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Sourcing Using Blogging Platforms
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One thing that is all too easy to do is to get into a sourcing rut. For example, going to the same wells of talent (i.e. Linkedin, Google, etc.) each time you have a sourcing chore, mining it for what its worth, and then feeling like you’ve done all you can do and basically…feeling stuck. Hey, it happens! This is the reason you want to always be on the lookout for new sources to exploit for your various recruiting needs. How? Glad you asked.
One thing I do is to keep up with news stories about social networks. Which social networks are growing? Which social network recently received additional funding? Which social network will potentially acquire another social network? Stuff like that. Why? The bigger a social network, the more likely you will find data about people and their jobs. To give you an idea of a good news article, check out the quote below from SocialBeat (a part of the VentureBeat website).
Tumblr, a social media network made up of millions of personal and business blogs, is seeing massive traffic growth, but is undergoing equally big growing pains.
Activity on the network of Tumblr blogs skyrocketed over the first half of the year and reached about 1.7 billion page views in the month of August. (Automattic’s WordPress.com, an older, more established blog platform, recently reported 2.1 billion monthly pageviews.) But Tumblr, which employs about 10 people, has been unable to provide service for hours at a time to its users, because of high traffic.
“It’s got humongous potential, and humongous potential to fail,” said JD Rucker, president of Hasai Media, a digital marketing firm that builds Tumblr blogs for corporate clients. “We know it can fail. It was down 10 hours straight in July. It goes down way too often. How are they going to turn a profit without pissing people off?”
Both WordPress and Posterous, another competing blog service, have experienced downtime, but not nearly at the rate or amount that Tumblr has, Rucker said.
So, when I read this article, the first thing I did was experiment on Tumblr and Posterous. What I wanted to know was:
Here are a few search strings I used and what I found (at least, at this writing).
Posterous
Tumblr
Hmm…. It looks like both sources could provide a few needles in a haystack. However, Tumblr definitely would have more needles to find. So while I thought they were interesting as a source for resumes, I was not blown away. I glanced back at the article again and focused a bit more on WordPress. Since they have been around longer, I was confident that I would be more impressed by them as a source for resumes and I was correct.
WordPress
This is good, very good in fact, but about to be MUCH better. Why? Microsoft announced that it was deleting its blogging platform – Spaces and directing everyone to WordPress. This is great news for Sourcers because Windows Spaces has 7 million plus bloggers. Hmm… how many of those 7 million blogs have resumes on them?
• site:spaces.live.com my.resume (16,700 results)
• site:profile.live.com project.manager (368 results)
• site:profile.live.com (845,000 results)
• site:profile.live.com occupation:programmer (2,330 results)
Hmm… although I did not find as many resumes as I would like, its nice to know that there were almost a million searchable profiles available. Wouldn’t you agree?
Happy Hunting!