Most people coming out of schools “don’t really want to build bridges when they grow up,” says Andrew McCarty.
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:
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.