profession. The average “person on the street” may not know anything about Hardware@Microsoft. But a target audience of engineers who work in hardware will know about the importance of hardware in terms of Microsoft’s business vision.

ERE acknowledged our work with a “Most Strategic Use of Technology Award” and industry thought leaders like Dr. John Sullivan called our work “pioneering.” (In fairness, this award was shared by a talented group of colleagues who created View My World and incidentally just launched a new careers site.) While being recognized by one’s industry is flattering, the real success of our work was in solving a business need in our division.

The story of making Hardware@Microsoft a profession was an answer to a critical business issue.

As our division is the manufacturing part of Microsoft, we had a billion-dollar problem with respect to the quality of one of our key products. We needed to recruit world-class hardware and “reliability engineering” talent to solve some immediate issues and make certain this did not happen in the future.

The first thing we tried to understand was our target audience and how we could identify the individuals who we needed to attract — where they were employed; the best colleges for hardware engineers; what associations they joined; what they read … you get the picture. At a high level, the graph below illustrates the complexity of identifying hardware engineers. (It is at this point that I lament that IEEE has discontinued publishing a membership directory.)

Undaunted, we segmented hardware engineers from other types of engineers. The difference in our approach is that we use 17 to 20 different sources to identify the target audience. In this initiative we used competitive intelligence and competitive org-charting along with alumni associations, and every free and paid job board available. The filter that we apply to the talent is: would we be interested in that person over the next three to five years?

It is useful to illustrate micro-segmentation with a mini case study.

As the graphic illustrates, out of the 620,000 engineers (estimates provided by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics), we have identified 18,900 hardware engineers. And we identified a micro-segment of 2,500+ reliability engineers from the various aggregated sources.

We had eight openings in reliability engineering and needed to fill those roles with the best of the best. We employed a strategy that we call a TalentStream (a continuous flow of prospects) to make certain we met our business challenge. We targeted this group with four emails over six months. By the fourth email, nearly 40% of the target audience looked at our jobs. This rate was two and one-half times greater than the audience response to one email. By the final email we had three and one-half times more prospects than we had from the first email. The end result was we filled eight positions with candidates from eight different sources of hire. Thirty-eight percent of the hires came from referrals, so the viral aspect of the campaign was evident.

Now we have 2,500 reliability engineers and no openings. These prospects are passive and represent some of the best organizations in consumer electronics. We were faced with the challenge that every recruiter faces. How do you keep talent in orbit when there are not any positions? We choose to create community with these reliability engineers.

We created a LinkedIn Group that is for technical professionals only. Reliability Engineering on a Global Scale is a group (sans recruiters) designed to allow this premier group of professionals communicate and network with one another. Initially, 10% of the target group accepted our invitation. Since that time the membership in the group is increasing at about 5% per month. We do not brand this group with Hardware@Microsoft (although it is obvious Microsoft Hardware is involved). The two reliability engineering roles that our division had this year were filled quickly with high-quality individuals from the efforts described above.

We have just created a hardware@microsoft Facebook page and a hardwarejobs Twitter page. We will invite members of the original 2,500+ reliability engineers to become a “fan” of this Facebook community and also offer them the opportunity to “follow” us on Twitter. One of the discoveries that we learned during this talent community pilot was that we need to take a “community of communities” approach because, not all people will join the same groups. That caused us to rethink our original “uber talent community approach” as it turns out only a percentage of a targeted group will join.

The social networking laws that explain involvement (or lack thereof) by potential members of community caused us to rethink our strategy. Some important thinking on people and community was developed by Jakob Nielsen, who suggested that only 1% of a community were heavy contributors. Nielsen advocated that another 9% were intermittent contributors, while the other 90% were just lurkers. Jake McKee, a thought leader on community, build on Nielsen’s “Participation Inequality” theorem and carried it into the 21st century as the 90:9:1 as a way to describe people’s behaviors in a single online community. More recently the Groundswell folks at Forrester use Social Technographics to explain behaviors of population over multiple online communities. What Forrester Research discovered is that Forrester’s Social Technographics surveys show that when it comes to social content, 21% of online U.S. consumers are Creators, 37% are Critics (those who react to content created by others), and 69% are Spectators.

So what do these studies have to do with talent communities for recruiting? What it means is that if you expect to get a large group of people to join another community that we have formed, even if we are Microsoft, it is just not going to happen. We need to connect with the micro-segmented target audience on the leading communities (Linkedin, Facebook, and Twitter) as well as our proprietary community that is part of our vendor partner, Jobs2Web. So, if we think about our micro-segment of reliability engineers, in order to fully engage the 2,500+ target audience, we may have to form communities on 5 to 10 different social networking and/or community sites.

Micro-segmentation and community go hand in hand. I noted in a previous article that sourcing is marketing. And if we look through our marketing lens we see in this “new world of social media, networking and Web 2.0, much of segmentation occurs naturally” as communities are formed. Micro-segmentation has been built into the DNA of our approach to developing talent communities. And it is the backbone of our Web 2.0 recruitment marketing engine provided by Jobs2Web.

A purpose of this article is a preview of a presentation for the Fall 2009 ERE Event, where our talent community pilot will be discussed in the broader context of Web 2.0 Beyond the Social Recruiting Hype: Microsoft’s Approach to Building Talent Pipelines and Communities. While the presentation will be much broader than a discussion of “micro-segmentation,” this strategy is a cornerstone of our community development workstream.

This is the monthly Friday night (depending where you live in the world) Women’s Wine Club. Like clockwork, the first Friday night of each month these friends taste a new wine and share a conversation about their new discovery. They use Twitter as the means of sharing their wine tasting experience.

This wine tasting Twitter example seems to be becoming very much a part of the fabric of the 21st Century social experience. This is an example of a Virtual Third Place.

Ray Oldenburg coined the phrase — a “third place.” Oldenburg, an urban sociologist, suggested that informal, public gathering places are extremely important to community. He suggested that bars (Cheers), coffee shops (Starbucks), bookstores (Third Place Books) and other establishments are Great Good Places or “third places” (in contrast to the home and the workplace, the first and second places). These third places create space for conversation and creative interaction.

The “third places” of the 20th Century are morphing into the “virtual third places” of the 21st Century. The Twitter wine club is a scene that is being replayed in different stages, but with a common storyline: social encounters are taking place cyberspace. It is a logical extension of a third place. Job and careers are two of the most frequent topics of conversation; many virtual third places are being formed to discuss all the aspects of our respective professions. If there are discussions about careers, there must a role for recruiting in the virtual third places.

So how does a virtual third place fit into a recruiting strategy? Imagine you are a recruiter in Seattle or Portland that recruits recruiters. One virtual third place that you would want to join in the conversation would be the NorthWest Recruiters Association LinkedIn Group. The NWRA is an affinity group of nearly 900 members comprised of corporate and third party recruiters — the ideal target audience for a recruiter of recruiters.

The NWRA as an affinity group is not just a virtual third place, but also creates opportunity for face-to-face conversations. This mix of virtual and face to face conversations seems to be a very effective method of community. I am not suggesting that belonging to affinity group and having conversations with the members outside of a trade show or a meeting is new; it is certainly not. But what is unique about the 21st century model is the transparency of conversations to all the members of the group and an invitation for any member to share their views. That levels the playing field and fosters deeper relationships.

One of the aspects of virtual third places is the natural segmentation that has already occurred by the interest and self-selection of the members. For the sourcer (and I believe sourcing is marketing), as it is with a brand manager in marketing, segmenting the target audience is one of the challenges of the job. In this new world of social media, networking, and Web 2.0, much of segmentation occurs naturally. The challenge of the 21st century isn’t so much finding the community, but more about how we function as a member of the community as a recruiter with requisitions to fill.

How one functions as an effective member of a community is a subject for a different conversation, but there are several avenues available to pursue. If your practice is designed for the longer term, then perhaps becoming a listener and finding your voice in the community can be very effective. Communities tend to have a life of their own, and learning the culture and norms of the group could provide valuable insight. I have noticed the one or two NWRA members who recruit recruiters tend to move behind the scenes. They support the organization, volunteer for events, and are visible, productive members of the community.

A bright shiny new toy creates new words to describe old things. It is not so much that the old needs the “new” associated with it; it is more that a new vocabulary is required to explain the new dimension or new aspects of an older discovery. In the 1980′s I was very comfortable referring to my Rolodex (contacts/prospects) as my network. I referred to the National Association of Accountants or the Oregon Society of CPAs as affinity groups. And I referred to the directories of those affinity groups as money. I attended, networked, and supported those groups. Relationships and reputations grew out of those groups; clients were served and careers were enhanced. Today, I am comfortable describing my network as a database. I am comfortable with describing the affinity groups as a community (as they may have been all along). I join communities; participate in discussions; and give generously back to the community. And I still call the community membership directories money.

At the Fall 2009 ERE event, our talent community pilot will be discussed in the broader context of Web 2.0 Beyond the Social Recruiting Hype: Microsoft’s Approach to Building Talent Pipelines and Communities. While the presentation will be much broader than a discussion of “virtual third places,” this concept is a cornerstone of our community development workstream.