Among the players already in the ring are BranchOut, the first to build a business networking presence on Facebook, Monster’s BeKnown, and LinkedIn, the reining leader. (Facebook had its own big news Wednesday, filing for its much anticipated IPO.)

Like BranchOut and BeKnown, Glassdoor leverages a user’s Facebook data to find connections at companies in which they have an interest. These can then help provide a direct line to the recruiter or hiring manager. It works simply by using your Facebook login.

Setting Glassdoor apart is the wealth of information it has collected about tens of thousands of companies that’s hard or even impossible to find anywhere else. From its beginning as a place where workers could review their company (or former company) with sometimes no-holds-barred bluntness, Glassdoor has broadened its scope, providing just the kind of information job seekers want: job listings, salaries, interview questions, company background, those unvarnished opinions — both pro and con — and now, who among a person’s Facebook connections has an in.

Branded “Inside Connections,” the new service adds networking to the Glassdoor features, making the site, as Tim Besse, co-founder and vice president of product and marketing, said, “The most complete listing of information about jobs.”

It’s that completeness, Besse argues, that gives Glassdoor the advantage over all other careers networking sites, including, he insists, LinkedIn. “The two most trusted ways to find out about a company,” says Besse, “People you know and, two, people who worked there.”

LinkedIn has both, but if you aren’t connected to one of them, that won’t be much help. At Glassdoor you could always see what people had to say about an employer. Now, you can also see who among your connections works there.

“We have all the tools,” Besse adds.

LinkedIn’s advantage is the completeness of its user profiles. Because it is oriented toward careers and business networking, LinkedIn users tend to be thorough in posting their professional information and prompt in keeping it current.

Facebook users tend to provide only limited employment information. While data is hard to come by, Glassdoor says a survey it commissioned shows 65-70 percent of Facebook users have entered at least some employment data. However, Besse points out that Facebook’s Timeline will prompt ever larger numbers of people to complete their profiles and provide more details.

(Timeline was announced at Facebook’s f8 conference in the fall. Its rollout has been slow, but its anticipated impacts are large and have been discussed in detail by marketers, researchers, and others.)

A post on the Harvard Business Review site about the impact of Timeline on careers notes, “If you were holding onto the idea that Facebook could be your personal haven while you build your professional profile on LinkedIn, it’s time to let that fantasy go. The Timeline offers an opportunity for you to tell the story of your career in a uniquely compelling way, so you need to consciously tackle the challenge of building a propersonal profile that will position you appropriately in the eyes of employers, clients, or colleagues.”

If Facebook users do as the writer suggests, then sites like Glassdoor stand to benefit and it won’t matter that LinkedIn has locked out BeKnown, BranchOut, and others, refusing to share its data.

Besse, in that case, could realize his goal: “I am out there to build the world’s largest and most trusted” career site.

LinkedIn ran a distant second, with 46 percent of job seekers attributing their job to that business-oriented network. Twitter, the short messaging network, got a thumbs-up for its job help from 36 percent.

Those are among the findings of Jobvite’s Social Job Seeker Survey 2011 released this morning. The survey doesn’t say how the social networking helped the job-seekers. Other data suggests it may mean seekers researched the companies on social networks, reached out to their contacts for information, got a referral, or were contacted directly. Since most job seekers use more than one social network, the numbers add up to more than 100 percent.

In terms of sheer numbers, the results are not too surprising. Facebook has in excess of 800 million members, while LinkedIn has about 135 million. What is surprising, however, is that by an even larger margin recruiters in an earlier Jobvite survey reported making hires through LinkedIn.

Nevertheless, regardless of which social network they prefer, job seekers with the most contacts do more job hunting and get better results than their counterparts with fewer than 150 connections, friends, or followers. Of these “super social” job seekers as Jobvite calls them, 28 percent found a job directly through their online social networking.

As you might expect, Facebook has the largest percentage of super social job seekers — 37 percent — compared to LinkedIn’s 10 percent and Twitter’s 11 percent. Super socials, as the Jobvite survey discovered, are young and strong earners: 62% percent are under 40; 42 percent earn over $75,0;0, and 40 percent have a college degree. They divide almost evenly on gender with 49 percent female.

“Our new national survey shows that socially savvy job seekers have an advantage over their fellow job hunters and it’s paying off,” said Dan Finnigan, Jobvite president and CEO. “While referrals are still the top source of new jobs, online social networks play an increasingly important role in job hunting today.”

One curious data point is the number of workers who, Jobvite reports, say they find their job through social networking. Jobvite puts the count at more than 22 million, an increase of 7.6 million since its 2010 survey. If that’s accurate, then 15.8 percent of the 48 million jobs filled in the year ending Sept. 30 would be the result of social networks.

Neither of those were particularly noteworthy except that the townhaller was hosted by LinkedIn in Silicon Valley, with 80,000 people watching a live feed of the event.

During the hour-long meeting, Obama pitched his jobs bill, and fielded a variety of questions, most dealing with his plans to boost the economy, with others expressing concern about the future of Social Security and Medicare.

From a recruiting view, what was particularly interesting was the significance of the event for LinkedIn. If anyone had any lingering doubt that the business networking site was laser-focused on recruiting, the town hall meeting swept that away.

The White House hand-picked LinkedIn to host the jobs forum, at which the company’s CEO Jeff Weiner moderated. In a post-event interview, Weiner said, “We’re first and foremost very appreciative to the President and to the White House for recognizing the platform as a way to get the word out there.”

The San Francisco Chronicle‘s report on the event quoted a public relations consultant who called it “a coup of enormous value to the company and its brand.”

After last night’s bit by Jon Stewart on The Daily Show, that value may be just a bit less enormous. I won’t spoil the clip for you, but Ill tell you it’s hysterical, particularly the part about how LinkedIn “helps” people find jobs. Enjoy.

I don’t know how many participants the conference has, but the tweet stream is moving fast, especially at the start, when the tweetnote speaker, Republican presidential candidate and former Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty, started tweeting.

His 16-tweet conference opener was a Twitter first. Not only because he was the first presidential candidate to keynote a conference via Twitter, but also because conference organizers say it’s the first conference to be conducted entirely via Twitter’s short messaging.

Being a first didn’t count for much among the conference followers (#Jobs4US) who took Pawlenty to task for delivering a political address and challenged his record when he was governor. This one got loads of retweets: “Number of ppl that can fit in the Metrodome (home of the MN Twins): 64,000. Number of jobs created by @timpawlenty: 6,200.#jobs4US”

Things picked up when he got to answering questions. Tweeted one participant, Oh! @TimPawlenty is answering questions on #jobs4US — this is much more interesting than the speech. I hope it lasts a bit.”

It did, briefly. Pawlenty took a handful of questions, answering most with some variant of this: “My priority is getting the economy moving again — we must create jobs by cutting taxes, and controlling spending.”

For the record, I tracked down a few of the tweeters and found staffers from Pawlenty’s primary opponents online and a few Democrat staffers, too. But whatever your politics, the next sessions were laser-focused on offering job seekers advice and helping them with problems as specific as how to go about approaching your network contacts for help.

That one, to Career Diva Eve Tahmincioglu, got this answer:

reaching out to someone on twitter who really doesn’t know who the heck you are is dumb

start by contacting your inner networking circle, those people who know you, your work, and most importantly…

..reach out to people you know like you. please! i hear horror stories about references that end up dooming job seekers

The followers in this sessions, currently underway, retweeted that advice asking such follow-ups as what to do when you don’t have a big network, and how to get people who do know you into your network. Tahmincioglu, the session leader, is getting plenty of help from recruiters and experienced job seekers, who are responding to questions as soon as they get asked.

“Why not help out at a local business chamber or at your child’s school – even form your own networking group,” was one suggestion for a seeker who’s network, they said, is fairly thin.

You can find the conference agenda here. I suggest using the interface you’ll find on the site, as it’s easier than going directly to Twitter. The American Jobs Conference, which I discussed in a post last week that also talked about tomorrow’s nationwide virtual career fair, is sponsored by TweetMyJobs and CareerArc Group, which acquired the jobs distribution service earlier this year.

It may fly in the face of other surveys, but LinkedIn insists that men are savvier networkers when it comes to their participation on the global business networking site and when their number of connections are taken into account.

“Women,” explains Nicole Williams, LinkedIn’s Connection Director, “can sometimes shy away from networking because they associate it with schmoozing or doling out business cards, when in reality, it’s about building relationships before you actually need them.”

Well now, just a couple weeks ago ComScore said women in five of the biggest European countries — France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and the United Kingdom — spent more time on social networks than men. And it didn’t matter if they were 15 or 50. In every age grouping the women were ahead.

See what I did there? I compared ComScore’s time online in Europe to LinkedIn’s global counts of men, women, and their total connections. Different measures.

Getting closer to an oranges-to-oranges comparison, Rapleaf, a data analysis firm, found that women had more friends and deeper relationships than did men on social sites. The study came out in 2008, so its findings are dated, but more recent reports tend to confirm them.

Pew just released a report on who uses social media, which found that 56 percent are female, a gain of three points since 2008. On Twitter, Facebook, and MySpace women are more plentiful by far than men.

But, when it comes to networking on LinkedIn, men are way ahead of women; 63 percent participation by men vs. 37 percent for women, says Pew, which did the counting last fall.

With that kind of discrepancy, it’s no wonder that LinkedIn’s own data showed men to be the savvier business networkers. That holds true even in areas where women might be expected to dominate.

Take the cosmetics industry. LinkedIn found even though women outnumber men, it’s the men who are the savvier networkers.  Mary Kay — yes indeed, the cosmetics company with the pink everything branding — is a “very male savvy company,” LinkedIn reports.

HR, a female-dominated occupation, is another male networking surprise. In the U.S. and in Australia, France, Germany, India, New Zealand, Spain, and the U.K., men were found to be the savvier networkers.

On the other hand, in the tobacco industry, it’s just the other way around. Women are the better networkers.

LinkedIn speculates the minority sex has to network harder than the dominant sex to break into those industries.

Overall, concludes LinkedIn, “Globally and in the U.S. men are savvier online professional networkers than women.”

It closed down officially a couple weeks ago. That no one much took notice until blogger, author, and LinkedIn champion Lindsay Pollak tweeted the news Saturday speaks volumes about the reach of the site. As tuned in to the Gen Yers as it was, Koda.us simply couldn’t get up the critical mass to really ignite.

The final blog post says nothing about the reasons for the closure, other than it came as a surprise to the staff. “The winds of change are swift,” says the final post, written by Lauren McCabe, who was Koda’s marcom specialist.

In truth, though, it had ceased to exist at the end of February. A note then said it was being taken offline while the team designed “a brand new product, one that is substantially different from the current version that you see today. As a result, we’ve decided to go “dark” while we build our new site.”

Koda had promise and $3 million in angel dollars. Launching in the summer of 2009, into the worst recession since the Great Depression 80 years before, Koda aimed squarely at the young worker. It’s a crowded market, but Koda declared itself a different kind of site. It was a place where the entry-level Gen Yers could establish a professional presence, providing a personal — in some cases a very personal — look into who they are and they promise they hold.

“KODA is more professional than Facebook but more personal than LinkedIn, letting both sides of the hiring equation get to know each other,” declared co-founder and CEO Jeff Berger in the launch announcement.

Alas, the economy was bad then and is only starting to look better now. As I wrote in a launch announcement then, “Although KODA reports having relationships with some 350 companies and non-profits, the majority on the site say they aren’t hiring and have no listed jobs.”

That didn’t appreciably improve. But it didn’t keep the site and its young writers from doling out career advice that was direct, and sometimes brutally honest. One I recall suggested networking while doing yoga, surfing, playing basketball, and other such activities. Silly, until you start to think about the meaning behind it: networking can happen anywhere, anytime.

Fortunately, the blog is still online. Check out the Gen Y wisdom there while it’s still available.

It was fun.

Chapter 6 of the National Rifle Association’s guide to the basics of personal protection in the home published in 2000, says that, “…encounters occur at very close range, often in reduced-light conditions, and are over in a matter of seconds. One study of Police shootings in a major urban area showed that the majority of encounters took place after dark, at three yards or less, in less than three seconds, and involved the firing of an average of three shots.”

The instructor called these events, “up close and personal.”

That’s where I got the idea for the name of this series.

In this series you’re going to learn effective communication techniques — the “up close and personal” ones.

We’re going to first touch on the traditional and emerging technologies that foster communication and then we’re going to delve in later chapters into the techniques that lead to real connection between people.

Communication is a fundamental social process, a basic human need and the foundation of all social organization. It is central to the information society. –World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) Declaration, A/4

We are more connected today to each other than at any other time in history yet in many ways we are also more alienated than we’ve ever been from one another.

Much of today’s technology allows us to live under the cover of connections.

Connection and communication are two different things.

Much of today’s communication happens in a variety of ways. I’ve broken them into two categories: Old World and Brave New World:

BRAVE NEW WORLD

Text

Instant Messaging

Electronic mail

Social Media Exchange

Cell Phone (Mobile)

OLD WORLD

Snail Mail

Fax

Land Line Telephone

Face-To-Face Communication

TEXT

Beginning with the brave new world’s newest technology advances, texting, or text messaging, or SMS (short message service) refers to the exchange of brief written messages between fixed-line phone or mobile phone and fixed or portable devices over a network.

It is very popular with the young and seems to be the preferred method of communicating for them. Including spaces, text messages traditionally can’t exceed 160 characters, and failure rates can be high.

Text messages are either included in the cell phone bill voice plan or are added as an extra cost. SMS messaging is used pervasively around the globe.

INSTANT MESSAGING

Related to texting, instant messaging is a form of real-time direct text-based communication between two or more people using personal computers or other devices, along with shared clients.

Online chat is a subset of instant messaging in that it is direct one-on-one chat or text-based group chat using tools such as instant messengers, Internet Relay Chat, talkers, and possibly MUDs. The word chat is defined as “informal conversation.”

ELECTRONIC MAIL

Electronic mail, commonly called email or e-mail, is a method of exchanging digital messages from an author to one or more recipients. Modern email operates across the Internet or other computer networks.

Email started in 1965 as a way for multiple users of a time-sharing mainframe computer to communicate. It began to spread as an accepted medium of exchange in the late 1980s and continued into the 1990s and became widely accepted in the late 90s.

Recipients understand just over half of all email correctly with tone and language choices being the main culprits in misunderstanding.

The number of emails sent per day (294 billion/in 2010) means more than 2.8 million emails sent every second and some 90 trillion emails sent per year.

Around 90% of these are spam and viruses.

Around 1.9 billion email users — about 26% (1 in 5) of the Earth’s population — send emails from genuine accounts.

Estimates say that about 25% of all email accounts (730 million) are business accounts.

SOCIAL MEDIA EXCHANGES

Social media exchanges use web-based and mobile technologies to turn communication into interactive dialogue.

User-generated content is the fuel that social media thrives on with the added opportunity for individuals to dialogue in positions of social authority. That authority carries the added dimension of the message as marketing vehicle.

Never before has the effective (and ineffective) marketing message been carried to so many by so few.

CELL PHONES

A cell phone (mobile) is an electronic device used to make mobile telephone calls across a wide geographic area vs. the limited range a fixed landline offers within a home or office. It can bridge networks around the world by connecting to a cellular network owned by a mobile network operator.

Mobile phones support a wide array of the services just mentioned with handy Internet access, gaming, business applications, and photo services making them today’s “smartphones.”

One of the ironies to mobile is that cell phones are used to text rather than call by many young people. They’ve also become this younger generation’s primary digital music players, schedule keepers, and morning alarm clocks.

Beginning in the 1940s and in the 20 years from 1990 to 2010 worldwide mobile phone subscriptions grew from 12.4 million to over 4.6 billion, penetrating developing economies and reaching the bottom of the economic pyramid.

“Can you hear me now?” was Verizon’s astute response to customers’ (mostly unspoken) consideration of network reliability.

To me, it’s still the #1 problem with cell phones, and it’s hard for me to believe the quality issues still exist in the technology.

How reliable is your cell phone for having the clean, clear, and uninterrupted exchange required for business communications?

FAX

In existence in various forms since the 19th Century, a fax (short for facsimile) is a document sent over a telephone line that faces increasing competition from Internet-based alternatives. In some countries, because law does not recognize electronic signatures on contracts while faxed contracts with copies of signatures are, fax machines enjoy continuing support in business.

LAND LINE TELEPHONE

A phone line that travels through a solid medium, either metal wire or optical fibre, as opposed to a mobile cellular line, where transmission is via radio waves.

Telephones allow two people to talk to each other.

They have long been long been considered indispensable to businesses, households, and governments.

FACE-TO-FACE COMMUNICATION (P2P)

People to People (P2P) remains, today, the most powerful human interaction. Electronic devices can never fully replace the intimacy and immediacy of people talking with, and connecting to, each other.

Next week we’re going to get into the meat and potatoes of this series on communication meant to help you enhance your communication and interpersonal skills. The different parts will:

• Explain the basic forms of communication in use today
• Appreciate the value in listening (active, paraphrasing) as a communication technique
• Help you understand the part feelings play in communication
• Focus on how business communication differs from personal communication
• Use both low and high technology appropriately
• Tailor your message to your audience

I know the different forms of communication above have a lot of links. I encourage you to visit and read them. Their understanding will be valuable in the different parts of this series.

(Series intro)

Build Social Capital to Succeed with Social Media

“The Whuffie Factor” is a book about using social networks to build your business. The concept of whuffie (rhymes with whoopee, but don’t confuse the two) refers to social capital built through connections among and between people in communities of shared interest. This creates a sort of “cultural currency” that an organization (or individual) can “spend” for its own benefit.

The Whuffie Factor is about marketing and sales but it does have some lessons for recruiting. The main one is that in order to succeed in making hires, recruiters must actively participate in social networks in — well — a social way. What most recruiters are accustomed to is using any media or channel to push ads.

The social media recruiting strategy of many employers can be described as one of getting as broad a network as possible (followers, connections, friends), getting to know major influencers, and getting write ups or posting jobs through those. That may well have worked in a Web 1.0 world, but it won’t do much in a Web 2.0 world, where people expect to have interactions with others — which is what social media is all about.

‘Tis Better to Give Than to Receive

Whuffie is about getting involved with a close-knit community, actively participating, and paying it forward. As an example, don’t just promote your company. Ask others about their companies. Participate in other’s online events and help them promote theirs. Don’t just ask them to attend yours. And help others get make connections that help them; don’t just ask for connections to people who might be interested in your jobs. Turn the bullhorn around: listen, don’t always be the one talking.

That builds up social capital and creates a currency that you can spend in pursuit of candidates. But you have to earn the currency before you can spend it. These principles are the same offline and online. Just how likely are you to help someone make connections who shows little interest in you and is only interested in using your network for their own benefit? But most people will help others they are close with and with whom they have regular interactions.

Talent Community or Marketing Database

Whuffie can be built up in talent communities, so long as they are real “communities.” Members interact with each other, share experiences and knowledge, and have a sense of belonging. But that takes time and deliberate design to ensure that there are meaningful common elements, good reasons for participating, and facilitators to make the interactions happen. This all takes time and effort and employers that can’t do so end up feeling frustrated with social media. A lot of so called talent communities are nothing more than a database of prospective candidates. They can be described as communities only if you believe that the phone book represents a community.

I signed up for one such community and the next thing that happened was I started getting emails telling me about every job that company had open, from the an entry-level administrative role all the way to a director-level position. Really makes you feel like you’re part of something special.

Some companies have decided that the returns do not justify the effort required for a talent community to be successful. The strategy of a major cruise line is only to post stories and articles on social media sites and direct candidates to their own website. That can be automated by a content management system. Given the volume of hires the company makes and the wide diversity (in jobs, locations, and languages), a true social media strategy is not practical. What they’re doing is using social media as a channel for broadcasting ads. There’s nothing social about that. It doesn’t build Whuffie.

Recruiters need to interact with a talent community to earn whuffie, which takes time and effort. There’s no way to automate that, though it can be outsourced. Some employers have established or hired offshore teams to interact with talent communities and create whuffie, much like gamers in multi-player games buy advanced levels from “factories” in China and other countries. That has to be less satisfying than doing it yourself (much like makin’ whoopee) but either way, you have to get it before you can spend it. It’s not a one-way street which is what makes it difficult for recruiters to build a reliable, repeatable process for getting hires through social media.

The central message of The Whuffie Factor is that your social reputation is your capital. It takes time to build a reputation but do it well and you can achieve a lot.

Just how hard is it to have the ATS send an auto-response at least acknowledging the application. (Answer: Not hard. No ATS? Set up an auto-response via your email program.)

I don’t hear from a lot of job seekers, but when I do, it is almost always about the application black hole.

No wonder then, that the seeker-centric startup StartWire introduced today an application update feature as the centerpiece of its first update since launching in January.

For more than 1,700 employers, applicants will be able to find out, at a minimum, whether or not they got the job. For some employers, those who have turned on the applicant self-service features of their ATS, StartWire will offer more detailed status updates.

“The one thing we will absolutely be able to get is that they didn’t get the job,” says Christian Forman, CEO and founder. “That should be some improvement.”

For sure it is. And it won’t hurt that StartWire flags the jobs where updates are provided. Two comparable jobs. One has the update icon. The other does not. To which do you apply first?

Gerry Crispin, who has been making the candidate experience a cause celebre for the industry, gave the StartWire application update kudos in a blog post today. He also cited some of the other StartWire v.2 features, such as how it enables users to create multiple communities for job search networking.

If you tinkered with the initial version, you might not even notice some of the updates. Forman kidded about the “peas and Jello” improvements to StartWire, a reference to how he used to hide peas in the dessert to get his kids to eat their vegetables.

In version 2, Forman and his partner Tim McKegney, both of them alums from AIRS, rejiggered the page configuration to bring jobs to forefront. The “Ask the Expert” feature is now tied directly to jobs, with suggestions on the kinds of questions an applicant might consider asking.

(Ask the Expert is a Q&A feature that gives users customized, individualized responses from professional recruiters.)

A less-subtle change is that users can create multiple networks, talking to individuals one-to-one without public status updates. Or, of course, they can choose to go the public route. But in all cases, only the friends and contacts job seekers designate get to participate.

Forman walked me through the changes last week, and as he did so, it was pretty clear how much thought and research he and McKegney put into the changes they made. Remarkable at least to me was the Forman had conversations (email or otherwise) with 300 or so users, asking them all sorts of questions about how they use StartWire and what they wanted out of it.

Networking is important, Forman agreed, so StartWire tells a user who in their network works at an employer they’re interested in. “They decide if they want to contact that person and how they want to make that contact,” said Forman. “That’s peas in the Jello.”

Monster and CareerBuilder have tried to address the issue of the applicant black hole and to increase the transparency into the whole application process.

Apply through them to one of their advertisers and you can at least learn your application was delivered. A few years back, Monster began offering an expanded “Apply History” that tracks an application’s status — when possible, of course. Applicants can also compare their qualifications to others who applied using a Monster resume.

CareerBuilder has an even more extensive service. hireINSIDER gives applicants a fair amount of information about the numbers and qualifications of other applicants.

Despite their efforts, here we are in 2011, still arguing over whether even acknowledging a resume is a good idea. It has taken a Presidential order for the government to do that. So it’s refreshing to see StartWire make an effort to snatch some light back from the black hole.

Except that it’s LinkedIn offering it. And it’s a step better than what Monster and CareerBuilder offer. And, more to the point, it’s another step in the LinkedIn transformation from a business-oriented social network to … something else, like a job board for the 21st century.

The LinkedIn people don’t necessarily agree with that. Francois Dufour, senior director of marketing, LinkedIn Hiring Solutions, wrote to tell me that “LinkedIn is a professional network.” It’s “a platform for helping professionals manage their careers.”

“Whether you’re looking to hire or be hired, LinkedIn is becoming top of mind for a lot of people,” Dufour says in his response to my email about what LinkedIn is becoming. “Yet the reason we continue to thrive is that we offer so much more than a job board.”

True enough. Being public, a profile is a marketing and brand-building tool. Participating in groups and building a network furthers those objectives, as well as gives participants a place to get help with professional problems.

Traditional job boards have their discussion groups, but nothing even remotely approaching what LinkedIn has. Yet with what we’ve been seeing from LinkedIn over the years,  the camel’s nose is getting further and further into the job board tent.

Recruiters began sifting through the profiles years ago. So adding LinkedIn Jobs in 2005 was, as Jeff Clavier described it a “natural extension.” Since then, the network has refined its candidate sourcing tools, improved the targeting of its jobs listings, added company profiles in what might fairly be described as a response to Facebook and, in the last two months, LinkedIn has added Jobs For You and Referral Engine (which ERE wrote about last month).

Along now comes Resume Builder. Technically still in the experimental stage and without a release date (though it is fully usable), it’s another natural extension of LinkedIn. From what Dufour says, LinkedIn agrees. “We want the LinkedIn profile to be the professional profile of record, whatever the context – personal and professional brand-building,” Dufour writes in his email.

He rightly points out that, “We are a leading source of quality candidates for corporations…” Indeed the public nature of most of the profiles provides a higher degree of confidence in their accuracy than do the private resumes of a job board. And because of the value the professional groups and contacts offer, the sheer number of participants — 85 million a month ago —  is well beyond what any of the job boards has.

So Resume Builder — did I mention how cool it is? — is a good thing, right?

Not necessarily, says Gerry Crispin. Partner in the recruitment consultancy CareerXroads, he told my colleague Amybeth Hale that LinkedIn could end up rebranding itself as “the new job board of the 21^st century.”

Should that happen, he told her, then professionals who want the business connections, but don’t want to be thought of as job-seeking, will go elsewhere.

“You want to find people who are actively engaged in work,” Crispin pointed out. “What you find out about them is that they’re looking to improve their capability on the job. It (makes) them great for recruiting. But if LinkedIn focuses solely on the recruiting aspect, it will drive those other people (non-actives) underground.”

There’s a thin line there that LinkedIn is walking. It’s adopting some of the best of what the job boards have to offer, and has so far done it successfully. But, as Crispin observes, it faces a risk if it becomes thought of primarily as a job-search site.

LinkedIn’s Resume Builder doesn’t tip that scale. The difference between resume builders on job boards and on LinkedIn are all about their reason for being. You use a resume builder on a job board for job hunting.

The LinkedIn tool is a convenience. It takes the profile you already have and turns into a resume.

It may be a subtle difference, but it is a difference that recognizes all of us (OK, most all of us) are passive one day, receptive another, and active the fourth Friday in a row that the boss drops a project on you that absolutely, positively, has to be done for the meeting on Monday.

CareerBuilder’s new Talent Network does it for you. It’s pretty much a turn-key service that takes your branding, your look and feel, your jobs, and creates a site, optimizes jobs, and provides a versatile link  that invites jobseekers to join your network and start getting personalized job posts. Recruiters get a searchable pool of candidates, and a way of keeping in touch with them, and with all those other candidates now languishing in your ATS.

If this sounds like something you could do for yourself, it is. And if you have already done all the heavy-lifting to make it happen, pat yourself on the back. But from my conversations with recruiters and vendors, doing it yourself  — from the planning to the ATS customization, to implementing it in a way that automates all the routine work — is  so much effort that making it happen is far down the priority list for most employers.

Which is one reason Hope Gurion, CareerBuilder’s chief development officer, says the new service can be a “game-changer” for many employers. “A talent network,” she explained during a quick demo of the new service, “helps you capture active and passive candidates from multiple sources.”

Here’s how: A potential candidate spots an interesting opportunity on your Facebook page. Or maybe she hears about it from a friend who forwards a post, or… You get the idea. If she’s not ready to apply just yet, she can join your talent network simply by clicking the button and answering a few (a very few) questions. (Gurion calls it “lightweight registration.”)

Your prospect can choose to upload a resume or not. Gurion says that during the beta testing no fewer than 60 percent of the registrants do. Even if your candidate doesn’t, CareerBuilder can use her name or email address to search its own resume database for a match, finding one 30-50 percent of the time.

Using the resume and learning her job interests by seeing what kinds of jobs she clicks into, CareerBuilder’s Talent Network now sends your newly enrolled prospect customized job opportunities.

Because so many millions of seekers already have resumes uploaded to CareerBuilder and are cookied, Gurion says that during the testing period something like 40 percent of the visitors to beta client’s Sunrise Senior Living site found job listings already personalized to them. To get the alerts and notifications, these visitors would still have to opt-in to the talent network. Many do.

What’s more, you can upload all the candidates in your ATS to the talent network, giving a second life to all those resumes you promised to “keep on file.”  You can search your talent network for candidates fitting certain particulars, creating a pool to which you can send customized emails.

The talent network service doesn’t replace a corporate career site. It works with it, though it appears the job listings could supplant that part. While jobs are personalized to the individual site visitor, they can still search the entire inventory. Plus, CareerBuilder automatically extracts some key elements adding them to the header, improving their positioning on search engines.

Gurion also pointed out the added value of the analytics. Besides the usual data on source of visitors, and the conversion rate for the talent network, the Talent Network has the ability to segment visitors by the types of jobs they seek, their geography, and some other relevant demographics. That’s useful information if, like Sunrise, you hire people for a variety of jobs in different parts of the country. Spotting an imbalance in your pipeline lets you make adjustments to your advertising and marketing program in time to avoid problems.

The service doesn’t come cheap. Figure on $100,000 to $150,000 in the first year for set-up, licensing and so on.

The company launched Fresh Contacts a month ago offering participants two months free access to the ZoomInfo database just for uploading their personal contacts. Upload one or one thousand contacts, it’s all the same – two months’ access to the 45 million contacts and 5 million company profiles ZoomInfo claims.

Without a doubt, it’s a shot over the bow of competitor Jigsaw, which built its leads business on an early faith in crowdsourcing.

But as you’ll see shortly, there could be more afoot here than a front-on challenge to a competitor.

Enlisting users to provide content is not unknown at ZoomInfo, where the subjects of its machine-created profiles have long been able to correct and update them by “claiming” them.

But this wholesale pitch to users is a first for the company that built a business by aggregating personal and corporate information. Spiders quarry nuggets from all over the visible Web, which are then assembled into profiles.

“The center of our success is technology, and it always will be,” CEO Sam Zales told me at the outset of a GotoMeeting presentation Tuesday. “The secret sauce is really how we connect the dots.”

Even as he was saying that, he was introducing the company’s three-legged stool, which, besides the spidered, processed, and packaged profile content, and the “claimed” profiles, now includes the user-uploaded contacts.

The Fresh Contacts program is one of those win-wins. ZoomInfo gets fresh and updated contacts for its database. Participants, many of whom are expected to be job hunters, get free access to the database, which can make the difference between a resume in an ATS and one that goes directly to a hiring manager.

The contacts themselves get to say yea or nay to being included in the database.

This third leg of the stool is no doubt giving Jigsaw some indigestion. Founded in 2003 on a faith in crowdsourcing, Jigsaw built a community of loyal players who earn points by uploading or correcting contacts. You can buy contacts or trade your points for them.

Like ZoomInfo, it has company data, crowdsourced and presented in wiki style.

Both companies have their limitations. Jigsaw’s contacts are pretty good. The carrot-and-stick reward system tends to keep them fairly accurate. But voluntary contributions of business-card info means the bigger the company, the better the data. Smaller companies, where there are fewer players in the Jigsaw system, are less well-represented and what info there is tends to be staler.

ZoomInfo spiders keep its data fresh, especially the business intelligence. The downside, though, is that machines aren’t very good at telling one John Doe from another. And then there’s the matter of individuals and companies who make an effort to hide addresses and direct dial contact info from the search engines and the “leads” companies.

What if, though, you could combine the self-correcting mechanism of a Jigsaw, with the machine updating of ZoomInfo? And what if somehow you could convince everyone they just had to maintain a personal profile, the way LinkedIn has?

Sam Zales

I ran that scenario past Zales as we were talking. There’s no doubt, he said, that users can mediate spidered content to improve its accuracy. They do that on Wikipedia very effectively. And spiders more quickly can keep a profile fresh and current.

But building a social network such as LinkedIn’s is not easy. That may be why Zales was emphatic in saying, “I want to be clear that we don’t want to be called a social network.”

LinkedIn, he told me, is a complimentary service to ZoomInfo. You can research companies and individuals on ZoomInfo, then go to LinkedIn to see if there is someone in your network who can help open a door to the company or the contact.

Still, something Master Burnett joked about at the Social Recruiting Summit is germane here. Burnett, who’s managing director of John Sullivan’s consulting firm, was poking fun at the digitally illiterate executives who run America’s companies when he said that their LinkedIn profiles are stuck at around 12 percent complete.

That struck a chord when I mentioned it to Zales. ZoomInfo’s spiders could build those profiles and keep them fresh, while the execs would only have to police them.

They can do that with their ZoomInfo profile now, but few do. After three years, not quite a million profiles have been “claimed” by their owners. LinkedIn hit 50 million profiles this year, all of them created by their owners.

See the potential? Zales does. I asked him if my scenario was behind his curve or ahead of it.  “You’re right there,” he said, somewhat ambiguously.

While ZoomInfo might not aspire to be a social networking site, there’s no reason it couldn’t partner with one.

If that’s the direction Zales is taking the company, he didn’t let on. In fact, the Fresh Contacts program, as it is currently structured, is all about growing the ZoomInfo contact database, rather than building a community. At the end of the two months of free access, users have to start paying if they want to continue. At $1,000 a year, the casual user and the job hunter will bow out.

But Zales is a savvy business executive with a background in marketing at American Express and B2B online sales. So he has not put an end date to the Fresh Contacts program and told me it could continue, perhaps with some changes.

Perhaps with something akin to a community?

I chose the word tribe because it is a good, short noun for the idea that “birds of a feather flock together.” And top managers can be a destination. They have their own posse and peeps who follow them wherever they work. I know: I work for one. But even the most incredible managers eventually run out of people to call when rounding up the usual suspects. This is where I come in. I sell the manager and the team. I look at the group that I am headhunting for and try to find some common denominators.

1. Get the existing team’s resumes. Use LinkedIn, resource managers, or go to their portal and search the bios. Look for common schools, themes, associations.
2. Ask the manager where he found them. Who is his best hire? How did he find them?
3. Take a look at the companies they worked for, and when. Is there a theme?

You figure out that Java developers in Europe like Twitter, W.O.W., Ruby games, and Stockholm. To get them to leave their company to come to yours, build your own tribe’s membership theme. To get a pitch, figure out what membership privileges are:

• Ask the people who work for your “chief” why they worked at three companies for him.
• Ask them what they like about the company.
• Ask them how it was different than the company they came from.

You can build a message from this, like “we still have Peet’s coffee! We still have Thirsty Thursdays! Conference Calls longer than 17 minutes are forbidden!”

That is the message. Not “Java Consultant — EMEA.”

• If they are doing the exact same thing, why would they leave one software company to come to another? To come back to a tribe like them.
• Examples of common denominators might be, “worked in start-ups,” “went to MIT,” “plays W.O.W.” or “brags about Platinum status.”

Here is a thumbnail of my tribe:

Bay Area Software Company. Managers who are Java experts. Peet’s Coffee. Thirsty Thursdays. “It’s-It” ice cream bars. People from Cal and Stanford.

I get that tribe. It’s the tribe of the Bay Area software engineers.

If you have ever been a worker bee or a headhunter in the Bay Area, which I have during several waves (1990, 1999, 2009), you know that there are companies with handbooks containing phrases like, ‘Managers must wear shoes. Beer Me Fridays are mandatory, and don’t get Folgers or you’re fired.” They stock Peet’s coffee; everyone is a Stanford and Cal grad; and now, It’s It (a Bay Area ice cream bar with a cult following) is in the breakroom. These people swarm to the new “it” company and they don’t stick around when Folgers makes its debut.

Call them and/or connect with them on Twitter, LinkedIn groups, user’s group meetings, industry associations, however, whenever. I may even ask an Internet sourcer to find some profiles to add to the pile. I look at my Rolodex. I put the whole lot of them into one big pile and I begin to air out my message that “we want you eventually and this is why.”

This is where the Tweetups come in. If I can get the manager/chief to ask the real qualifying questions that I mention above, it is not a stretch to get to the next piece. “If I find someone from Cal working at XYZ company, would you buy him a coffee in Stockholm?”

Or even better, “Tweet me before you go to Stockholm … and let’s find a place to meet … and if you have time, let’s send out a TweetUp to all of the Java developers in Stockholm who are following me on Twitter, and get them to meet you somewhere. We’ll Tweet that the first round of Guinness is on you at The Rusty Nail pub across the street from our client.”

That way I can put real live candidates who don’t have resumes in front of a real, live “chief” and without a lot of wasted time. Sounds expensive? Twenty five rounds of Guinness is a helluva lot cheaper than 35% of an annual package which the agencies are charging us, and you get to meet a real live person and do the puppy dog close.

For those of you with ADD, here is the upshot:

1. Analyze the tribe. Who are these people and what do they do and care about?
2. Evangelize the message of the tribe through your grapevine — Twitter, LinkedIn, your company’s career page, user group meetings — heck, anywhere you can.
3. Sell the manager on selling his job on the fly.
4. Always be closing the candidate on why your tribe kicks their tribe’s ass. Ask: “When they can come have a look see?”

There are going to be accountants and HR people who read this and say, “how does that fit into $10,000 cost per hire, and how do we know that this will work, and why do we have to do anything since everyone is unemployed and is dying to work here?”

But top-tier people are always taken out of companies. There are some things that just can’t be automated and outsourced and cost-optimized, such as building a A-team, building a tribe, and building loyalty.

Rethinking how we source is not easy. But the unrefined tools such as search engines, job boards, advertisements, and even referrals are slowly giving way to far more powerful social networks of candidates. These networks can be shaped for specific types of candidates and for specific skills and competencies. They can be the only source of candidates you have so that your focus can be on your brand and building awareness of your organization and the kinds of work you offer.

Does this sound a little pie-in-the-sky? Maybe given today’s level of understand and technology, it is a stretch to give up all other forms of sourcing, but I predict these networks will replace 90% of other sourcing techniques with in decade.

What Is a Social Network?

For those of us in recruiting, a social network may be better thought of as a pool of potential candidates or as a community of talent. This is not the same as a static database of candidates. It is an ever-changing, expanding network of people who have chosen to associate with one another virtually. I often make an analogy to a network being like a series of circles rippling out from a center. Those people at the center of the circles are your most valuable and most likely candidates. Each successive ring of candidates gets further from you, is less known, and therefore less valuable. LinkedIn denotes this by giving priority to those people you know and who know you and then giving lower priority to people who you know through others.

Why Create Your Own Social Network?

Most of us rely on the established networks for sourcing candidates. These include LinkedIn, Facebook, MySpace, and many others depending on your geography and specialty. These will always have some place in recruiting, but by creating your own network you can have much more impact and get better results.

The purpose of creating a social network is to bring the best people into your innermost circle. By building a relationship through frequent communication via whatever means make sense (telephone, email, Twitter, SMS, or IM), you get to know more about each other. Potential candidates can make decisions about whether they like you, the organization you represent, and the positions that are available. You get to screen candidates and select people who closely match your needs.

Creating the infrastructure for a social network can be demanding, but free ones such as Ning are available and provide some level of customization. Others are built from scratch or by using open source tools and modules. ERE.net’s community of users (you and me) is a good example of a social network of practitioners. We have common interests and any of us can find other recruiters who we might like to recruit or help to find a new position. This is an example of an open network, but it could just as easily be available only to people who answer some questions or pass through a filter of some sort qualifying them for membership.

With your own network, you can build in tests, require certain information, or in many ways decide if someone is the right person for your organization. By doing this you eliminate hundreds of unqualified people and reduce the time your recruiters spend screening out the unwanted.

A social network, or talent community, is always growing and changing. People can become a member of a talent community in several ways, but each requires them to learn more about the organization and provides the recruiter with more information about them. For example, if someone comes to the recruiting website and indicates an interest in a particular job, software can quickly assess a variety of things including aptitude for the job, interest, and skill level. People who answer questions in a certain way or who achieve certain scores can be referred to the most suitable positions, turned away completely, or forwarded directly to a recruiter for immediate followup. No one is asked to just “dump” their unevaluated resume into a hopper and wait for a follow up call — which usually never comes.

What Do Candidates Think?

Given these economic times, candidates are stressed and unhappy, as I have written in past articles. They are keen to find organizations that are responsive, friendly, and where they can showcase their own unique qualities. A social network allows this, and the candidates I speak with respond very positively to the immediate knowledge of how well they meet requirements. They are pleased to be invited to be part of a community they have an interest in and they are also glad to know right away that they are not a good fit and won’t be considered. No news is not good news to a candidate who is trying hard to refine his or her knowledge of different organizations and different positions, and who wants to maximize her time.

I am surprised that the hype about social networks revolves almost entirely around the public networks rather than on building your own. If you are in the planning stages for next year, set aside some of your budget to explore creating your own branded social network. You might be surprised at how well it works and at how it creates a far more efficient and candidate friendly environment than you probably have today.

“I never use data services,” I haughtily told the salesperson.

And then it happened. I palmed (pardon the expression) an iPhone. Sheepishly, I upgraded my plan. I am a convert — to unlimited everything! The iPhone makes handheld technology fun and accessible. (I still get a kick out of the level application. I fire it up to randomly to test the lopsidedness of tables. I also play mobile Scrabble. Hours of geeky fun!)

In addition to entertainment value, the iPhone also provides opportunities for recruiters to improve productivity. Joel Cheesman and Michael Marlatt have written extensively about the coming mobile revolution. Joel, who has launched a mobile recruiting marketing agency, outlines why recruiters should be paying attention to mobile technology in an excellent whitepaper.

Most of the recruiting/job-related iPhone applications were developed for jobseekers. Here are a few apps that will help recruiters save time, allow greater mobility, or improve communication with networks and contacts. You may very well have some favorites to add; please include them in the comments.

Tweetie ($2.99). Do you keep your network informed via Twitter? Tweetie makes communicating via Twitter easy and fast. Tweetie provides all of the functionality of the twitter.com website, such as saved searches, inline web browsing, and the ability to manage followers. In addition, Tweetie supports navigation between multiple Twitter accounts, easy retweeting, automatic URL shortening, and uploading Twitpic pictures. I find Tweetie easy to use when tweeting from conferences. There are other, free, Twitter-for-iPhone apps, such as Twitterific, but I find that the additional features of Tweetie make it worth the small investment.

SearchOnTheGo ($9.99). SOTG is the first iPhone app written especially for recruiters by recruiters! SOTG turns your keywords into a full-blown Boolean search string. SOTG automatically generates search strings for resume searches, blog searches, PDF and Excel file formats, and more. SOTG will also execute web profile searches and public LinkedIn profile searches. After executing the search on the iPhone, users can save the search, email the search, or review results real time. Pretty nifty, especially if you dislike writing Boolean strings. Currently, SOTG returns only Google results. I would love to see other search engines included in future versions.

LinkedIn (free). Can’t live without LinkedIn? Then make sure you download the iPhone companion. The mobile version provides basic LinkedIn functionality — search, status updates, invites and more — for recruiters on the go. When meeting someone in person, try linking in instantly, instead of exchanging business cards. I am especially impressed with the Address Book Integration, which uploads contact info to the iPhone in one click. Unfortunately, there is no ability to receive or manage LinkedIn Groups information.

AgileMobile ($9.99). It was not until I joined Yahoo! that I became a big fan of instant messaging. Used properly, IM can improve the speed and quality of communication. Phone calls and emails are best for initial outreach, but nothing beats IM for quick confirmations and clarifications. AgileMobile is an all-in-one instant messaging service for mobile phones. Agile allows instant chat-on-the-go with MSN, Yahoo!, AIM, ICQ, and GoogleTalk. This kind of agnostic service is great for recruiters, who can communicate with candidates or colleagues regardless of IM service provider. AgileMobile also enables voice chat and media sharing.

Interview Pro (1.99). Technically, Interview Pro is an application developed for jobseekers. And a pretty clever one at that. This app provides a list of “50 of the most common behavioral interview questions.” Each question is accompanied by an answer that helps candidates navigate the interviewer’s intent and expectations. The questions are divided into categories such as “Team Dynamics,” “Planning,” and “Success Factors.” The interview questions are not all “behavioral” and the app does not come with instructions for the interviewer (such as how and when to drill down to get complete answers). With a few modifications, however, an application like this could be very useful to recruiters and hiring managers. Imagine if your hiring managers were able to download a custom interview guide. Never fear: the makers of Search on the Go tell me that they are working on just such an app.

beamMe (free or $1.99 for subscription updates). Finally, I can feel comfortable leaving the house without business cards! beamMe allows users to exchange vCards by inputting an email address, mobile phone #, or @Twitter id. The recipient is directed to a secure website, where he or she can download a vCard (including a photo or logo, and links to URL or Twitter id). Genius! The only downside is the subscription scheme; so far the free version works well for me. I’m not sure I want to be billed $2/month to continue to receive product upgrades.

There you have it. The future is here!

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.

But the big questions for many are simple: What are social networks, what do they replace, and what makes them useful?

What Are Social Networks?
Very simply, social networks are Internet-based applications that allow you to expand and grow the number of people you know who have the skills, interests, or abilities that you are looking for. They also give you the opportunity to market your organizations to a targeted group of people.

For most of us the challenge is how to find enough of the right candidates to meet the needs we have and how to find people in markets and geographies that are new and strange. When your boss says that there are positions open in China, and you are in Minneapolis with only a local network, what do you do? This is where social networks can be magical.

Social networks as an idea are neither new nor unusual. We all have our own networks of candidates, friends, college mates, sports mates, relatives, and so forth. The only difference is that our networks are physical, and most likely interactions only occur face-to-face or over the telephone. We also often have very limited information about the people we meet everyday, and really aren’t certain if they could fit an open position we have or not. The Internet-based social networks provide a much broader ability to screen and communicate with potential candidates.

The social networks we all know best are LinkedIn and Facebook — both of which connect you to millions of potential candidates. They have been around for several years and through their own marketing and promotion have assembled a huge number of people. Other well-known social networks include MySpace, Bebo, Orkut, Hi5, Ning, and others. There are also many smaller networks, some more focused on a particular type of candidate or candidates of a certain age group, but still very valuable.

By offering the ability for you to connect to people through other people, you can build a global network of potential candidates. By using your own branding and marketing efforts, you can create a large and robust sub-network of people who know you and your organization and who you can communicate with as frequently as you wish. Some organizations use LinkedIn and Facebook to find people and then invite them to join a private social network that you may create by using a tool such as Ning, for example. By creating your own network, you can tailor the messages to your potential candidates and you can use the members to find more people.

What Do They Replace?
Instead of posting jobs to job boards, you can instead list your job on your career site and invite your network members to refer it to anyone they think is appropriate. If you have a large enough network, you may find enough candidates using only this method. But, for many recruiters you may still have to post to a job board or use some other outreach method to gather enough candidates. But, given a large enough network, it could replace job boards.

And, rather than hire people to do Internet search, you can simply ask your network members to refer someone who has the skills, abilities, or experience you need. The potential of a social network is huge and is only limited by how many people you have in the network. That is why many recruiting functions are taking budget dollars from traditional sourcing and investing them in marketing and promotion to build their social network.

What Are the Benefits of a Social Network?
Social networks also let you reach out to targeted groups of candidates to let them know about new opportunities or to just provide them with background information about your organization. By doing this on a regular basis, you can slowly inform candidates about many aspects of your business, the culture of your organization, and the kinds of opportunities you generally have. This helps candidates to self-select out of organizations they are not comfortable with, and prevents many bad hires. It also creates excitement in potential candidates who feel they are a good fit.

By using Candidate Relationship Management tools, you can build excitement and create a relationship with candidates. CRM allows you to:

• Send messages on birthdays or other special occasions
• Offer the opportunity to come to events and/or job fairs you might hold
• Send information about internships or special assignments
• Share facts and corporate news with them
• Comment on their background or ask for additional information

Social networks allow you to increase the level of trust that candidates have in you and your organization, especially if you offer regular communication through a blog or some other media. Some organizations create regular videocasts or podcast about their business, offer videos of the CEO or other leader, and provide potential candidates with a broad perspective on the organization, its leadership, strategy, and culture.

What Role Does Twitter Play, for Example?
Tools such as Twitter are really micro-blogs and allow you to send messages to a group of followers to build or maintain interest in your organization. Twitter also serves as a type of CRM tool by letting you send job listings or specific messages to those same people on a regular basis. But Twitter is just one of a growing number of applications that either help drive more people to a social network or that keep them interested in your organization or build a relationship with them over time.

As you can see, using social networking well is challenging and time-consuming. It requires you to develop a social media strategy, decide which of these many tools are best for your organization, learn about new technologies, and practice a more proactive type of recruiting.

At the ERE Expo in Florida, there will be several sessions and a panel devoted to how to better use social networking. If you are still uncertain about how to make social networking payoff for you, this would be the event to attend.

While at first it may seem overwhelming to embrace social networking, candidates are getting accustomed to being treated in this more personal way, and the results are a higher quality candidate. Social media will become the primary sourcing tool and will provide the best forum for communicating with prospective candidates.

!IT Jeans is giving away jeans that retail for around $65-$70 a pair to everyone who shows up with proof they’re unemployed and proof they tweeted or posted to Facebook about the event at Lime, a retro-60s restaurant and bar in San Francisco’s hip Castro district.

With the jeans carrying names like “Hottie,” “Industry,” “Dream Diva,” and “Studio,” don’t expect to see any resume-carrying, tie-wearing, business-suited, job-seeking mid-managers at this event. But it also doesn’t look to be just a group of 20- and 30-year-olds surprised to be out of work. Judging by the profiles on the MeetUp site that the Bay Area Job Seekers & Professionals Looking to Network group calls home, there’s a curious mix of talent coming to make contacts and learn how to get into consulting, which is the theme of the evnt.

According to the description, “This event will also focus around the theme of ‘Creating your Consulting Career,’ which simply put, means how to focus your job search efforts on consulting positions instead of permanent positions.”

One of the sponsors of the networking event, the MeetUp group is organized by Mark Thomas, CEO of the equally curious job site, WorkYourCareer. It’s a sort of job board that incorporates classic job postings with an interview auction. Participants apply for a job in the usual way, with one exception: neither application nor resume may carry contact information. If an employer shows interest, the job seeker is invited to bid for an interview. The top bid gets the pick of interview time, with other bidders winning slots until they’re filled.

And yes, the job seeker must pay; most credit cards are accepted.

Thomas, whom we couldn’t reach, also has MoneyBackJobs.com. Pointing back to WorkYourCareer, it seems to have faded with the recession. Its business concept, though, is similar to the many bounty programs that have been tried over the years. Job seekers who accept a job with an employer participating in the MoneyBackJobs program get paid between 4 and 10 percent after 30 days on the job. There are some hoops they have to go through, but the concept is fundamentally bounty.

Tonight’s event, however, is free and open to all job seeking members of the MeetUp group or co-sponsors Pinkslipmixers.com and Slipsquad.com, both of them national networking groups for the laid-off and unemployed. Recruiters from IKON, LOLApps, Jobspring Partners, and Magley & Associates are expected, says Slipsquad.

McCarty, sourcing manager at the infrastructure/construction company Parsons, is trying to address this recruiting challenge partly by spreading the good Parsons word through social media. McCarty, along with Yahoo’s Carmen Hudson and TMP’s Louis Vong, is speaking at a workshop put on in Los Angeles (where he’s apparently a rare non-car-owner) by SHRM’s staffing-management association. He was brought to Parsons partly to help infuse higher-tech tools into the company, where many employees are in their 50s.

To help craft their Web 2.0 strategies, McCarty says companies should ask themselves the following questions:

• What are the best Web 2.0 options to use?
• What is your goal? Is it branding? Is it sourcing? Is it conversion?
• Who is your target audience? Is it internal? Is it external? Is it both?
• How much content can you manage? In other words, you’ll get out of it what you put into it, but what time can you put in? Says McCarty: “You can create a really great front page, but if it’s not maintained, it’s not marketed, and if you don’t drive people there, it’s not going do you any good.”
• Are there other groups in your company that are currently leveraging Web 2.0 technology, that you can piggyback on? Can you share usage, tools, and techniques with these groups? Can you convince a non-HR entity to pay for costs?
• Do you have the ability to move or reconfigure budget to accommodate costs?

McCarty’s No. 1 source of candidates is still employee referrals. Social recruiting, he says, is merely a way to get more of them, and to get better ones (topics to be explored further in June).

He says that people (the general public, not HR/recruiting types) are just beginning to realize that “everything you publish is there, forever.” He has dropped family members from his Facebook “friends” collection because what they posted was inappropriate. “If you can’t control yourself, I now control you,” he says.

Things will get better for you when you get better.

Sage advice indeed, and now might be the best time to take heed.

When I assess candidates, this is one of the factors I examine — finding out how the person got better. Not surprisingly, the best people have this core trait in common, and in spades. They’re always getting better. All of them improved themselves and the activities they were directly responsible for. A good portion of these people went out of their way to improve things they weren’t directly responsible for, so you need to give these people an extra star.

A much smaller group went out of their way to improve not only themselves, but also the people they worked with, whether they were responsible for them or not. These were the true leaders of the bunch.

As you assess candidates in the future, look for the degree the person got better, which will help you more easily separate the best from the merely good.

Surprisingly, very few had the exact level of skills, academics, and experience requirements listed on the job description. While they all possessed enough of the requirements to do the work required, the mix was different than the “must haves” listed, and the level of experience in absolute terms was generally much less.

Offsetting this was something far more important — a track record of consistent high performance doing comparable work, often in different industries.

Just like top people in any field, recruiters needs to consistently change and improve, just to stay even. To get better, you need to change even faster.

With that said, here are some ideas on how to get massively better. With recruiting departments being cut 30%-70% on average, getting massively better represents a survival of the fittest mentality.

In my opinion, if you don’t want to get massively better, drop out of the industry and do something you want to get massively better at.

How to Get Massively Better

1. Become someone worth knowing. Recruiters need to be able to connect with lots of top-notch people on an ongoing basis. This is the best way to get referrals of great passive candidates. If you’re worth knowing, hiring managers and candidates will seek you out. They’ll refer the best people they know to you without asking. If you’re not worth knowing, you’ll only attract the attention of those desperate for the job you’re currently representing. This is a transactional relationship. Those who are worth knowing develop long-term relationships that span years, not just a few days. Here’s an article on how to become someone worth knowing.
2. Know the job. If you don’t know the job, the best you can do is screen on skills and experience. If you know the job, you can quickly become someone worth knowing. You’ll be able to counsel and advise your candidates and hiring managers alike. You’ll be more accurate in your assessments and you’ll be able to defend qualified candidates from those hiring managers who conduct superficial or narrow interviews.
3. Build a network of all-stars. If you’re placing similar type positions (e.g., developers, tax managers, ASIC engineers, pharma sales reps), most of your placements should come from referrals. To get these referrals, you’ll need to be considered an expert in your field. Part of this is cultivating relationship (not transactions) with every top person your best employees are connected with on LinkedIn. If you’re a third-party recruiter, build these relationships with the best people on your LinkedIn list. While they won’t give you great referrals right away, after a few months of professional nurturing and knowledge sharing, you’ll have a strong network to work once the req is approved.
4. Become partners with your best managers. Recruiters are at least 50% more productive when they have a peer relationship with their hiring manager clients instead of a subservient one. This recruiter/manager partnership is developed when recruiters have a strong understanding of real job needs, present a few highly qualified candidates in a timely manner, have strong assessment skills, and can influence the shape of the job and the person ultimately hired. You know you’ve arrived when your hiring managers see everyone you recommend without having to review their resumes.
5. Implement an early-bird sourcing strategy. During the first few days of a job search, the best active candidates contact their close confidantes, previous mentors, and a short network of influential people. In parallel, they Google for jobs by searching on the job title, the city, and the word “jobs.” The best of this group start interviewing within the first week. Time is now a competitive advantage, so being called first and being found first is the key to hiring the best as soon as they enter the market. Becoming an early-bird is an essential skill if you’re sourcing active candidates.
6. Become an expert in consumer marketing. The messaging (ad copy) is a critical aspect of implementing an early-bird sourcing strategy. Rather than benchmark other recruiting departments, benchmark the best consumer products companies. When you do, you’ll notice that their advertising is written to appeal to their target audience with a focus on the benefits of the product rather than the technical specifications. For recruiting, this means eliminating traditional job descriptions filled with requirements (comparable to the product specifications) and start describing what the person will do, learn, and become (the benefits). While there’s much more than this consumer marketing stuff, it won’t help much if you’re posting boring job descriptions.

These are just some ideas on how to get massively better, and it really doesn’t matter if you do these exact things. What does matter is that you start getting massively better at what you’re doing today. Once you get on the path of getting better — whether it’s more training, attending meetings, leading workshops, taking on more challenging assignments, or becoming more innovative — don’t stop. Getting continuously and massively better is the real goal here.

As Jim Rohn said, “Things will get better for you when you get better.”