Many years ago I worked for an eBusiness incubator called Dom-James plc. They were part of a large Financial Services empire and tasked to create new products and services online that would serve the needs of a community. Really it was social media before that term even existed.
One of the ideas was a relocation portal to help people move around the world with the minimum of pain and the target customer was the HR professional and recruiter. As we formulated the product I got to know my customer well and whilst this is quite a generalisation, I surprisingly discovered a closed community in what is essentially a people focused, highly social job.
We found recruiters and HR professional slow to adopt new technologies and new ideas, and obsessed with privacy, accuracy and legislation. A view borne out by the lack of HR mashups and frankly when is the last time you saw a ground breaking commercial models in recruitment.
The brand we launched into this space took over 12 months to gain any traction, so you can imagine my surprise of seeing some facets of HR and recruitment firmly embracing Social Media and doing so in vibrant, new ways.
Job boards like Monster and Jobserve have been around for a while and it is now interesting to see those brands now see un-moderated blogs as essential way of attracting high calibre candidates.
Antony Mayfield says, “Social media quickly establishes a connection between you and your prospective employee; if you try to dupe them they will share their negative opinion and the ‘viral on steroids’ effect of social media allows that opinion to spread far and wide with immense speed. Treat candidates with respect, provide useful information and you can earn trust you and have them become ambassadors for company – that can be the most effective, lowest cost form of recruitment there is.”
Keith Busfield, Regional Manager at Career Management Consultants Limited, points out that content written after a drunken night out on a social web site can be used against you by current or prospective employers, and warns that people have to be more and more careful about their own “candidate brand”.
I for one have used LinkedIn, Facebook and more to check out potential employees of iCrossing.
The next big thing?
Most businesses have their own site with which they try to attract visitors, but many have begun to explore calling out into social networks like LinkedIn, and in the future I think brands, recruitment consultants and job boards will all have to participate actively, usefully contributing to their industry’s community.
As we pull out of recession and demand outstrips supply, greater consideration of the needs of the candidate will be essential e.g. greater use of technology to sift and manage candidate processing whilst keeping a personal touch. We will use technology to educate and even entertain candidates and most certainly to bring opportunities together in one place, make them more visible to candidates and perhaps even more personal. I for one expect to see hiring Waves ripple out through Google technology.
This change in recruitment thinking is what drew my attention to this press release today for a new recruitment focused social networking site – Bar Exchange. Think iTunes meets YouTube meets Facebook meets LinkedIn. One of the most visually appealing things I’ve seen in recruitment.
It’s the features like exposing employees of one company directly to prospective new hires, the visibility of acquired skills, the mash-up of YouTube training and job location via Google Maps and StreetView are most certainly out there and it is one of the few sites adopting interoperability technology that is part of Google Wave i.e. RSS, OpenSocial and OpenId. Absolutely bleeding edge and fascinating for this vertical.
There are similar style sites like Lawyrs.net for legal professionals which started life quite some time ago, 2007 in fact, but I did say HR folk take time to absorb new things and move so just maybe this kind of vertical social site could mean an end for traditional internet job boards or recruitment agencies?
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Nilhan on 
June 18th, 2009 at 4:26 pm
Social Media for recruitment is a must for any decent recruitment consultant, being able to engage with your candidates in multiple ways is imperative to being successful.
I have been in recruitment (sorry, apologies all round) for over 5 years now and have been an active user of LinkedIn and more recently Facebook as a recruitment tool, and have had success using it both as an recruitment consultant and as an in-house recruiter (I am still amazed to this day when I speak to recruitment consultants who have never even heard of LinkedIn)
However, as with all social media, it has to be done well. Having a LinkedIn profile with 6 people in your network, no information about what you do is no help to anyone.
Recruiters use traditional job boards because they work, that is where the candidates look for jobs, these new sites like Lawyrs.net are a great idea, but we need Joe Public to buy into the idea as well.
Maybe in a few years they will be the norm, but it isn’t down to recruiters or HR people being slow on the uptake, it’s beacuse the public are, they don’t work and recruiters won’t waste their time (and money) on something that is a drain not a benefit.
Anything that will help a recruiter fill a role, they will use it.