Aw, come on. Of course you’ve looked yourself up on the Internet. Almost half of all Internet users did in 2007. The latest survey puts the number at 59 percent.

And if you really, really haven’t then you may want to retake recruiting 101.

Just as companies no longer are masters of their own brand, neither are you. There are sites to rate teachers, cops, doctors, even parts of your anatomy. Then there are the pictures and comments well-meaning friends have posted about you.

Google yourself and you may find those bleery-eyed conference party photos of you rank higher than than does the whitepaper you authored. Or, you may discover you rank lower than the death notices of others with like names.

To help remedy that there’s PlaceYourName.com. It’s a personal marketing service that promises to help users “manage and control what is seen about them when their names are searched online.”

For $50 and a few minutes of your time you get a press release (which you write, they edit) sent to an online newsservice and PlaceYourName submits your name and some bio info and your photo to what it says are four “high ranking websites, blogs, and news portals, viewable in search engine results.”

For $100, you get double the distribution plus a vanity website of your own.

There’s nothing PlaceYourName will do that you can’t do yourself. But the truth is most people don’t. Sarah Welstead, a Toronto recruiting marketing professional, a few months ago wrote about the importance of building a personal brand. Yesterday, ERE offered a webinar on this topic: “Creating a Personal Brand: Increasing Your Online Presence.” Presented by Toby Nathan of RecruitaStar is the nuts and bolts of how you build a personal brand and it’s archived here.

There’s also a valuable personal branding blog started by Dan Schawbel, a guru of personal branding.

While a service like PlaceYourName.com can get you started — and you may want to consider it and other branding tools like Personavita or VisualCV if you lack the discipline — in order to sustain the effort, you need endurance, and something to offer.

It’s hard to argue against the statement that social networking (i.e., Facebook, Twitter, YouTube) is an extremely hot topic in business. But I have yet to find a single CFO or senior executive willing to fully fund a comprehensive social network recruiting strategy based merely on the fact that it’s a hot concept.

Even when budget is made available, most organizations need to develop measures to help direct spending into the right efforts that will provide them with the highest recruiting impact and ROI. There is no escaping it: making a compelling business case must become a priority for social network recruiting champions.

In this article, I’ll provide an outline of the four basic business case steps covering how to secure funding during these tight economic times.

Business Case Step #1: Identify the Potential Benefits of Social Network Recruiting

Provide targeted executives with a list of potential benefits and then simply have them select the ones that (if proven) would be compelling enough to positively influence their decision. Have them eliminate benefits that, whether true or not, wouldn’t influence their decision.

With that guidance in hand, design a process that focuses on proving only those benefits that were selected as highly compelling.

The following is a list of 20 potential benefits and business impacts that can result from effective social network recruiting. They are grouped based on their general level of impact on cynical executives:

Highly Compelling Benefits

• Hire quality — the program may result in hires who perform better on the job and have higher retention rates.
• Candidate quality — those who frequently use social networks may be the highly desirable early adopter; this source may identify higher-quality candidates who can then be presented to hiring managers (including those who are more technically savvy and more innovative). Note: even the simple act of listing the primary source (that generated the resume) on the top corner of every resume will, over time, educate hiring managers and eventually lead them to demand that recruiting shift their emphasis toward the sources that appear most frequently on top of the resumes that end up on a hiring manager’s short list.
• ROI — the dollar value of the program’s benefits may far exceed its cost, and the resulting ROI may be significantly higher than other recruiting programs.
• Vacancy days — because of the high usage rates and the short response times on some social network communications channels, revenue-generating, and key positions may be filled faster, resulting in fewer costly vacancy days in key positions.
• Higher offer acceptance rates — using social networks to attract and communicate with candidates may result in higher offer acceptance rates among finalists.
• Hidden candidates — it may identify qualified candidates who cannot be found or successfully messaged using other sources.

Often compelling benefits

• Employer brand — using social networks may increase your visibility and may significantly improve your “we get it” leading-edge employer brand image among targeted prospects (even if the image-building it doesn’t result in immediate applications).
• College impact — because of the high social network usage rates among college students, it may directly impact the number and the quality of college hire and entry-level candidates.
• Communications responsiveness — because there is less spam and in most cases you must be invited before you can send a message, using social networks to communicate may result in higher response rates and/or in more immediate responses when you send messages to prospects and candidates.
• Message impact — messages sent over social media channels may be perceived by the receiver as being more authentic or have a higher level of credibility and believability than traditional corporate mechanisms. The relatively low cost of sending messages over social networks may also allow your firm to increase the number of messages that it can afford to send. Together, these two factors may result in more effective messages that directly increase applications.
• Job visibility — using social networking sources may ensure that your job openings will be seen and read by a larger number of qualified candidates.
• Candidate diversity — it may provide your firm with a higher percentage of qualified diverse candidates in managerial and professional jobs.
• Global candidates — it may provide your firm with a high number of qualified candidates who reside outside of your headquarter’s country.
• Cross-fertilization — the methods, tools, and approaches that are developed using social networks for recruiting may be directly transferred to other business functions like marketing, customer service, product development, etc. So these functions may find that their social networking results will be directly and measurably improved as a result of the collaboration.

Occasionally compelling benefits

• Candidate volume — social networking sources may provide your firm with a high volume of qualified candidates.
• Lower dropout rates — you must build relationships with your “friends” in order to maintain them as part of your social network. Fortunately, social networks make it easy to build relationships quickly. Once built, it’s not surprising that this relationship may result in more applications, but it may also lower the candidate dropout rate throughout the hiring process.
• Competitive advantage — using social networks may provide your firm with a significant competitive advantage over other talent competitors. The net result may be that you can win more head-to-head battles with competitors over top talent.
• Benchmarking and learning — the time that your employees spend building relationships that may lead to recruiting successful candidates may also help gather benchmark information and improve employee learning.
• Increase sales — because using social networks directly improves your visibility and your firm’s “we get it” image, it may also influence the sales of your consumer products among those that equate product quality and being a desirable employer.
• Cost per hire — the recruiting-related transactional costs may be lower compared to other sources.

Business Case Step # 2: Identify And Counter Additional Resistance Issues

Merely convincing decision-makers that the program has significant benefits isn’t enough on its own to get funding. Unfortunately, almost all executives have some often-powerful preconceived issues that must be successfully countered. In the case of using social networks, these roadblocks almost always include issues related to:

• Employees “wasting” numerous work hours on social networks.
• Protecting the release of company information and secrets.
• Maintaining a single corporate message when you can’t control what your employees say on the Internet.
• Privacy-related issues.

At the very least, demonstrate to the COO, CFO, CIO, PR, and the corporate counsel that their potential concerns are overblown.

Start by showing that other benchmark firms that are allowing their employees and recruiters to use social networks are realizing benefits far greater than the potential costs. Next, present external research data that shows how employees use social networks for professional purposes. While studies that determine what percentage of social network traffic is professionally versus personally relevant are rare, informal studies among organizations piloting looser controls on social network activity found between 40%-65% of activity posted during work hours was professional in nature; the majority either requesting or sharing information from/with peers.

Additionally, show skeptical managers that you have developed a formal process for identifying, countering, and burying undesirable information on the Internet. Educate them that, in a connected world, they have already lost complete control of what is said about their firm, and that strategies that involve doing nothing are tantamount to giving up entirely.

Show the naysayers examples of what’s already out there. Show them how having numerous active employees on social network sites, talking positively, will directly counter the existing negative information and actually increase the number of positive messages that people can easily access.

Business Case Step # 3: Use Logical Arguments to Gain Agreement on Some of the Remaining Benefits

After narrowing the list of potential benefits to the most impactful ones, make every attempt to get executives to accept the likelihood of some of the benefits based exclusively on logical arguments. Whether you write a report or provide a PowerPoint presentation, minimize the number of benefits you have to prove with hard data.

With social network recruiting, executives might accept your professional judgment on benefits like its effectiveness on college recruiting; the value of cross-fertilization; the availability of global candidates; and the employer branding impacts.

Business Case Step # 4 – Prove the Remaining Benefits with Data

Out of the 20 possible benefits that you started with, you are likely to have to prove the actual impact of at least five of them with data. I will outline each of the five data collection methods in the remaining bullet points. Please note that the methods are listed from the least convincing to the most convincing data collection method.

Using existing data

• Provide benchmark data — in some cases, executives will agree that a program will likely provide the level of expected benefits based on external research data. The data might come from consulting firms or industry associations. However, the most convincing research data generally comes from either direct competitors or from firms that your executives admire. The goal is to convince executives that if, for example, using social networks at IBM reduced time to fill by 38%, a similar result could be expected at your firm.
• Look for existing internal efforts — on occasion, especially in large firms, you will find that some group, facility, or region has already tried your new approach without corporate approval or knowledge. In the case of social networks, you would attempt to identify and then use the results produced by any “rogue” group as an indication of the benefits or results that a company-wide effort might obtain. Because the data is internal, it is more likely to be accepted than external benchmarking data.

Limited data collection required

• Use your own employees as a baseline — assume you are trying to prove that social networks provide the capability of identifying “hidden candidates” who could be found in other sources. Start with a list of your own top performers in a particular job and then search traditional sources like job boards, attendees at professional conferences, and Google searchers to see what percentage can be located. You then do a search of their names on social network sites. By comparing the two results, you can find out whether your best employees who are “hidden” or not available on traditional sources can in fact be found on social network sites. You can use a similar approach to identify whether social networks contain more diverse candidates. You can use a third-party to see if messages to your own employees have a better response rate if they are sent via social network channels (compared to traditional voice or email).

Providing new data

• Run a small pilot sample — in order to gather performance data to prove that a program produces certain benefits or results, it’s sometimes necessary to run a small pilot project. Pilot projects are widely used in other business areas and they have a high rate of credibility. In the case of social networks, you could suddenly allow a single recruiter to begin using social network tools and you would then attempt to identify any improvement in their performance (comparing their baseline performance to their performance after using social networking tools). You can also run a pilot on a single job to see if the baseline performance on key metrics improves. If you have the resources, you can run a pilot in a complete business unit or facility and then compare the before and after results. Unfortunately running pilot projects may require some level of approval and it will cost some money (but much less than a full-scale rollout).
• Use a split sample — the most convincing form of proof that doesn’t require a companywide implementation is to use a split sample. It’s the same approach that is used by drug companies to convince regulators that their product is effective. For example, say you wanted to prove that social network recruiting produced higher-performing hires than traditional recruiting methods. You could start by identifying a team of recruiters who recruited exclusively for a single job family. You would randomly separate this small team of recruiters into two groups. Nothing would change for the control group, while the second group from the team would be trained how to use social network recruiting tools. They would be required to use social network recruiting as a major segment of their recruiting for all of their jobs over a six-month period. The initial on-the-job performance of their new hires after three and six months would be compared to the performance of the new hires from the recruiters in the control group. If the performance of the social network recruiter group was significantly better, you could say with a high level of credibility that using social networks improves the quality of hire. Continuing to measure the performance differential over time would provide additional data to support the program’s ability to improve the quality of hire.

Final Thoughts

Managers of recruiting functions seem to struggle continuously to obtain more budget and resources.

Most, unfortunately, rely too heavily on building relationships in order to maintain or increase their funding levels. If you’re tired of the up-and-down funding cycle, maybe it’s time to master the science of building an effective business case. It’s sad that recruiting is still struggling to prove what we already intuitively know (i.e., that recruiting top talent into key jobs has a huge dollar impact).

We have one of the largest impacts and ROIs of any function in the corporation, but we fail miserably at presenting it in such a way that a CFO would find it believable.

But Sidewiki’s potential for deconstructing a brand is enormous. Unlike all the networking sites, Twitter posts, and job board forums where the disaffected go to vent their anger, Sidewiki makes it possible to post these comments directly to your site.

Just imagine the mischief a disgruntled job seeker or employee can wreak by posting their story directly to your site. Side by side with your video of happy employees talking about the fun and interesting work they do is a post — or multiple posts — from current and former workers denouncing your message as bogus.

If Sidewiki were to catch on and gain even a percentage of the users that Twitter has, the impact is easy enough to see.

Says Mark Hornung, senior vice president, strategy, at Bernard Hodes, “What that means for corporate employment sites is that they need to be monitored much more aggressively.”

But what you do about negative posts is much more difficult. As Sullivan observed in his article, “The new owners (of your brand) are a complicated mix of individuals who use a variety of communication channels to influence your brand without your knowledge, consent, or guidance.”

It should be needless to say that Sidewiki also offers significant benefits. Users can post helpful suggestions for others consulting, say, a how-to page of a site. Or offer additional places to look for information. Employers can even benefit from positive comments and helpful feedback.

So even though this article addresses the negative side of Sidewiki, there are plenty of pluses and lots of potential value for users in the application.

Before we go further, let’s talk about what Sidewiki is. It is a type of message posting system that attaches to web addresses and can be seen by users accessing the address who also have the Sidewiki app installed on their browser.

There’s nothing really new about Sidewiki. Similar tools — Purple Bunny, iComment for instance — have been around for years. None of them have gained broad enough acceptance to have a significant impact.

Google, however, has a big advantage over the other commenting tools. It’s packaging Sidewiki with its popular Google Toolbar that has been installed by millions of users. The Internet Explorer version alone from CNET has almost 4 million downloads.

“It’s difficult, if not impossible, to predict if Sidewiki will get traction or how large it will grow,” says Hornung, who leads Hodes’ employer branding practice.

“Practically speaking the growth of Sidewiki will be dampened by several factors,” he adds, citing the relative lack of anonymity to the postings, the need to download and install the toolbar, and the likelihood that corporate IT will fence off downloads of Google Toolbar.

Still, there are plenty of ways around the issues and with Google simplifying the installation of its toolbar, even novices can manage the feat.

“Sidewiki may become interesting only to those who have it, mostly the tech ‘in crowd’ who bother to download and use it,” says Hornung. “Employers should be concerned about it today, especially if they are in a technical field.

“The techie crowd will (by definition) be the early adopters and a negative buzz from Sidewiki —- especially if it appears that the employer is unaware of what is going on (kind of like goofing off in high school while the teacher was writing on the board) —- could be trouble.”

Already comments have begun to appear here and there on websites. Monster, for instance, has two comments posted on its main page. One is a pitch for another job board and the other is a political polemic that has almost nothing to do with Monster.

Google has thrown site owners a bene in that they get to post their own message, which will always appear at the top of the wiki, even as other posts slide down when more relevant posts rise up the list. In spot checking several job boards and corporate career sites, I didn’t find any employer posts. Hornung did, providing the Raytheon screenshot accompanying this article.

Curiously, though, he doesn’t recommend that employers make a peremptory post.

“I would take a ‘wait and see’ approach,” he counsels. “If there is no activity, why provoke it?…

“As some observers have pointed out, Sidewiki really creates a ‘bifurcated’ Web experience: those with and those without Sidewiki will see Web sites differently. To those who are unaware of, or don’t care about Sidewiki, why create a commotion when there isn’t any?”

He says his clients are just now beginning to get their arms around the notion that an old tool may be getting some new life breathed into it. “I think the hardest part is to grasp the concept that people may comment on your Web site whether you want them to or not. Some view it as online vandalism,” Hornung says.

While many corporate communications departments already subscribe to monitoring programs or otherwise track what Internet users say or write about the company, Hornung recommends that the HR department install Sidewiki to monitor the corporate career site. ” Sidewiki can go on individual pages such as benefits descriptions or diversity programs, and it is unlikely that (marketing or communications department monitors) will drill down too deeply on an HR site when they’re trying to keep up with the hobgoblins elsewhere.

“I believe HR must be more proactive in monitoring and policing it,” he says, especially since some posts may involve employment law issues that aren’t readily spotted by others. Hodes, among others, provides a brand monitoring service for employers and has added Sidewiki posts to its scrutiny.

And when a negative comment is spotted? “If you feel you have to respond, respect the opinion. Don’t be defensive,” warns Hornung, who likens online discourse to a conversation. “If something is really just venting, you can ignore it.

“The essential lesson is you have to be thick skinned. You have to accept it.”

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.

The 1,800 word article begins, “Email has had a good run as king of communications. But its reign is over.” It goes on to argue that alternatives like Twitter, social media, texting, and other communications forms are eating into email’s dominance.

The most telling point in the article comes from Jeff Teper, a Microsoft VP, who says that email was overused in the past. “Now, people can use the right tool for the right task,” he says.

To put it another way, when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

Recruiters, however, should be wary of too quickly abandoning email. No less an authority than Nielsen, the user analytics company, says social media usage appears to actually increase email usage. Hitwise, another analytics and business intelligence firm, says Twitter’s usage may have hit a wall. Though it can’t count the number of Tweets being sent, indicators such as accesses to Twitter profile pages and on-site searches suggest the site “Twitter appears to have hit a resistance point as of April 2009.”

The Nielsen review, a quick study to test the common belief that social media usage decreases email use, demonstrated the opposite. Blogged John Gibs, VP media analytics at Neilsen, “It actually appears that social media use makes people consume email more, not less, as we had originally assumed -– particularly for the highest social media users.”

That said, there are some generational differences in email usage. The Pew Internet and American Life Project found that teenagers have decreased their usage of email. Comparing usage in 2004 with that in 2008, the Pew survey discovered 73 percent of the teens using email at the end of last year versus 89 percent in 2004. One reason, of course, is the rise in texting during that period.

Contrast that with usage by Americans at the other end of the demographic scale. Says the report, “Fully 74 percent of Internet users age 64 and older send and receive email, making email the most popular online activity for this age group.”

Even so, the Pew report observes, “Instant messaging, social networking, and blogging have gained ground as communications tools, but email remains the most popular online activity.”

It is worth noting that while  social media usage, generically, continues to grow, it is no guarantee that individual sites will. A year ago MySpace.com had two-thirds of the U.S. social media traffic. Today, it has less than a third, while Facebook’s share of the traffic tripled from 19.9 percent to 58.6 percent.

Meanwhile, time spent on MySpace declined 12 percent. On Facebook, it rose 23 percent.

JIGSAW

The business intelligence and sourcing site has upgraded its community forum, giving it a cleaner look and implementing such to-be-expected features as tagging and contributor ratings. Tags are especially welcome, given that forum posts aren’t easily searched.

No one is going to mistake the new community platform as avant garde; think of it as functional, especially so if it adopts the name “The Corner,” which is beating out “Puzzleville” in the name voting.

The company also has an iPhone app that’s going into beta. Jigsaw is looking for iPhone users willing to provide feedback to the team in exchange for being the first to use the new app to “search, download and export contacts directly.”

CEO LONGEVITY

Challenger, Gray & Christmas say CEO turnover has slowed since the dark days of September 2008 when the outplacement firm recorded 140 CEO departures. Last month, the firm counted only 105 departures.

Since the beginning of the year, 939 CEOs have left their posts, a 17 percent decline from the 1,132 departures announced through September last year.

Health care CEOs have the biggest worries when it comes to job security; 151 have left their job so far this year, the most of any sector. Government/non-profits are next with 116 departures.

RISESMART

This Silicon Valley HR startup is rightfully boasting about the latest member of its board of advisers. Pat Pittard, the former chairman, president, and CEO of Heidrick & Struggles, signed on to RiseSmart’s board, saying, “I believe in what the company is doing, and I’m excited to be a part of it.”

RiseSmart has been getting noticed for its imaginative blending of traditional outplacement services with 21st century technology. The company stripped outplacement of the group coaching, counseling, and consulting to focus on the job getting. Services are delivered online and by phone, keeping overhead to a minimum.

Considering the cost and the focus of the program, it’s not surprising that Pittard called RiseSmart’s business model “disruptive.” He said it is “transforming how corporate outplacement works – leveraging technology, along with a laser-like focus on results, to squeeze out the inefficiencies of traditional outplacement services.”

Michael Specht wrote a great post, several months ago, with a simple and concise definition of social recruiting.

• Using social media tools as part of recruiting.
• Building a community of potential candidates.
• Engaging with candidates as people not numbers.

Can anyone do better than that? Do we have a universal definition for the act of social recruiting?

When you talk about social recruiting as a construct, I want to know how you define it. Do you leave off the word social and just use the broader term of recruiting? Is ’social recruiting’ something so unique that it still requires a separate definition, or is it ubiquitous enough in our industry that it’s embedded in your daily operations and recruiting strategy?

I’d love to know what you think. The comments are open…

Editor’s Note: This post was originally published on socialrecruitingsummit.com

Let’s talk about the very interesting phenomena of communicating with potential candidates in ways that have not been there before. For years, we have been discussing whether to call first or email first. Some gurus suggest that you first send a detailed email, then leave a phone message, and then send a short email mentioning that you had called. Fine, but here are your other options today:

• Join a group on LinkedIn where the person is a member and send a message (which is free, by the way)
• Invite them to join a group on LinkedIn dedicated to their technical skills or their industry
• Look the person up on Twitter and follow him/her
• Re-tweet or reply to their tweets
• Share an article with them using the “share” button available on Ning and on many blogs
• Invite them to an interesting event posted on LinkedIn, or Ning, or elsewhere

(Note that when you invite somebody to an event or share content, you do not need to worry about the person not wanting to hear from you. All those systems have their built-in means of managing the person’s subscriptions.)

The above methods would let you reach more people, especially passive candidates. Your direct email may land in their junk folder. Your call may interrupt their day. (I can definitely say that as a former software engineer.) However, following them on Twitter or sharing news about their industry is a gentle, non-invasive way to get in touch with them. It also gives them a chance to take a look at your profile and figure out a bit about you before they respond. So, if you venture out on a particular network, make sure that your profile on whatever network that is, is professional, filled out, has your picture, and reflects your own or your company background.

Further on, built-in tools and tools built on top of social networks allow us to interact with lists of potential candidates with a touch of a button. It goes without saying that we need to figure things out about those people first, and avoid spam. But there’s nothing wrong in, say, following a list of people on Twitter whose profiles are promising, or sharing interesting content with a list of people who work in a particular industry. The “share” buttons available in many places, such as Ning networks, allow you to share an article with a list of email addresses. The (slightly buggy) tool twitterator.org allows us to bulk-follow a number of people on Twitter. You shouldn’t overdo this, of course; plus, Twitter has its (very reasonable) limitations and wouldn’t let you go too far in this direction. But these tools do increase our productivity.

Today most recruiters are on LinkedIn, many are on Facebook, and about 25% are on Twitter. This is based on some statistics that I have seen online, and is also true about my sourcing webinar attendees. There are endless online discussions on which network is the best, and whether some, such as Twitter, are “a waste of time.” Well, for one thing, Twitter and LinkedIn can hardly be compared. The functionality, the pace of communicating, the length and the nature of relationships are all very different, so your expectations also need to be different. And then, it makes most sense to me to use both LinkedIn and Twitter in conjunction, plus use other networks as well. If you have a targeted list of candidates, you can interact with them in different places simultaneously. You can look up information about them; they may be more present in one online place than the other. Perhaps they have a blog and would welcome your comments. You can invite the same person to a group on LinkedIn and follow them on Twitter, and so on.

There are ways to find the same people across networks. It’s, of course, easier if the person has a unique name and distinct keywords, such as technology skills, in the profile. However, if you get hold of an email address or a Twitter ID, this can sometimes get you pretty far in the sourcing process. In the recent SourceCon challenge I used the site pipl.com to look up people based on their username across networks. Pipl.com also allows you to look up people based on an email address.

An amazing, not explored by many, part of this communication with prospects is that the person may have very little info in their profile on one site vs. another, but based on what you have learned about them you might try to connect on either or both. Searching for candidates on one network and contacting them on another expands our sourcing capabilities.

Successful recruiting using social media requires new personal qualities. To conquer the social media world, we need to be fearless and open-minded. We also need either to be somewhat technical or to have coworkers who are. It’s not terribly hard to navigate different sites, but working with someone who is used to browsing and searching on the web helps. Then, there’s less structure out there now, so if you are creative, this is a useful quality; compare the well-defined ways of using a job board with the open-ended interactions on social networks. We need to get used to questioning our assumptions as we go. Facebook does not work like LinkedIn, so expect to see something different there. Assumptions do not work at all if you are used to searching in one or two places. Search syntax is different on Google, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Monster; though all these sites support Boolean logic, you can’t reuse the same searches around the social media.

Measuring our success is tricky. Since we still want to hire the best candidates and there are still traditional interviews and offer negotiation processes, perhaps checking how your social media activities affect your submission, interviewing, and hiring statistics makes a lot of sense. That said, we need to be spending a few hours here and there checking out what others do and what new tools show up.

It’s pretty exciting to be here, right?

Besides spending like it was 1999, Jobster changed, enhanced, modified, enlarged, annexed — choose your favorite adjective — business models often enough that the enterprise resembled Mrs. Winchester’s house. All of this playing out quite publicly via leaks, corporate PR, and the CEO’s own (defunct) blog.

In fairness to the now departed Jason Goldberg, he was a visionary. When Jobster launched in 2004 it tapped into the then-unnamed and not even  recognized phenom we now all know as social recruiting. To briefly, and only inadequately, explain it, Jobster was a corporate recruiter’s tool to tap the connections of the company’s employees; a digital employee referral program.

Over the next three-plus years Goldberg made well-timed investments, buying a job search engine called WorkZoo, a job tagging service called Jobby, and the blog Recruiting.com. Jobster would eventually relaunch as a career networking site, loosely tying in the referral program of its youth and bits and pieces of the acquisitions. Much of the best parts, however, languished, suggesting the visionary lacked a vision.

Now, just about two years after Goldberg announced he would leave the company, Jobster has been reborn as a recruiting services provider with the name Recruiting.com, which it adopted in the spring. Jobster.com lives on as a classic job board where you can pay to post.

The product now that is the hope of the investors who have poured some $55 million into Recruiting.com nee Jobster is a sourcing, searching, and organizational tool. It’s an ATS without the jobs; candidates only.

The key job of Recruiting.com is to quickly search your talent database (Talent Bank), which can be imported from multiple sources, including an ATS. A recruiter drives — there’s no job matching here. The process relies on keyword combinations or Boolean search to produce relevancy ranked lists of candidates. These prospects can be organized into folders named as the user desires.

Pull up a prospect and you can see from where they were sourced and see if there’s any contact history. You can add a note yourself.

Now what does this sound like? Say it with me, “ATS.” Or, if you prefer, “talent acquisition system.”

Jeff Dixon, the VP of product who handled the demo, was insistent that Recruiting.com is not an ATS. For one, he says, there are no jobs in the system. And without a req and the candidates associated with it, there is no tracking.

In that sense, he’s quite right. He’s also right that many of the systems on the market do a poor job of sourcing. Some of course, do a fine job. The bigger, beefier, and costlier ones can search internal and external candidate databases, social networks, and the web at large, creating lists of prospects and handle the contact management. Just this week a new tool from Jobvite was released that can do the same.

Dixon, though, says Recruiting.com’s market research revealed that even users of these systems find them intimidating. That’s my word, not his. What he actually said was, “What you hear (from recruiters) is ‘My ATS is a necessary evil’.”

Recruiters either can’t source from their ATS (very unlikely), find it too difficult (much more likely), don’t know how (?), or simply don’t. The latter is my choice for the most probable explanation for a datapoint from Dixon that one of Recruiting.com’s test companies discovered that 40 percent of its hires sourced externally were already in the ATS.

Think of the waste, even if the percentage was half that.

Considering that many companies have decimated their recruiter ranks, Recruiting.com may have just caught the tide of another trend, not as glamorous as social recruiting, but eminently more marketable in this economy: efficiency.

“Our tool is much more of a how-do-we-make-the-lives-of-recruiters-easier approach,” Dixon said.

My demo didn’t cover all the ground, but compared to some ATS search demos I’ve seen, Recruiting.com is simple to use. Once, that is, you have built the Talent Bank index. Some ATS databases are easier to port to Recruiting.com than others. Inbound resumes still go through your ATS or can be processed by a Recruiting.com connection, which I didn’t have time to see.

Capturing and parsing data from LinkedIn I did see and it was a snap. Dixon told me it was equally easy for resumes found elsewhere on the web. As a pure sourcing tool, it’s not as versatile as some of what’s coming on the market now, but it does the job.

Oddly, Recruiting.com shies away from the social networks. Certainly the unpredictability of formats and the content, as well as the accessibility issues are all, undoubtedly, part of the reason. But Recruiting.com CEO Jeff Seely’s belief that social networking is not  recruiting’s “secret sauce,” as he put it, is a factor.

“I just don’t get it,” he candidly said during a conversation earlier this week. “I’m a reluctant participant in Facebook. I’m not on Twitter.” He believes that the social networks will never be fertile ground for recruiters.

So in the year after he assumed the CEO job, he decided the company’s best bet was focusing on products to improve business performance. With Recruiting.com, that’s what he has done. It’s a bet that needs $55 million just to cover.

You can see Recruiting.com for yourself if you are heading to Chicago next week for HR Tech. The company will officially unveil the new product at the show.

Google is a sourcing tool, but while it may get the job done, how long will it take to sift through the results? Jobvite Source is more of a blend of the best attributes of ZoomInfo and Broadlook with access to the social networks as well as the entire Web.

Last week, during a demo, Chief Product Officer Jamie Glenn did a search for an online marketing manager and came up with the resumes of, maybe, a couple hundred possibles from all the Web’s free sources. A similar search on Google turns up results in the hundreds of thousands.

The difference is Jobvite Source can compare the results to the job req, sifting out the job listings and other stuff, leaving you with resumes that match the requirements. It does the same as a well-structured query to your ATS or a resume database.

Before you say “Yeah, so,” consider that what Jobvite Source does for the job req, it can do for the candidates. Once you’ve compiled the initial candidate list, applied whatever additional filters you want — Glenn limited the search to candidates in the San Francisco Bay Area — and are satisfied, you can toggle over to a view of the candidate and whatever background is available online about them. The compilations are not as extensive as the summaries on ZoomInfo, but they are detailed enough to let you decide whether to look more closely.

Once you’ve narrowed your candidate list, you can import them into your ATS or create a campaign right in Jobvite Source. Either way, you send them a Jobvite, inviting them to apply and letting them know you’re interested. Likewise, any employee can use Jobvite Source to send a personal invitation to friends and connections in their social networks that the technology has matched to the job description.

The candidate contact is the very essence of Jobvite. Says Dan Finnigan, Jobvite CEO, “The Jobvite is the way to engage the candidate.”

Earlier this year, Jobvite introduced an application allowing it to access the  LinkedIn and Facebook connections of a company’s willing employees. It searches out contacts who best fit the job requirements and suggests to whom a Jobvite ought to be sent. To use it, you had to take the whole Jobvite package. Jobvite Source is a standalone application that works with any ATS.

With so many companies moving toward integrated products, Finnigan explained that Jobvite choose to make Source available as a separate product in order to reach that part of the market that already has an ATS and doesn’t have the money or the inclination to switch.

Companies, Finnigan says, have been “obliterating their recruiting departments.” But they still need to fill jobs. He believes that recruiters are moving away from the for-fee resume databases to search for candidates elsewhere. “The world has changed to the open Web,” he says, mentioning all the networks and personal blogs and sites that have cropped up in the last five years. “What we think recruiters need is a way to integrate with all this stuff.”

Jobvite Source, with its automated searching and parsing and filtering, makes it possible for what remains of the recruiting staff — or an HR generalist, in the smaller shops — to source, rather than post and pray. It isn’t going to replace a sourcer like a Shally Steckerl, but there isn’t an employer who wouldn’t welcome a way to cut down on the average recruiter’s time spent looking for candidates.

With a starting price tag of $500 a seat, Jobvite Source can help the SMB market play on a leveler playing field with the bigger firms at a competitive price.

Entice Labs

Earlier this year, John Sumser described the company as a “game changer.” In June, Susan Burns, president of Talent Synchronicity, said the company’s TalentSeekr product is “a sleek and effective approach to targeted employment brand positioning.”

Now, TechCrunch has said of the company, “it still beats hiring a headhunter.” OK, so that’s not as scintillating an endorsement as either Sumser’s or Burns’, but then TechCrunch is a site for geeks, not recruiters. But you gotta figure that a product that wows both techies and recruiters is worth taking a look at.

So let’s start with the elevator description: TalentSeekr is a recruitment advertising program that creates interactive ads out of standard job postings, targets them by the criteria you specify, places them on sites in its ad network, then monitors the results, adding exposures here, reducing them there and deleting ads entirely from sites that provide too few or too poor results.

The ads can be of all types, including video, Flash, banners, and text ads, for example. Formats and placements are tested and refined in real time. Recruiters can monitor the performance of individual ad types and placements and make changes. But the automated adjustments are the real selling point. As candidates click in and are qualified, TalentSeekr learns what performs best, and provides more of the same. The longer the campaign, the better the performance and the lower the cost of each applicant.

This heuristic capability sets TalentSeekr apart from mere monitoring systems that provide lots of information but don’t act on it. With the potential of having an ad appear on hundreds, thousands, and even more websites, being able to make changes on the fly can save money on PPC postings and improve the quality of the candidates overall.

The other, and equally important capability, is the potential for capturing passive job seekers. Ads can be placed on all sorts of sites and places. Adidas managed to snare a candidate who saw an ad when checking their  Gmail.

Targeting can be contextual, behavioral, geographic, or by social media type or all of these. There’s a video on the TechCrunch site that says Entice Labs can target as broadly as a nation or as narrowly as an individual building.

On her Talent Synchronicity Burns describes the process:

“EnticeLabs begins by collecting information from the recruiter about a job or a job category to develop a highly relevant positioning strategy. They’ll work with you to understand key markets (talent and geography) and create text, image, picture, video, or flash ads that will appeal to passive and active seekers.

Then, TalentSeekr automatically generates an engagement page that serves as a “storyboard” type concept to enhance the prospect’s experience with your company’s brand. Through the engagement page, TalentSeekr weaves together video, photos, referral capability, and links to your career site, job posting, community interface, or any other digital real estate to which you want to drive traffic that results in a valuable employment experience.”

In the interest of complete transparency I should point out that Burns and Sumser are members of the Entice Labs Expert Panel. But having seen some of what TalentSeekr can do, the descriptions are apt, if understated.

The heuristic nature of the system sets it apart from other advertising networks, most recently SnapTalent, which closed up shop in August.

TalentSeekr, as its VP of strategy and alliances, Joshua Westover, says, makes the most sense for continuous recruiting. Small companies with only the occasional need to advertise positions or those that care little for branding are not Entice Labs’ best prospects.

But, as Stephen Fogarty of adidas explains in a video Burns did with him and Westover, TalentSeekr can help fill even challenging positions, the kind that adidas used to turn over to headhunters. In her blog posting, Fogarty reports that in a test campaign to fill a difficult job, TalentSeekr produced several qualified candidates in two weeks.

Writes Burns, “The prospect adidas hired had seen the ad on their Gmail page and was so taken by the experience and highly relevant content they were blown away.”

Twitter has value for recruiting, no question. Tweeting jobs raises their visibility because search engines rank them higher, though this works in an indirect way. Twitter adds a “nofollow” attribute to links submitted by its users. The “nofollow” attribute advises Google, and a few other search engines, to ignore the link. Some of these follow the links but exclude them from their ranking calculations (Yahoo, Google); some ignore the links completely (MSN, Bing). The only known search engine that doesn’t comply with “nofollow” at all is Ask.com. What Twitter does is to affect positively a website’s Alexa rankings by sending visitors to those pages. Usage data is a sign of quality for Google and all the other search engines and raises their rankings in search results. But search engines don’t index Tweets in real-time today so there’s a lag. However, that can be compensated for by using the “bio” line on Twitter to include some text on your jobs, because that is being constantly indexed.

Pointless Babble

Broadcasting openings via Twitter can help fill jobs, as described here. But Twitter is a particularly weak tool when it comes to engaging with others or building community. First lets examine the available evidence. Analysis of Twitter usage patterns show that there’s not much in the way of two-way communication happening via Tweets. A study by Pear Analytics found that some 40% of Tweets qualify as “pointless babble” and about the same amount as “conversational updates.” It should be no surprise that while Tweets are great for broadcasting anything, they’re not a channel on which to have a serious conversation. Twitter is much too public a forum to engage with a community. Communities on Facebook and other sites are restricted: you have to be accepted as a friend to get in. Anybody can follow someone on Twitter or find their tweets. That’s not how communities form.

Further proof of this comes from a study at the Social Computing Lab at HP which found that Twitter users have a very, very small number of real friends compared to the number of followers they claim. A link between any two people does not necessarily imply any interaction between them. In the case of Twitter, most of the links between users are meaningless from an interaction point of view. Put that together with other data, such as that half are not active, and the only conclusion that can be drawn is that as a social networking tool Twitter has limited value.

Social Networking 101

Social networking works by engaging with people and communities. Communities share something — an idea, an interest, theme, or topic. That happens more on sites like Facebook, MySpace, or Cachinko, where access is limited and one has to request to join a community. HP’s Social Computing Lab has also found that inside close-knit communities, information flows faster and to more people because an item relevant to one person is more likely to be of interest to individuals in the same social circle than those outside of it. Engage with the right communities and you can amplify your message and expand your networking efforts exponentially. But the key word here is “engage” — having something to share that the community cares about — so that its members will interact and reciprocate. That is more likely on sites like Facebook than through Twitter. Just how many meaningful conversations does anyone have that they’d like the world to be able to learn about?

Using Twitter is not a waste of time, but its value is limited as a way to expand your social networking efforts. For the average recruiter interested in social networking, their time would be better spent engaging with communities on Facebook and other sites. Twitter can raise the visibility of your jobs, but it’s not the most powerful tool in the social media toolset.

The last time I wrote about this subject some people interpreted it to mean that I was critiquing everything to do with social networking. Far be it for me to do so — I like social networking and it has been a huge benefit to me professionally. I just returned from a six-month project in Switzerland that came about because of social networking.

Some readers pointed out that many find it hard to accept any kind of criticism that challenges their cherished beliefs. If you haven’t got something nice to say then don’t say anything. If you’re not with us you’re against us. Seems like narrow-mindedness isn’t limited to healthcare reform. That’s understandable — nobody wants to be told that the prophet they’ve been listening to doesn’t have the answer to their prayers and probably doesn’t know a whole lot more than them. One of the many lessons my parents taught me was that just because someone may not like what you say is no reason not to say it, unless you’re running for election. And I’m not.

The Facebook app comes from LinkUp, one of the second-tier job search engines. It’s owned by JobDig, which operates a traditional pay-to-post job board and an inexpensive on-demand ATS called JobDig Tracker.

If your company career site is one of the 22,000 indexed by LinkUp, then installing “Current Jobs at Our Company” will automatically update your company’s job listings on Facebook every day. The first five jobs are free. Any more than that and you’ll have to pay $39 a month.

In either case, LinkUp must be indexing your career site. Check LinkUp to see if that’s happening and if you don’t find them there, then you have to contact the company.

As much of a time saver as this app can be, if you don’t work your Facebook presence then it really won’t make a difference. Simply posting jobs to a friendless Facebook site is a waste.

JobDig CEO and president Toby Dayton makes that point himself in a blog posting that praises Hyatt Hotels for its community-building efforts. Now it happens that Hyatt has installed the Current Jobs at Our Company app and, presumably, is paying JobDig $39 a month for the more than five jobs capability.

But Dayton is right about the personal effort Hyatt is making. Take a look at the comments on the Wall and you can see there’s a thinking person behind the company’s comments. As he put it in his blog post, “there is a real dialogue going on between job seekers and people within Hyatt.”

Now, there are plenty of jobs apps available for Facebook. There are apps for users interested in security jobs, and apps from CareerBuilder for jobs of almost every type, and Indeed, which has a new mobile app we’ll get to in a moment, has an app to find jobs where your friends work. But as far as I can tell, LinkUp is the only app developed specifically for recruiters. And no, I’m not forgetting the Jobvite or Force.com apps. They are aimed at getting referrals by leveraging their employees’ Facebook relationships. Plus they cost a boatload.

Indeed, which never seems to sleep, has the #1 most popular free business app for the iPhone and iPod. And, to give credit, where credit is due, CareerBuilder is #5 on the list.

While everybody always wishes for some feature more than the product has, Indeed’s app is rated a bit higher than CareerBuilder’s. Of course, CB released its app 14 months ago, pioneering, if you will, mobile search in the U.S. Indeed released its iPhone search in March, including some features CareerBuilder’s reviewers wanted.

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.

Amazingly, that’s what Fellows and Associates has done. And just to make sure you get it, the firm issued a press release over the weekend discussing the video.

“The aim was to find an idea that was provocative in order to elicit a response and maximise the video’s potential for spreading virally whilst maintaining a balance of responsible advertising” says Fellows and Associates Managing Director, Pete Fellows.

I don’t know about the provocative part, but the viral part seems to have fallen flat. According to You Tube stats, the “Goose Attack At Wedding” video has not yet broken 1,000 views after 7 days online. Compare that to the branding video for Caterer.com that I wrote about in July. It got almost 38,000 views on its first day.

The press release notes that “Fellows and Associates are the first UK recruitment firm in the Intellectual Property sector to experiment with viral video advertising.” But issuing a formal press release isn’t quite what viral marketing is all about, even if it has gotten some online mileage.

On the other hand, when you’re launching a new business into a competitive market, any publicity is good publicity. We wrote about it, didn’t we?

It’s an innovative program which kills two Nestle birds with one stone: using social media (online user-generated videos) to market candy, and providing job experience that potential employees may not get elsewhere.

Nestle’s Daniel Jhung, who manages the Butterfinger brand, launched the program in June after he had been hearing and reading about how cynical young people were about jobs and employment — Gen Y’s feeling that the job market was rotten, and that many big-corporation jobs were pretty dreary anyhow. Plus, Jhung figured Nestle could stand to learn a thing or two about social media from the Gen Y-ers.

He did a pretty wide sweep for candidates. It included the HotJobs job board (Nestle and Yahoo are tight); colleges; casting-call agencies in New York and LA; film schools; the Improv chain of comedy clubs, and more. After getting about 450 applicants in three or four days, that was enough to shut down the search.

Nestle narrowed down the field to a top-10 list in each city, and had each produce a video. From there, it interviewed two per city, and made its final selection.

A.J. Mayers is a FUNtern in Los Angeles. He heard on the radio that Nestle was having an in-person event to talk about the opportunity. He couldn’t make that, but did follow-up when he saw a posting for the internship on Craigslist, which pointed to HotJobs.

The University of Texas-Austin grad got the internship right before he got brought on at MTV. Because the Butterfinger gig is flexible, and can be done during off hours, from home, or at the beach (where he has passed out candy bars), he opted to take both the internship and the MTV job. There’d be no need to commute from his West Hollywood home to Santa Monica for MTV and then back to Nestle’s building, which could’ve been hellacious. Plus, Mayers was looking for experience in the entertainment industry and wants to be a TV producer, and for Nestle, he gets to make videos as part of an online user-generated video contest. The contest is part of Nestle’s re-introduction of its “Nobody’s gonna lay a finger on my Butterfinger” tagline.

Mayers, whose Butterfinger stint ends at the end of August, is making a last video that will be a “very fun, dancing, High School Musical-esque production,” he says, “with the Butterfinger man dancing around. It’s funny, silly. It’s my way to go out with a bang.”

Other FUNterns are in Chicago, Atlanta, and New York. They’re doing different kinds of work revolving around promoting the candy bar and the video contest. The Chicago FUNtern is headed to BYU when the internship is over; the New York intern, who is also working for a wireless company, is also headed back to school. The Atlanta intern is doing the internship as part of some time off she’s taking to explore freelance projects.

Jhung didn’t say who might at some point be offered jobs from the group, but did mention that Nestle is considering one or two of them, pending among other things, the remaining videos they make. My guess is that AJ is one of them (if so, it’ll be interesting to see whether he picks MTV or Nestle; he mentioned to me that MTV is part of his TV-industry career path, and doesn’t sound eager to leave). Anyhow, below is one of his videos. Perhaps I should warn you that I’d give it a PG-13 rating.

First, the headlines:

• A publicist for business law firm Proskauer Rose LLP reminds us that Sept. 8th is the deadline for federal contractors to sign up and use E-Verify, if they want to continue being federal contractors;
• CareerBuilder lit a match to BrightFuse, the business community site it launched 18 months ago, issuing a press release officially announcing it. At the same time, CareerBuilder released a survey saying 45 percent of employers have used social networking sites to research job candidates.
• Australia’s leading high-salary job board — www.sixfigures.com.au — introduces a new look and expanded career content today for its dues paying, high earning members. It’s also putting more news and content on the outside of the login wall.

E-Verify

This is the electronic employment verification program the U.S. Department of Homeland Security operates. If you haven’t used it, chances are you eventually will, since the government is slowly expanding its mandatory use and has made its voluntary use very attractive to employers.

The program is free and (mostly) insulates employers from legal sanctions for hiring undocumented workers if they have verified I-9 information through E-Verify.

Come Sept. 8th, federal contractors will be required to use E-Verify if their contracts exceed $100,000. Their subs, if they earn more than $3,000, will also have to use E-Verify. President George Bush first ordered the program in 2008, but between presidential extensions and a lawsuit, the implementation deadline kept getting pushed until Sept. 8th, a date expected to actually stick this time.

BrightFuse

This is CareerBuilder’s version of Facebook for business. Instead of content a job seeker may come to regret, BrightFuse offers a place for your face in a pantsuit. It’s a professional profile that can be used in place of a standard resume. Recruiters will like it since the data is neatly structured, making it conveniently available for digital capture.

It clearly shows a LinkedIn influence, what with the section for contacts and another for recommendations and the ability to create and join interest groups. It also has taken some cues from Facebook, allowing user to add Twitter feeds and RSS feeds to blogs. There’s also a tab for a portfolio to showcase work and a way to export elements of a BrightFuse profile to Facebook. Though with the CareerBuilder survey showing just how fast employers have embraced online backgrounding for candidates, some job seekers may want to keep their BrightFuse profile separate.

SixFigures

I can’t tell you much about this relaunch, except to report what was in the press release I got the other day. Here’s what it says about the site that may already be live when you read this:

“Due to growing demand by high salary earners for more specific career and industry related content, Six Figures is meeting demand by catering for additional aspects of a professional’s career, with career development, directorships, education and industry news forming a part of its extended offering. “

According to the PR, SixFigures has about 25,000 members, a seemingly small number until you consider that the entire labor force in Australia is only 11.2 million. How many of them pay the AU$66 a year wasn’t disclosed.

Incidentally, since the press release came from Australia, which is on the other side of the International Date Line, it wasn’t clear until today whether the new site’s launch date was Aug. 21 in Australia or in the U.S. It’s today, using the North and South American time zones.

The just-completed study reaffirmed a finding first reported in January 2008 that visitors who arrive at a retailer’s site by clicking on a paid search ad were more likely to make a purchase than were those who got there by clicking on an organic search result. How much more likely? Sixty one percent more.

The highest conversion rate — 7.38 percent — came from those visitors who arrived at the site by typing in the address or using a bookmark. Those who arrived by clicking on a link in an email or another site, converted at a rate of 6.58 percent.

The Engine Ready study also found PPC (pay per click) search advertising — buying keywords that appear on search engine results pages — yields higher sales volumes than does a user clicking out of the organic (free) listings. In fact, buyers who found the site via PPC ads spent on average almost $8 more per purchase than those who came in by clicking a link from elsewhere, which was the next highest category.

I don’t want to overstate what these numbers might mean for recruiters, but there is a striking similarity between retailers seeking to attract quality (high spending) customers and employers searching for quality workers. Whether you buy that or not, the Engine Ready study is worth considering when debating where to put limited marketing dollars.

Microsoft, as Marvin Smith explained in Thursday’s ERE article “Sourcing Insights: SEO is Not Enough!”, is fully engaged in a program to elevate its job openings to the top of the first page on Google. That effort — Search Engine Optimization — has resulted, he reports, in 97 percent of his division’s jobs appearing on that first page. A success to be sure and one which has resulted in “a significant increase in traffic” to the jobs.

For recruiters without the means to provide a distinct landing page for each job as well as keyword-laden job descriptions, and to simultaneously finance a PPC campaign on the major search engines, the Engine Ready report offers some guidance about the most effective use of online recruitment marketing dollars.

With the vast majority of companies lacking an effective SEM strategy, according to Arbita’s Recruitment Genome Project, a strategy that at leasts tests the conclusions in the Engine Ready report is an improvement.

Look over the January 2008 report (the 2009 report has not yet been publicly posted). You’ll find that the current findings mirror those of 18 months ago. One curious finding of that earlier report is that the value of every visitor arriving from a referral source — this includes email — was higher than from any other source other than by direct access (typing in the address or using a bookmark).

Here, again, the parallels shouldn’t be taken too far, but the result does suggest that building a relationship with quality candidates can pay off.

Creating an online recruitment marketing strategy based on an e-retail study is not what I’m advocating. Instead, consider the implications of the report before deciding where to invest limited marketing dollars.

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.

Koda.us is a new networking site that describes itself as “the first platform dedicated to social recruiting, which brings the relationship-oriented process of social networking to job recruiting.” Think of KODA as Facebook without the embarrassing pictures and without the comments from friends you never want mom — or a recruiter — to see.

““KODA is more professional than Facebook but more personal than LinkedIn, letting both sides of the hiring equation get to know each other,” says Jeff Berger, co-founder (with Tony York) and CEO of KODA, in a press release issued by the site Monday.

The target is Gen Y, a group with academic chops but little business experience. For them a traditional resume isn’t going to land them a look, let alone a job, considering all the recession-fueled layoffs that are hitting the entry-level workforce hard. So KODA has structured, yet personal profiles that give you a feel for the person behind the words. There’s a place for those oh so old-school resumes, but the heart of the experience are the “Me in Three” bullet points and “A Deeper Look.” Together, these two categories, and a third for “Life Experiences,” offer a refreshing and candid self-description of the people on the site.

For instance, one of the KODA members got a master’s in landscape architecture after earning undergrad and graduate degrees in theater design and stagecraft and working for several years (not one of the Gen Y’ers) with opera and dance companies. Why is a puzzler, until you read about her decision in her “Life Experiences” section where she explains she wanted to help her adopted New Orleans rebuild after the hurricane.

These are the kinds of things a recruiter wants to know, but will never find out from a resume.

On the other side of the equation are the companies with jobs. 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. All, though, complete a profile of their own. The expectation is that these profiles will give job seekers a feel for the company and its culture. In time, perhaps they will.

KODA’s features are still on the raw side, not unexpected for a site in beta. The promise, however, is that once built-out, KODA will present its members with jobs that match their interests and background and help them connect with those companies. Right now, completing the “compatibility criteria” — such things as company size, type of job, attire, corporate environment, and so on — produces about the same result as a keyword search, but with fewer jobs.

KODA’s business development lead, Katie Del Guercio, says the site is not just for job seekers. It’s for “having an online professional identity,” she explains, going on to say that college freshmen and sophomores are encouraged to create a profile and use it to manage their professional persona as they grow themselves.

KODA isn’t the first site to launch with similar goals. Jobster, after completing one of its frequent transitions a couple years ago, offered both candidate and company profiles. The difference, though, was that Jobster made it possible for candidates to contact company employees to get an insider’s view that might — or might not — be more honest than what the recruiter’s said. But at least it was available.

KODA doesn’t connect individuals. As its FAQs say, “While KODA is inspired by social networking sites, it simply isn’t one.”