I’m very much an anti-hype, anti-bandwagon person.

I neither like to nor want to get caught in the undertow of the emotional rush associated with being excited about something that nearly everyone else seems to be excited about, where everyone celebrates the new and “cool factor” with little-to-no critical thought.

When that next bright and shiny object comes along, it’s all too easy to be blinded by it.

Rest assured I have not been blinded by #socialrecruiting. I’ve been using social media for a little while now (Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and blogging), purposefully remaining calm and collected on the subject - choosing to explore the true potential rather than get caught up in the hype. 

So whether you’re a social recruiting evangelist, hater or n00b (I’ve been all 3, not necessarily in that order), you’ll find some value in this post because I am going to strip away all of the hype surrounding social recruiting, demystify it, and cut straight to the heart of the real opportunities associated with using social media for sourcing and recruiting.

So What’s the Big Deal About Social Media and Recruiting?

Many people want to know - what exactly IS the big deal?

Well, from my perspective, the advent of social media affords sourcers and recruiters with easy and unprecented levels of access to more people than ever in the history of recruiting.

For free.

Using just the “Big 3” social networks, recruiters have the ability to find, communicate with, engage, and build relationships with well over 100,000,000 million in the U.S. alone.

That’s kind of a big deal.

Hasn’t Recruiting Always Been “Social?”

That’s always been my question! As if there ever was antisocial recruiting?

“Social recruiting” is simply the use of social media and social networking sites to find, engage, communicate and build relationships with potential candidates with the intent to network and recruit.

Yep, it’s that simple.

However, using social media to communicate and build relationships with potential candidates is no more “social” than using the phone to do the same thing, or actually doing it live and in person (that still happens, right?).

To demystify social recruiting, it is simply the use of specialized Internet-based technologies and websites to perform the same standard and basic recruiting practices that have been conducted over the phone and in person for decades - finding candidates, initiating contact and engaging candidates, and building relationships with candidates.

Social Recruiting: Finding vs. Attracting

Suppose you only use a social network such as LinkedIn to find potential candidates, and you use other means to initiate contact and engage them - isn’t that social recruiting?

Social recruiting purists would say no – that using social media only to identify candidates but not to communicate with them isn’t “social recruiting.”

I don’t think it’s so black-and-white an issue.

If I identify a potential candidate on Facebook or Twitter, cross reference them on LinkedIn to find out where they might currently work, use the phone to initiate contact with them, then invite them to connect with me on Twitter and LinkedIn as an additional way for me to stay in touch with them - is that not social recruiting?

I’ll let you decide, but I think the answer is obvious.

Isn’t Social Media Just a Big Waste of Time?

Can a recruiter waste a lot of time using social networking sites? Most definitely. But don’t be silly – social networks don’t waste time, people do.

Carol Rozewell, a VP/Distinguished Analyst at Gartner, explained brilliantly in her “Resisting Social Media is Futile” blog post that, “An employee wasting time on social media is a performance problem. Don’t blame it on social media. Productive employees are too busy with work to spend lots of time in social media having personal conversations. Instead, they use social media as a means to get their work done.”

Enough said.

Social Recruiting Doesn’t Work For Everyone

When it comes to social recruiting – one size does not fit all.

If you’re hiring Information Technology professionals, you can easily use social media for recruiting and get results.   That’s because there are many I.T. professionals using social media.

However, social recruiting won’t work so well for you if a large percentage of your target talent pool isn’t using social media. For example, Jerry Albright has observed that many groups of candidates seem nowhere to be found on Twitter. Jerry’s a recruiter, he’s social, he blogs, he’s on Twitter- and yet recruiting with Twitter still eludes him for one simple reason: the kinds of people he typically recruits for are scarce on Twitter.

When it comes to fishing – you go where the fish are.

When it comes to recruiting – you need to go where the people are. If the people you need to recruit aren’t on certain social networks, you obviously don’t need to go there to be a successful recruiter and to get results.

Social Recruiting at the Corporate Level

Companies have an unprecendented ability to engage millions of potential candidates where they live online – at little to no cost.

As I said before – when you’re recruiting, you go where the candidates are. When you can create a Facebook Fan Page to represent your corporate brand, socialize your hiring needs, communicate hiring events and post videos to attract talent for free on a site where there are over 130,000,000 monthly unique visitors from the U.S. alone (sorry, www.compete.com only shows U.S. data), why wouldn’t you?

When you can create a corporate Twitter profile for free to communicate in real time with 1,000’s of people who are interested in your company, why wouldn’t you? 

No-brainers.

However, companies that limit their “social recruiting” efforts largely to posting jobs on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn aren’t really performing social recruiting in my opinion. Job posting is job posting – there’s nothing “social” about it.  

Final Thoughts

Social media and social networks that enable and facilitate social interaction have without a doubt given recruiters unprecedented access to large populations of potential candidates where they live online, but social media is no more “social” than attending a user group/networking event or simply picking up the phone and speaking with a potential candidate.

Social media simply gives sourcers, recruiters, and employers one more way to find and interact with potential candidates - sites such as LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook are not replacements for in-person or telephonic interaction.

The basics of the “human element” of recruiting - effectively communicating and building relationships with candidates, understanding candidate motivators, consultative selling, etc. – none of these have been changed or altered by the emergence of social media.

Social media and social networks merely give recruiters a 3rd medium through which they can perform the same thing all good recruiters have been doing over the phone and in person for decades. Having said that, I do think that a recruiter or recruiting organization that effectively leverages all 3 mediums (in-person, over the phone, online) will outperform anyone who is only leveraging any 2 of the 3.

If you happen to be a social recruiting non-believer, please know that you aren’t qualified to say that social recruiting doesn’t work for you or your organization unless you’ve actually tried it in the first place, beyond posting jobs on Twitter and LinkedIn groups and creating a Facebook Fan Page.

Bottom line – you should use recruiting methods that work for you and produce the best results - not what the industry is buzzing about.

Are You a Sourcing Snob?

Ask yourself these questions:

• Is a candidate identified on LinkedIn intrinsically “better” than a candidate sourced from Monster?
• Is candidate sourced by cold calling inherently “better” than a candidate sourced from a job posting on Careerbuilder?
• Does it really matter where a great candidate comes from?

I continue to see well respected thought leaders in the staffing industry make claims that the quality of candidates on the job boards is low, and there seems to be no shortage of those in the recruiting and staffing industry who are happy to jump on that bandwagon. However, whenever I read or hear broad, sweeping statements claiming that an entire population of 50,000,000+ candidates is low quality just because they happen to be in an online resume database of a major job board - my response is a mix of shock and disappointment. 

Stereotyping is Poor Judgement

Broad statements such as ”the job boards have low quality candidates” reeks of stereotyping.  A stereotype is an oversimplified conception or opinion based on the assumption that there are attributes that members of the “other group” (in this case, job board candidates) have in common. Stereotypes are often formed by an Illusory correlation , a false perception of an association between two variables where in fact none exists.

You just can’t go around claiming all job board candidates are bad. That’s like saying everyone in New York is rude, or that everyone in California is a hippie. To stereotype all job board candidates as low quality is downright insulting to the many fantastic people who make the decision to post their resume to well known online resume databases. If they only knew that posting their resume to a job board was equivalent to moving to “the wrong side of the tracks.”

Sourcing Snobbery

Many sourcers and recruiters use the Internet to source and identify candidates all the time, yet there is never a mention of the intrinsic “quality” of candidates who happen to post their resume on their own websites. As if creating a website and posting your resume to it somehow makes you a better person than someone who either doesn’t know how do do that or simply doesn’t care to, instead opting to post their resume to a well known job board site.

And what about Social Media? The last time I checked – there is no “candidate quality filter” built in to LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, or any social network. ANYONE can decide to create a web page or a Social Media profile, from “A” players to “F” players.

So what’s with the stigma of being a “job board candidate?” I think it’s sourcing snobbery.

If you find a candidate by searching Facebook – that’s cool. Found your candidate by cold calling into a competitor? You’re awesome! If you found a candidate by searching Monster – you suck.

Employee referral?  Great candidate! Job board candidate? Ewww – gross!

As if  WHERE a candidate comes from actually matters! A great candidate is a great candidate. Employee referrals are wonderful, but I’ve got news for you – the best candidates do NOT always come from employee referrals. If they do in your organization, maybe your sourcers and recruiters aren’t very good at actually finding quality candidates on their own – referrals are “gimmes.” Think about it.

Statistical Facts

Job board resume databases - just like LinkedIn, Twitter, companies you directly source from, and every other source of candidates - are a large random sample  of the entire candidate population. Large random samples adhere to the statistical inevitability of a normal distribution (bell curve). You’ll have a small percentage of horrible candidates, a large percentage of average candidates, and a small percentage of top-notch talent. For those interested in learning more about the statistics of large random samples, check out the Central Limit Theorem (CLT) and the Law of Large Numbers.

That’s right – LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, and the Internet are no different than the job board resume databases in that they all adhere to the laws of statistics. Statistically, it can easily be argued that any given person that can be found on the Internet or in a social network is no more likely to be an “A” player than any given person that can be found on a job board resume database.

Why Do People Post Their Resume on Job Boards?

If you think that the only reason people post their resumes to online job board resume databases is because they are “desperate” and unemployed, you’re wrong. Many people see the job boards as an online marketplace, not unlike eBay.

Let’s use an analogy to drive this point home. If you’ve cleaned out your garage, basement, or attic and you’re looking to sell some stuff – you could have a yard sale, but yard sales limit your potential buyers to your neighbordhood and nearby areas. Why not dramatically increase the pool of potential buyers by putting the items on eBay?

There is nothing intrinsically wrong with candidates using job boards as one approach to helping them make the next step in their career. The idea that candidates should not leverage job boards in their efforts to find their next career opportunity is like thinking that you shouldn’t shop online, sell things on eBay, or use Match.com. This is the 21st century – by all means everyone should leverage all available Internet options in all endeavors!

Looking vs. Being Found

If a candidate relies solely on searching job postings online, they are being proactive in seeking employment, but they are 100% dependent upon the reactive response of the firms they reply to. And let’s be honest here – most companies aren’t very good at responding to candidates who apply to their job postings. Too many candidates experience the “black hole” effect when they respond to job postings (auto-responders don’t count here – they’re no better than auto-DM’s on Twitter).

This lack of response leads many candidates to seek to take more control over the process by opting to post their resume into a resume database so they can be actively found and pursued by potential employers – kind of like posting something on eBay so that people looking for that thing can find it and attempt to acquire it. Many candidates pursue both paths, thinking they’ll cover both angles.

You have to be aware that some people have not had to switch jobs in the past 5-10 years, and that most candidates are not professional job seekers. When the time comes for these folks to move on in their career - many seek the job boards simply in response to the effective and ubiquitous advertisements of the major job boards. Instead of going to the employment section of the local newspaper – going online is perceived as the “new” way of finding a job as compared to the last time they may have had a career transition.

Why not let 100’s of recruiters try and find you the best opportunity for free? Aside from the experience they may have with poor recruiters, this is not a bad value proposition. Also – this is essentially the same value proposition of posting a resume on the Internet or updating a LinkedIn profile with a complete work history.

But What About Networking?

Networking to find a job can definitely work and I would never discourage or disparage it. However, there is no guarantee that any given person’s network can provide the ideal job opportunity at the right time.  What’s the proabability? 

Limiting your job search efforts to only your “network” would be similar to looking to get married to someone, but only on the condition that it must be to someone that your friends know. As if your soulmate can’t be someone outside of your “network.” 

All Sourcers/Recruiters are NOT Created Equal

Perhaps some of the stigma attached to job board candidates is based in the belief that candidates in job board resume databases are “easy” to find. As if the challenge and drugery associated with sifting through large volumes of garbage results while performing Internet searches somehow will produce a higher quality candidate.  Also, there’s nothing inherently “easy” about quickly finding the best possible candidate among 20,000,000 others. All sourcers/recruiters are NOT created equal.

I love to challenge those who assume that just because 100 recruiters may have access to the same source (say Monster, for example) that they can all find the same candidates, as well as all of the best candidates available in the system.

Nothing could be farther from the truth. That’s no different than thinking that if 100 people go fishing in the Pacific Ocean that they will all catch the same fish and all of the available fish to be caught. Ridiculous!

Unlike many who disparage the job boards, I have actually used them to source candidates, and I’ve recruited and placed many “A+” candidates from the job boards that my clients and competitors also had access to. By “A+” I mean candidates that were better than those produced through client/employee referrals. Blasphemy? No – just the facts.

How is it that no one else found the same people I did? Did I get lucky? Only if you can get “lucky” consistenly. Just because many people have access to a given database, it is not safe to assume that everyone can find the same candidates, or find ALL of the qualified candidates, or find the BEST candidates in that database. Perhaps the people who are always claiming the job board resume databases have low quality candidates lack the proficiency to actually FIND the high quality candidates.

For a look into how 1 person can find great candidates that 100’s of other recruiters did not using the exact same job board database, read this post about a Google Network Performance Tester position that literally hundreds of agency and contract recruiters had been working for 4 months.

Conclusion

If part of the stigma of job board resumes is that everyone has access to them and thus they are “easy” to find – I am thoroughly confused. The last time I checked – literally EVERYONE has access to the Internet, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook. There is no competitive advantage in using any of these sources to find candidates because everyone has access. The same goes for cold calling – everyone has access to a phone, right?

However, as I have hopefully shown you, having access to a resource and being able to find the right people are two completely different things.

If posting a resume on Monster is an act of a deserate job seeker, then so is posting a resume on the Internet, updating a LinkedIn profile, and using Twitter to advertise that you’re looking for a new position.

More of the candidates of today and certainly most of the candidates of tomorrow are likely to have a blog, a Facebook page, a LinkedIn profile, use Twitter, AND post their resume to an online resume database (Monster, niche, or other such as VisualCV). 

The bottom line is that it really doesn’t matter where you find a great candidate.

Don’t be a sourcing snob.

I define E-sourcing as leveraging information systems for active talent identification – searching the Internet, social media, job board resume databases, and applicant tracking systems to find candidates. The proper use of technology in the sourcing and recruiting process should increase your efficiency, productivity, and effectiveness.  I’ve created the SlideShare presentation below to cover a number of different ways for you to maximize your ability to find more of the right people more quickly, to accelerate and enable your recruiting efforts.

Click on the presentation below to review:

• Boolean operators and common query modifiers
• Searching LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook
• X-Ray searching Social Media
• Search automation and aggregation
• Semantic search: manual and artificial intelligence matching solutions
• Search ROI – a comparison of the searchability and data depth of the Internet, Social Media, Resume Databases, and ATSs
• Talent Warehouse concepts

Non-Standard Descriptors and the Role They Play in Social Media

Article by Valerie Scarsellato, Sr. Sourcer at Intel Corporation
Co-written by Glen Cathey

Sourcing has always been a significant component in the recruiting lifecycle. However, in recent years, sourcing has taken a giant step into the forefront and has become recognized as the solid foundation at which successful recruiting rests upon in order to identify and secure top-level talent, no matter what industry you may be supporting.

One of the newest tools available for sourcers and recruiters to leverage to find candidates is Social Media (SM). These days, it seems as if nearly everyone from CEOs of Fortune 500 companies, to inventors in various fields, to the grandmother of your best friend has a Myspace or Facebook page or a LinkedIn or Twitter profile.

Twitter happens to be my personal preference in the SM realm. It also happens to be the fastest growing Social Media application at 1200% in the past year!

Although some people are still discovering and testing the waters of the Twitterverse, a diverse and large population (over 14M visitors in March – surpassing LinkedIn!) spanning nearly all industry segments has already fully jumped on to the real-time messaging bandwagon in order to share information or blurt out a piece of nonsense rolling around in their head.

Understand Social Media Users

With the significant levels of attention and traffic being driven by Social Media, it’s critical for sourcers and recruiters to understand how to best utilize SM for talent identification. Technology is ever-evolving and those of us in sourcing/recruiting/talent acquisition roles (even we have many titles!) are constantly having to play catch-up with those that create each new SM application.

After attending one of Glen’s focused and information-packed FREE webinars, I had an epiphany. It’s true - we need to build the right search strings in order to filter through and find the right people we are targeting. In order to do that effectively, I realized that we as sourcers need to understand the psychology of the people we’re searching for and be aware of how they think of and refer to themselves in order to return highly relevant results when searching Social Media.

Social Media Offers a Creative Outlet

Social Media is a relatively new outlet where professionals of any industry can be creative and a little looser with how they refer to themselves. There’s definitely a drive for people to look for cool and hip new ways to describe who they are and what they do. SM, which is informal, dynamic and somewhat voyeuristic, enables people to create alter-ego profiles for friends and peers to view and delight in.

On a standard resume or on a professional social networking site such as LinkedIn, most people will refer to themselves by their industry-standard titles such as Programmer, Developer, Engineer, Marketer, etc.  However, when it comes to Social Media, many people purposefully avoid “corporate” and resume-level descriptors and ”tag” themselves using more informal language that results in a more personalized identity, rather than conforming to industry-standard job titles. For example, the computer programmer at work becomes “geek” or “tech nerd” in his/her Twitter bio. While these may not be considered “professional” descriptors, they are important to note in order to be able to effectively target and search for talent on Myspace, Facebook and Twitter. This requires us to shift our way of thinking in the way we search for people.

Twitter and many other SM interfaces have advanced search options or third party applications that enable you to search the “bio” areas of a person’s profile. When searching these Social Media applications, you must be careful not to limit yourself to the “standard” search terms. You must be open to non-standard descriptors such as “geek,” “nerd”, “techie,” “evangelist,” “droid,” “drone,” “junkie,” and “enthusiast” to name a few. In my sourcing efforts I’ve come across all of these non-title descriptors multiple times in people’s bios.

Twitter Demographics

Don’t assume that all of huge Twitter growth (77% - 6M additional visitors in one month!) is coming from 18-24 year old segment – because it’s not. Most of the growth is coming from the 25-34 and 45-54 year old segments! Yes – 45-54 year olds CAN refer to themselves as tech geeks and spin doctors.

Examples of Non-Standard Descriptors – Twitter

Examples of Non-Standard Descriptors – Facebook

Non-Standard Location Descriptors

Sourcers and recruiters also need to think outside of the box when it comes to searching Social Media Applications for candidates in specific locations and challenge their traditional thinking towards standard naming conventions as it relates to locations. Many people with SM profiles are being quite creative when describing where they are from.

Searching profiles on Twitter and Facebook will yield you non-standard, yet recognizable results such as Silicon Valley, Central New York, North NJ, Suburbs of Boston, NoCal, and Southern CA. However, some people take it a step further and utilize popular slang terms - for example: City of Angels, Big Apple, Bay area and Chi Town. There are the even more creative “tweeps” that want to remain mysterious, their location may be “Universe,” “Everywhere,” or “Narnia.” Perhaps even more intriguing is that some people simply list their latitude and longitude via their iPhones.  

Examples of Non-Standard Location Descriptors

When I clicked on her URL, I discovered that she is a software engineer.

When I clicked on her URL, I discovered that she is a web designer.

Save Your Search Terms!

As you search for candidates using Social Media and uncover these non-standard descriptors, I recommend that you create a living document of search terms that are relevant to your hiring needs and profiles, taking special note of which ones may return the best results. While there is a lack of consistency in some of the non-standard descriptors, ”geek” and “nerd” seem to be the new way to describe different flavors of technologists. You will also find that a good majority of these people will have a link to their personal blog, website or Facebook, MySpace, or Linkedin page which may reveal a more detailed view of their professional focus, as can be seen in some of the results above.

Twitter Search Applications

Twitter is my Social Media application of choice, mainly because it provides real-time contact/updates and people are limited to easy-to-digest 140 character “Tweets” that you can follow in a variety of ways. Plus, you are able to direct message (DM) a fellow Tweeter – and in most cases, they will DM you back. When it comes to search Twitter for candidates, you have many options – each week it seems as if new applications pop up for Twitter. Below you will find a partial list of some applications that enable you to search for or keep up with people on Twitter.

Wefollow
Twitter search
Twitterfall
Tweetbeep 
Tweetscan
Twingly
Twellow
TweetGrid
TweetDeck 

Conclusion

If searching Social Media sites such as Twitter, Facebook, and MySpace is a part of your talent identification and acquisition strategy, you MUST think outside of the box when choosing your search terms, or else you run the risk of adding to the Hidden Talent Pool of candidates you can not find. 

If you search for a location of “Boston”, you simply cannot find people who only mention “beantown,” let alone “restaurant @ end of universe.” Similarly, if you’re searching for a title of “software engineer,” you can not find people who instead refer to themselves only as “tech geek.” 

You can’t find these people using standard search terms, but they are there – you just need to know HOW to find them. Think outside the box.

About the Author
Valerie Scarsellato is a Sr. Sourcer at Intel Corporation in Phoenix, AZ. You can find her on LinkedIn, and if you’re on Twitter and would like to “follow” her, she’s @Musicloverchick. Tweet her up and she’ll follow you back! She rocks!