It’s great you’ve found your way to The Fordyce Letter Network (have you added me as a friend yet?). Like you, many other recruiters are recognizing the importance of online social and business networking through sites like Fordyce Letter Network.
And many are also venturing beyond the “tip of the iceburg” sites like LinkedIn, Spoke, Plaxo, MySpace, and others for candidate sourcing and general networking purposes.
Here is a list of other social and business networking sites; my guess is that there could be more candidates for all of us somewhere in here. Try some and let me know of any luck that you have:
- 43 People: social meeting people online
- Asoboo: social networking with events/places
- Blogtronix: social business networking; blogging
- Bolt: video/photo/music sharing service
- BrightFuse: business networking operated by CareerBuilder
- Collective X: group calendar, discussions, email, sharing
- Couch Surfing: a worldwide network for making connections between travelers and the local communities they visit
- Dodgeball: social networking with mobile phones
- Doostang: social professional networking by invitation only
- Faves: build your own social network based on templates
- Favorville: social networking doing favors
- Hi5: Find friends in your hometown or other parts of the world; upload music, videos, photos
- HooversConnect: business, find the people you want to meet through the people you know
- iKarma: social business networking with recommendations
- Imeem: social network where millions of fans and artists discover new music, videos, and photos, and share their tastes with friends.
- Jambo: social networking
- Jyve: skype networking and tools
- Kaneva: social networking service
- Konnects: make connections: locally, internationally, in your industry
- Meetup: localized interest group meeting
- MyMapSpace: social networking site with maps
- Orkut: social networking
- RecruiterRockStar: talent generator and social network for candidates and recruiters
- ShoutCentral: social networking site; blogs, photos and fun
- TagWorld: social networking + blog + music + storage
- The Well: uninhibited, intelligent, and iconoclastic
- XING: business social networking; powers relationships for the world’s business professionals
- Ziki: social networking site
I want to thank Jeff Weidner of HTC Research (jeffweidnerlinkedin@gmail.com), who compiled and was willing to share this list. HTC is a premier provider of passive candidate research and staffing strategy implementation amd has been doing so for over 13 years.
To search most of these you can sign up and search from within the site, or go into a search engine and use the SITE technique. For example, you can use the string in Google:
site: www.xing.com java -groups -job (“united states” OR usa)
and get a listing of about 175 java developers from the USA. On this particular site there are also many international profiles.
Try some of these and see if you can’t get a candidate or two.