You’re on LinkedIn – congratulations!

So, how big is your network?

Without going into a rant on quality vs. quantity (who says we can’t have BOTH?), let’s take a different angle on the size of your LinkedIn network…at your current company, where do you rank in terms of number of connections?

Do you know off the top of your head? Why not?

If you don’t know where you rank at your current company in terms of LinkedIn network connections, here’s how to find out:

How to Find Out Where You Rank In Your Current Company

Go to LinkedIn advanced search and enter in your company in the company field and select “current.”

Then, change the “sort by” from the default of “relevance” to “connections” and hit “search.”

Voila! Now you know where you stand in your company in terms of LinkedIn network size. When I perform that exercise, I can see I am currently the most connected person in my firm.

It’s actually kind of fun to check on other companies to see who the most connected person is:

For example – Deloitte. No surprise here.

Try it yourself – check out some companies, peers, and competitors and see who the top 10 most connected are. You’ll find it’s not alway who you would expect!

If someone claims to be a social recruiting “expert,” IMHO they had better be #1 in their company, or at the very least not behind anyone NOT in recruiting.

How Do YOU Rank?

So, I ask again – where do you rank in terms of number of connections with regard to other people in your organization?

Are you #1? If yes – nice work! It means you’ve taken an active role in building your LinkedIn network. Of course, it could also simply be that no one else in your organization leverages LinkedIn effectively.

If you’re NOT #1 in your company, why not, and who is?

Free LinkedIn Accounts vs. Premium LinkedIn Accounts

As a reader of my blog, I’m assuming you fit somewhere in the sourcing/recruiting/talent acquisition space – and having a decent sized network on LinkedIn allows you to run searches taking full advantage of LinkedIn’s search interface instead of having to resort to the imprecise science of X-Ray searching LinkedIn to view results of people outside of your network.

I say imprecise science because when you attempt to target current titles and/or companies via an X-Ray search of LinkedIn, you’re not actually finding all of the available results. Trust me – you’re not.

Of course, if you have a premium account with LinkedIn or you have access to LinkedIn Recruiter or LinkedIn Recruiter Professional Services,  you may be able to see more (even all) search results.

However, that still doesn’t answer the question as to why you don’t have the largest LinkedIn network of connections when compared to your peers in your current organization.

It’s Not a Contest

No – it’s not a contest to see who can build the biggest LinkedIn network, and there is no magic number of connections you need to have. 

However, LinkedIn isn’t Facebook – it’s primarily a professional networking site. You don’t have to be best friends with someone to include them in your network. In fact, many would argue that it’s beneficial to network with people on LinkedIn you don’t know personally because of the simple fact that it expands your network reach and view.

Is connecting with someone you don’t personally know really any different than going to a live, in-person networking event (or seminar, or conference, etc.) and receiving a list of the contact information of everyone who attended, whether you had a chance to mingle with them or not?

Is having the ability to easily reach out to and network with people you don’t know any less “social” than networking only with people you already know?

It could easily be argued that it’s anti-social to not connect with people you haven’t already met, spoken with, or exchanged online messages with.

Not connecting with someone unless you already “know” them just like having a rule that you won’t talk to someone over the phone unless you’ve already met them in person. Who is to judge what connection has to be made first (phone/in-person/email/LinkedIn)?

Final Thoughts

Do you have to be the most connected person in your company when it comes to LinkedIn? Of course not.

However, it’s a worthy excerise to examine why and how someone else in your company has a bigger network than you, especially if they aren’t in some kind of talent identification and acquisition role (doh!).

If you happen to benefit from an employer that affords you premium access to LinkedIn (e.g., LinkedIn Recruiter) – what happens if you leave your current employer and join a company that doesn’t have LinkedIn Recruiter?

For those who only have a free account on LinkedIn – having a large network can mean not having to run an X-Ray search 95% of the time, regardless of location or skillset searched for. Without a premium account, the question may ultimately be what percent of the LinkedIn database do you want to be able to “see” without having to resort to X-Ray searching?

Connecting with people on LinkedIn with relevant skills and experience (i.e., your target talent pool), whether you already ”know” them or not, has obvious benefits.

However, the benefits of connecting with people who don’t have relevant skills and experience (i.e., NOT your target talent pool) aren’t so obvious. In fact – some people would say it doesn’t make sense to connect with people who aren’t in your target talent pool.

Those people obviously don’t understand the nature of LinkedIn’s 3 degrees of separation – which works magic in many cases! Sometimes it takes connecting to the “wrong people” to get connected to the “right people.”

Contemplate.

Are you attending or thinking about attending SourceCon 2010 in San Diego in March?

I am going to be the keynote speaker for the event, and I will be presenting on Artificial Intelligence vs. Human Cognition when it comes to sourcing and matching resumes.

If you’re curious to know what kinds of things I’ll be addressing during the session, here is a sneak peek:

1. The intrinsic and often overlooked challenges associated with sourcing resumes
2. What artificially intelligent semantic search and match applications claim to do and how they actually work
3. The limits of artificial intelligence
4. What people can do that semantic search applications cannot
5. The 5 levels of semantic search
6. The 5 levels of secondary/e-sourcing
7. What I believe would be the ideal candidate sourcing/talent identification solution

If you’ve ever wondered about the fantastic claims that some of the semantic search application vendors on the market make as to how their solution can mimic a senior recruiter when finding candidates, then you will be very interested in hearing what I have to say about the reality of what they can do.

If you’re a sourcer and you’re concerned that your role/position might eventually be replaced by sourcing software, you will be encouraged by my analysis and supporting arguments that explain why the abilities of creative and investigative sourcers will always be in demand – tomorrow and 50 years from now.

I hope you will be able to attend SourceCon 2010 – I know I’m looking forward to it!

If you’re unable to attend, the good news is that the presentations will likely be streamed. Additionally, I plan on posting my expanded slide deck, including all talking points – so you won’t be stuck staring at some pretty pictures wondering what the heck I talked about.

There is certainly no shortage of articles written on how to use Twitter, let alone leveraging it for recruiting. 

If you want an ultra-mega-so-huge-you-may-get-lost-in-it Twitter guide check out Mashable’s. If you want something short and concise that will cut right to the heart of how to effectively leverage Twitter for recruiting, read on.

There are various elements of this post that will be of high value to Twitter recruiting n00bs, journeymen, and veterans alike. 

Why Twitter?

Recruiting has always been social – interactions have primarily taken place in person and over the phone. Social media simply enables a third way to communicate: online.

Twitter can be a big deal in recruiting because it enables and facilitates real-time conversations. Facebook does this as well, but the vast majority of people (non-recruiters) use Facebook for communicating  with their friends and family – not so much for professional networking. And while LinkedIn is certainly a social network, LinkedIn’s social functionality isn’t nearly as real-time (e.g., discussions, Q&A).

Essentially, Twitter can be used to do exactly the same thing that recruiters have been doing since the dawn of recruiting - because it enables and facilitates interactive conversations, which are the foundation of relationships.

What Twitter has over in-person and over the phone interaction is that it is less intrusive. Most people would not call or meet with the same potential candidate every day, every other day, or even every week (you would come across as a stalker or stage 5 clinger), but you could have an exchange on Twitter that often with a particular person and no one would think twice about it.

Have a Detailed Bio and a Picture

Having a descriptive bio that allows others to get a sense of who you are and what you do is critical. People search for words specifically in Twitter bios to find others to follow, and they also use bios to determine whether or not to follow you back after you’ve followed them.

Not having a picture is like showing up to a party with a bag over your head. It’s social media – don’t be anti-social. Enough said.

Find and Follow

To have conversations with potential candidates, you actually have to have your target talent pool following you. For recruiters who complain that ”Twitter’s not working for me,” or “I don’t get Twitter” – most of them either don’t have (m)any followers, and/or don’t have anyone in their target talent pool following them.

If you have no followers and you tweet a job opportunity – that’s like going to an empty room and talking about your hiring need – no one is there to hear it!

If you hire mechanical engineers and you don’t have any mechanical engineers following you on Twitter, don’t expect any results – you’re selling to the wrong people!

To get the right people following you, one thing you can do is find people in your target talent pool on Twitter, follow them, and at least some of them will follow you back.

How do you find people on Twitter? Many ways – but here are my top picks:

1. TweepSearch
2. PeopleBrowsr
3. JobShouts Social Search
4. X-Ray Search (e.g., site:twitter.com “bio * * software engineer” “location * chicago”) 

Finding people based on what they do for a living and ideally the general area they live is critical to sourcers and recruiters – and the best way to find this information is to search in bios. All of the above methods do this, while Twitter search does not. Of course, one needs to be particularly thoughtful and creative when searching social media sites, as many people don’t use cookie-cutter terminology that they would in resumes and such.

Remember, when you find and follow someone that doesn’t know you, you can’t expect them to follow you back. The first thing they will do is click on their notification that you followed them and check you out to determine whether or not to follow you back. Typically, no bio/no picture = no follow.

Even with a great bio and an inoffensive picture, they still might not follow you back, because they don’t know you.

The #1 Method for Cultivating a Relevant Following on Twitter

Whenever you speak with a potential candidate, either over the phone or in person, simply ask them if they are on Twitter. If they are, then suggest reciprocal following (you follow them, they follow you).  If they are not on Twitter, suggest that they look into it – and if/when they do, suggest reciprocal following.

Yes, it’s that simple.

People are MUCH more likely to follow you back on Twitter after they’ve interacted with you over the phone and/or in person and have a sense of who you are – you will get a higher conversion rate this way over simply searching for people and following them.

If you talk to 10 potential candidates per day, that would mean 50 opportunities every week to add the right people to your network on Twitter.

Imagine tweeting about a job opportunity for an accountant and you have 300+ accountants in your metro area following you… 

Contribute and be SOCIAL

If you only tweet twice a day and the only things you every tweet are job opportunities, don’t expect a high ROI with your non-social recruiting efforts. Just posting jobs on Twitter isn’t social recruiting.

Sure, you’re a recruiter, and you have job openings, but that should not be the only thing you tweet about. Far from it.

It’s okay to tweet about the weather, your morning commute, the owls you heard hooting in the woods behind your house, last night’s game or the movie you just saw – it’s called “small talk.” Small talk is essentially social lubricant – you’re likely already applying it to every phone conversation and interaction you’re having with your potential candidates, so it’s equally applicable to your online social interactions as well.  Of course, don’t overdo it with the small talk - you also need to provide some value/content that others can use and will find interesting. If all you do is drone on with irrelevant, random thoughts, you will drive away current and potential followers quickly.

Ulitmately, people like helping people they like, and people like people they feel that they know. Your followers can get a better sense of who you are as a person if you actually share something about yourself other than the positions you’re working on. So when you DO have an awesome position you’re trying to fill with the right person, when you tweet about it – if your followers feel they know you, they are MUCH more likely to help you out by either referring people to you or by retweeting your tweet.

Don’t Talk AT People, Talk TO Them

If you see someone tweet something interesting, respond to them. Ask questions of others. Engaging people in two-way conversations is social.

While you can certainly use Twitter to tweet out random thoughts and bits of information into the Twitterverse, you’re only broadcasting - you’re not engaging specific people, which is where the “rubber hits the road” when it comes to recruiting.

Twitter Lists are for Listening

Twitter lists are great, but remember that when you create or follow a list, the people on the list are not necessarily following you back, thus they may not actually “hear” anything you tweet about.

Twitter lists can, however, be useful for finding people in your target talent pool and of course, listening.

Here are my top 2 picks for searching for Lists

1. Listorious
2. X-Ray Searching (e.g., site:twitter.com inurl:engineers list -”This list doesn’t follow any users yet”)

There is at least one app for bulk-following people on Twitter – Twitterator. It can be buggy at times, but I have used it to successfully follow lists of recruiters. 

Final Thoughts

If you don’t have (m)any followers on Twitter who are members of your target talent pool, your Twitter recruiting ROI will likely be nil. Cultivate a targeted and relevant group of followers. 

If there are very few, if any people in your target talent pool using Twitter, Twitter will not be an effective method of talent identification and acquisition for you. Go where the people are.

Be social – be yourself, get to know others, and don’t be just another job opportunity spammer. Contribute, add value, and help others. What goes around comes around.

To that end, when you see a (or are followed by that) recruiter who obviously just started using Twitter, who has no (or a bad) bio, no picture, and/or their first 2 tweets are about job opportunities – please point them to this article to help them use Twitter more effectively for recruiting.

The other day I came across an insightful post on Fistful of Talent by Josh Letourneau in which he addresses the arms race that rages on in the talent acquisition universe – the never-ending attempt of people and companies to achieve some sort of technological advantage over the competition.

Josh would rather have a recruiter “with the “will to fight,” in other words – someone with a never-say-die-because-I-will-make-it-happen Recruiter/Sourcer. If I have that, then I can introduce technology and truly accelerate their success. But if it’s a lazy Recruiter who would rather let their Careers Site do the work, then all the technology in the world would prove wasteful in their hands.”

I could not agree more!

A driven, no-excuses sourcer/recruiter will always out-perform a lazy sourcer/recruiter – no matter how bleeding-edge their technology.

High Tech or Low Tech – Information is the Key

Although Dan Hilbert, a recruiting leader who’s unequivocally proven what technology can do for a Fortune 25 company’s recruiting efforts (read this excellent 5 part series by Dr. John Sullivan: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, and Part 5) has said that “When the war for talent is waged over the Internet, major corporations will be won and lost over staffing technology,” it certainly doesn’t take sophisticated sourcing applications, the best contact management system, a better branded careers site, or a “bleeding edge” social media strategy to be hugely successful in the war for talent (or the latest term du jour).

However, regardless of high-tech or low-tech (or no-tech!) sourcing and recruiting approach, I will say that today’s level of access to large volumes of information/data at the candidate and corporate level is a game changer.

The ability to filter through the noise and abstract, evaluate and understand relevant information (intel, to stay in Josh’s analogy) and extract value out of it in a timely manner confers an advantage over those who are unable to. The quality, quantity, and timeliness of intel (good, bad, late, none, etc.) can drastically affect the outcome of any staffing and recruiting effort, provided that the person, team, or organization has the capability of effectively leveraging it. 

There’s an unprecedented amount of candidate data out there, both public and private – and interestingly,  it doesn’t take advanced technology (or a great careers site or a social media strategy) to take full advantage of it.  Talent mining via basic Boolean logic and a sound search strategy can yield great results!

Passive vs. Active Sourcers/Recruiters 

Unfortunately, there are a good number of sourcers and recruiters who either knowingly or unknowingly take a primarily passive role in their company’s talent identification efforts. These people are content to let their employer’s brand ( job postings, etc.), employee referral program, social media presence, and/or cutting-edge sourcing applications do the vast majority of the work in identifying/attracting talent.

In many cases, these sourcers and recruiters simply wait until the right person stumbles into their grasp through one of the aforementioned means.  Whenever that fails, they either wait longer, assume that the candidates simply don’t exist, or perhaps turn over the position to a third party recruiter who will produce the right candidates for a fee, although most of the time the third party recruiter won’t actually do anything the corporate recruiter could not do themselves. In fact, most third party recruiters get excellent results leveraging sources of candidate information that most corporate recruiters have access to. 

How wrong is that?   

The best active sourcers and recruiters can and will find a way to get excellent results, regardless of their employer’s brand draw, referral program, social media strategy, job board access, or artificial intelligence/semantic matching engines.

The best sourcers and recruiters are results-oriented and never complain about or make excuses for how challenging a particular position is. Failure is simply not an option for these sourcers and recruiters, and they actually thrill in rising to meet a challenge that others avoid, and to succeed where others fail. These people are (I believe) ultimately competitive control freaks who would never be content to wait for the right candidate to come to them, nor would they willingly give up any position to a third party recruiter.

Active sourcers and recruiters are true hunters – they will go out and find the right candidates, whether the candidates woke up that morning looking for a job (only about 14% of all people) or woke up that morning thinking they have the best job on the planet.

These sourcers and recruiters hunt in the deep end of the candidate pool – specifically targeting and taking advantage of the fact that 66% of all people are either not looking or are passive candidates – this vast majority does not search for job openings on career sites, job boards, or vertical search engines, nor do they “see” targeted ads positioned in the places they frequent online. 

To active sourcers and recruiters, everyone is a candidate – they just don’t know it yet.

Some Questions For You

Are you a problem identifier or a solution identifier?

Do you complain about difficult positions and make excuses as to why you can’t find the right person, or do you put your head down, grit your teeth, and revel in the challenge of solving the difficult hiring challenge? 

Do you sit in the back seat and wait for your employer’s brand, referral program or social media presence bring candidates to you, or do you sit in the driver’s seat and take an active role in finding the best candidates, whether they are looking or not?

A military force using outdated gear and weapons but with abundant and highly accurate intel and the ability to to leverage it has a significant advantage over an opposing force with the latest weapons and gear with low quality or no intel at all.

Similarly, a team of recruiters with the “will to fight” but lacking a big-name employer brand, industry-leading referral program, award-winning social media strategy, and high-tech ATS/CRM has an advantage over lazy recruiters who may do little more than hide behind a strong employer brand, industry-recognized social media efforts, and matching applications, and those who don’t or simply can’t take advantage of the vast amount of human capital data available to them.

Human capital data is the sword of the 21st century sourcer/recruiter.

Is your sword displayed on the wall, or do you spend countless hours practicing with and using it daily in combat in the war for talent?

When I run recruiter training classes, I often ask for the trainees to bring me example positions they are having trouble working on to use for live sourcing training.

During one such class (a little over 2 years ago), I had a recruiter bring me an opening for a challenging position at Google that had been open for a while. He had been working this position for a couple of weeks and had failed to produce a single candidate that Google was interested in interviewing. 

Many Had Already Tried and Failed…

As I asked him for a little background on the position, I found out it had been open for 4 months. 

That’s almost always a bad sign to a recruiter, as it had no doubt been thoroughly beaten up by countless other recruiters/vendors to Google. However, he assured me this was not a “black hole” requirement and that Google would indeed interview and hire candidates.

Now, the position this recruiter was working on was a network performance test engineer, which poses some unique searching challenges because most of the Boolean search strings that recruiters will employ will result in many false positives – resumes of candidates that contain all of the search terms, but who are not primarily responsible for the performance testing of networks. A simple game of “buzzword bingo” would not work for this position.

This was also independently verified by Google, as they commented that most of the candidates they were receiving were not appropriately qualified – most were QA/test engineers who had performance tested software and network applications, but not networks and network hardware specifically.

Give Me Four Hours to Chop Down a Tree…

When I first accepted the challenge of helping this recruiter, my initial searches did pull many false positives. However, after about 20 minutes of manipulating search strings and observing the corresponding changes in the results, I came up with a handful of Boolean queries that resulted in fewer false positives and a larger percentage of resumes of people who were primarily responsible for the performance testing of networks.

Once I gave these searches to the recruiter and he put them to use, in 2 weeks he called to let me know Google had already hired one of his candidates he had found using the Boolean search strings, and he had an interview request for another.

Where Did He Find the Candidates No One Else Could Find?

So where do you think he found these candidates that no one else had been able to find and submit to Google for the network performance testing positions?

Cold calling? Referral recruiting? Blogs? User groups? LinkedIn? Twitter? Facebook?

Nope – he found them on (drumroll please)…………..Monster.

Yes – this recruiter was able to use a resume database that presumably quite a few (if not all) other vendors to Google (and likely Google’s contract recruiters as well) had access to and most likely used to try and find candidates for these positions for several months.

Interestingly enough, the candidates this recruiter was able to find were not new candidates who just posted their resume – their resumes were over 3 months old, which tells me that they had been in Monster’s resume database ever since Google released their network performance testing positions.

I specifically point this out because I love to continuously disprove the commonly held belief that if many recruiters have access to the same resume database that they will be able to find the same candidates, the best candidates, and all of the appropriately qualified candidates.

Holding onto that belief is as foolish as thinking that if 10 people go fishing in the same lake, that they will all catch the same fish, as well as the biggest fish in the lake.

Job Board Resume Databases Do Have High Quality Talent

This is also a good example of how, contrary to popular belief, you actually CAN find extremely good candidates (Google is notoriously elitist, which I respect) on the job boards. I continue to see well-respected recruiting and staffing thought leaders comment on how the job boards have mostly “mediocre” and declining levels of talent.

This may be subjectively true, but certainly not objectively true. Besides, when’s the last time they ran a search and hired someone from a job board? Nothing bothers me more than people talking about something they have little-to-no direct experience with. 

All Boolean Search Strings “Work”

I am 100% positive MANY recuriters searched Monster in an attempt to find candidates for the network performance testing positions at Google. But there’s a funny thing about Talent Mining – you’re only aware of the candidates you actually find, and conversely, you are not aware of the candidates you didn’t find.

However, that does not mean the candidates you want and need aren’t in the database you’re searching. It just means you weren’t capable of finding them. When most recruiters search any particular database, including their own ATS or LinkedIn, and don’t find the people they’re looking for, they assume the candidates don’t exist.

But they’re there. Trust me.

The Power of Talent Mining with Boolean Search Strings

Here’s the search string that produced one of the candidates who was hired at Google:

Test* and (qa or quality) and (perl or tcl*) and (cisco or rout*) and (lab* or case* or plan* or script*) and (ixia or smartbit* or “smart bit”) and (L2* or LACP or STP or RSTP or VRRP or UDLD) and protocol* and (bgp* or eigrp or rip or ospf or mpls)

Interestingly, most of the search terms in the string above were not in the job description or required skills.

So it took me about 20 minutes of experimenting and refining search strings to come up with that search, from which a recruiter was able to make a hire from less than 10 phone calls on a position that had been worked for 4 months by countless other recruiters who had access to the exact same database.

How’s that for ROI?

That’s the power of effective e-talent discovery.

After recently writing about moving beyond the hype of social media and recruiting, I took some time to reflect quite a bit on the topic, and focused a critical eye on exactly what “Social Recruiting” is.

While there is no shortage of what people think “Social Recruiting” is, quite frankly - I’m not satisfied with any of the definitions and explanations I’ve found – most are too surface level and one-dimensional, as well as inaccurate, in my opinion. It seems that a large portion of what many people seem to be happy to accept as “Social Recruiting” is really nothing more than traditional job posting and employer marketing and branding in a 2.0 environment.

However, I can definitely appreciate the challenge of trying to nail down an accurate and concise definition of “Social Recruiting” – it’s quite the slippery fish. So rather than trying to answer the question of “What is Social Recruiting?,” I’m going to tell you what I think Social Recruiting is NOT.

Social Recruiting is NOT Posting Jobs and Press Releases

Posting job openings on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn is not Social Recruiting – it’s simply posting jobs on social networking sites. Job posting is job posting – there’s nothing ”social” about it, regardless of where the jobs are posted.

On Tuesday, January 19th, 2010, I posed this question on Twitter: 

Here are some of the insightful responses I received:

• @CMcKenzie77 Where’s the “social” piece if a company only posts jd’s & news releases? #socialrecruiting -Its missing conversation..Rt?
• @IrishRecruiter If company only posts job and press releases on Twitter, it is NOT #socialrecruiting. It’s nothing…
• @mysensay No, that’s just a corporate website or job board dressed up as a Twitter account.
• @jeroenkneppers no way. Both posting jobs & press releases is 1.0 sending in a 2.0 environment. Social Media is about conversation
• @aglogan No not IMO. Personally I don’t think it’s any different to advertising on a job board. The tweets offer no value.
• @julesmontgo If your admin can do it, it’s not #socialrecruiting. No offense to the admins…
• @anniechae Where’s the human touch in job posting/press releases? I prefer connecting, relating & interacting with what’s b/t the ears
• @tombolt There can be active or passive recruiting, but only using twitter passively is missing the point of #socialrecruiting.
• @TimDineen it’d be best if corps forget “managing” accounts /strategy and just be human #socialrecruiting
• @jayveniard no it’s not social recruiting its social media marketing…corporate TA will say it’s recruiting
• @davecarhart Definitely not. Unfortunately that style accounts for the good majority of corp recruiting accounts

These talent acquisition professionals on Twitter all agree that just posting jobs and press releases on Twitter isn’t social recruiting. In fact, I did not receive a single response to the contrary.

I particularly liked @jayveniard’s assessment that posting jobs using Twitter is social media marketing. I agree. Posting open jobs anywhere is simply promoting and distributing an opportunity for employment. Can anyone make a solid argument that posting jobs is “recruiting,” regardless of where the jobs are posted?

Social Recruiting is NOT Sourcing Candidates on Social Networks

Searching LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter to find potential candidates isn’t Social Recruiting. Talent identification is only 1 step in the entire recruiting life cycle (albeit a critical one!). If anything, it’s “Social Sourcing.”

Regardless of what you would like to label it - there’s nothing social about identifying candidates. You don’t even need to be human to source candidates from social networking sites – there are apps that can do that. 

Social Recruiting is NOT Just Having a Facebook Fan Page

Have a corporate Facebook Fan Page? Awesome! Have a bunch of cool ”What it’s like to work at…” and community involvement videos, links to awards from major magazines, press releases, etc.? Great!

However – is any of that really recruiting? Isn’t that just marketing and branding? 

Yes, it’s a no-brainer to have job search functionality directly on your Facebook Fan Page, to post jobs opportunities, and link to your corporate website from your FBFP. But job search, job postings, and website links do not a ”Social Recruiting” strategy make.

Social Recruiting is NOT Just Being on Twitter

While the “Big 4″ firms are often used as leading examples of how to leverage social media for recruiting, how “social” is it to only follow 15 people on Twitter? How about following only 1 person? Where’s the engagement and the 2-way communication?

Wait – it gets better. Is it very social to only follow your own Twitter accounts? 

I won’t name names – you can do the research. You’ll be shocked.

So if you have a corporate Twitter account and you don’t follow (m)any people, you don’t really respond to anyone, and you’re only posting jobs and content from feeds – how “social” is that? 

That’s called talking and not listening.

Which is really interesting given that many Social Media “gurus” claim that one of the biggest opportunities presented by Social Media lies in listening. 

#thingsthatmakeyougohmm

Social Recruiting is NOT Going to Replace Job Boards

It’s currently popular to trash job boards, proclaim they are dying, and say that social media is delivering the coup de grâce, but job boards aren’t going anywhere.

You see – for all of their supposed flaws, job boards actually serve a purpose.

It’s simply convenient to go to a place and find a large collection of jobs to search through. Sure, you can use any search engine to look for jobs, but that actually doesn’t make much sense. Why use an Internet search engine to search for jobs? 

Try going to Google anyway and enter something like: Java Software Engineer Jobs. Check out the results. 

I see Indeed, Dice, Careerbuilder, Monster, WashingtonPost.com, and LinkedIn (which most people think is more job board that social networking site, btw).

While Indeed is technically different “under the hood” from traditional job boards because it’s a meta/vertical search engine for job listings – it’s still a website with a bunch of jobs.

Which is what job seekers – active, casual, and even some “passive” – want and need. It’s simply convenient to go to one or a few websites to search for and review jobs. What’s the alternative? Individually search 100’s to 1000’s of corporate websites? Label sites like Indeed and Simplyhired whatever you want, but you won’t change the purpose they serve.

If you want to buy a car, you go where cars are sold. If you want to scope out potential jobs, you go where the jobs are. Yes, I know job boards are the root of all evil – but they actually serve a purpose, even if they’re imperfect and fail to serve that purpose as well as they could.

There is nothing that social media can do to eliminate the desire and need to conveniently search jobs on websites that have the most employers and opportunities listed. When you go shopping, do you really want to go to a store that has a small inventory with a limited variety? Some people, maybe? Most people, no. 

Your Thoughts?

“Social Recruiting” is the hot phrase in talent acquisition these days, but make no mistake - social media and social networking sites aren’t intrinsically “social.”

It’s the people using social media and social networking sites to be social – to listen, engage, and interact in two-way conversations – that’s the ”social” part. Unless recruiters and companies are using social media to have two-way conversations with potential candidates (instead of a one-way, one-to-many shotgun blast approach), social media isn’t any more “social” than a job board or a phone on the hook. 

Now that I’ve drawn a line in the sand and delineated what Social Recruiting is NOT, I’d like to hear from you what you think Social Recruiting IS.

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.

Now that we are on our way into exploring the new year, I’ve seen some articles on what’s coming next for the recruiting industry this year, and even as far out as 10 years from now.

When I read one such article written by Kevin Wheeler, I was struck by his comment that although sourcing remains a topic he is interested in, he feels that “the need to conduct in-depth Internet searches and apply Boolean logic to searches is no longer relevant in the majority of cases.” 

I was prepared to write an article just in response to that thought, but as I sat down to review his post again on Sunday in preparation for my post, I noticed that Kelly Dingee had commented in defense of electronic talent identification.

In response, Kevin wrote “I think that intensive Internet searching, for most internal recruiters, is a sign of their failure to develop a community of potential candidates. If the position is a unique or one-of-a-kind search, they should probably use a third party recruiter. For volume and routine hiring there should be no need to use anything beyond a network of potential candidates whether proprietary or not. Building that community is what a recruiter’s job is all about – not running searches or becoming a computer nerd.”

Wow. Where do I begin?

Boolean Search is NOT Dead – Nor Will it Ever Die

We are well into the Information Age of recruiting - ”characterized by…the ability to have instant access to… (candidate) information that would have been difficult or impossible to find previously. The idea is linked to the concept of a Digital Age or Digital Revolution, and carries the ramifications of a shift from traditional industry that the Industrial Revolution brought through industrialization, to an economy based around the manipulation of information.”

When you need to find information, unless you’re using a single word or phrase (I literally shudder at the thought), there is no escaping Boolean logic. You either want something (AND), you want at least one thing in a list (OR), or you don’t want it (NOT).

The reason why Boolean logic will never die is that it doesn’t get any simpler when it comes to information retrieval. Yes, I said “simple.” We’re not talking SQL here -  we’re talking about 3 very basic operators. There is a reason why Boolean logic is the foundation of ALL modern digital electronics – it’s the simplest fundamental logic!

Of course, if you’re using Google, Bing, or LinkedIn, you don’t have to type AND, as every space is an implied AND, so perhaps many people are unaware that they are conducting simple Boolean searches. However, if you use more than one search word/term you’re still using Boolean logic – it is inescapable.

The Boolean operators of a search are the easy part – the more challenging aspect of electronic talent discovery is the entire process of understanding the hiring need, thoughtfully translating it into an effective search strategy, and adpatively modifying consectuve searches to return results that have a high probability of being excellent potential hires. 

Yes, searching information systems to find candidates requires thinking. Sorry.

Recruiters Do Need to Know How to Perform Electronic Talent Discovery

While every step of the recruiting life cycle is equally important, the fact of the matter is that you can’t build a relationship with (or hire for that matter) a potential candidate that you haven’t identified in the first place. Talent acquisition is dependent upon talent identification.

Recruiters should know how to search information systems to find and identify talent. It’s not about being a “computer nerd” – it’s about the fact that with each passing day, there is more information available about more people electronically, whether it be in a corporate ATS/CRM, a social network, a blog, a press release, a resume, etc. This is a trend that will continue to accelerate – we will never experience a decrease in access to human capital data. 

If a recruiter cannot fully capitalize on all of the human capital data that is readily available and accessible today, they are doing themselves and their organization a considerable disservice, and their organization is at a competitive disadvantage.

When Kevin states that for a corporate recruiter, “If the position is a unique or one-of-a-kind search, they should probably use a third party recruiter” – my question is why? If I was a corporate recruiter, I would never need to use a third party recruiter, primarily due to my ability to leverage information systems and human capital data. I am not bound solely to candidates with whom I have a pre-existing relationship.

More on that in a few paragraphs.

Bottom line: You’re not a full life cycle recruiter if you can’t find your own candidates. Whether or not candidate sourcing should be a separate role or integrated function will be the topic of a future post.

Access to Information is Not Enough

The value of information lies not in the information itself, but in the ability to retrieve the information needed at the appropriate time. Information is of no use or value if it cannot be discovered in the first place.

Having direct access to an unprecedented number of potential candidates via a combination of an ATS/CRM, the Internet, LinkedIn, job board resume databases, Facebook, and Twitter is of no value without the ability to capitalize on that data – the ability to sort through the information and retrieve the right candidates at the right time. 

In part 1 of Dr. John Sullivan’s excellent 3 part series on talent acquisition trends for 2010, he comments that “The challenge moving forward isn’t finding people – that’s too easy…” I agree, in that with ready access to millions of potential candidates, finding people is easy. However, finding the right people at the right time is not, nor will it ever be.

It is all too easy to assume that access to information automatically confers the ability to fully capitalize on that information. It does not.  That’s like saying I’m a great tennis player because I own a tennis racket.

Even if you’ve already built a community of candidates, you still have to be able to find and retrieve the right person at the right time. If you think that a potential candidate has been “found” just because they are already in your ATS or CRM, think again. Having a candidate record in an ATS/CRM only means that the human capital data has been captured.

Many ATS/CRM applications are well-nigh unsearchable – candidates go in, but they don’t come out. Consider the Fortune 500 corporate recruiter who recently admitted to me that it’s easier for her to run a search on Monster, find a candidate based on skill and experience, then cross reference the name in their Taleo Talent Management solution to find the candidate record.

Ouch.

Breaking the Bonds of Pre-Existing Relationships

The Information Age of recruiting, unbeknownst to many people, has enabled recruiters to break the bonds of the pre-existing relationship.

A core responsibility of any recruiter is to build a community of potential candidates. For over two decades, recruiters have been trained that proactively pipelining candidates is the best way to ensure that they will have ready access to the right candidates at the right time. 

However, there are many intrinsic limitations and weaknesses of this practice. What is the likehood that the best candidate available for a given position is already in a recruiter’s pipeline? Also – what happens when a recruiter’s community of potential candidates fails to produce any viable (appropriately qualified, available, and closeable) candidates?

For the first time in the history of recruiting, a recruiter who has the ability to fully capitalize on the huge and ever-increasing volume of the readily accessible human capital data available to them via their ATS/CRM, LinkedIn, online resume databases, Twitter, Facebook, etc.  can almost instantly identify and engage well-qualified candidates with whom they have no pre-existing relationship.

The Information Era of recruiting enables recruiters with solid e-sourcing skills to no longer be limited solely to candidates with whom they have a pre-existing relationship. These recruiters can find and attract the best candidates, regardless of whether or not they have previously identified them.

I’ll let that sink in a bit. It’s deep. 

Social Networking

Nearly everyone in the recruiting industry is buzzing about the opportunity provided by and the importance of social networking. While I enthusiastically engage in online social networking (yes, I’ve even made a hire from Twitter), social networking is simply an evolution of in-person and phone networking - taking what recruiters have been doing for decades in person and over the phone (building and maintaining relationships) online.

While social networks increase access and reach for many recruiters, they do not significantly improve a recruiters ability to quickly find the right people, nor the right people at the right time, unless they are adept at e-sourcing. 

Moreover, as I’ve written before, networking of any kind (in-person, online, referral recruiting) has intrinsically low levels of control over critical candidate variables, and thus a low inherent probability of producing the right candidate at the right time. 

Final Thoughts

The more things change, the more things stay the same.

The human element of recruiting – contacting, building and maintaining relationships with, and consultatively selling to (recruiting) potential candidates – has not changed in the past 20 years, nor is it likely to in the next 20.

What has changed significantly, and will continue to do so, is the level of access recruiters have to people beyond their pre-existing relationships, which is 100% due to evolving and emerging information technology. 

Large corporate ATS’s contain millions of candidates, each of the major job board resume databases has over 20,000,000 resumes, and LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter alone provide access to over 100,000,000 people in the U.S.!

With ready access to unprecedented volumes of potential candidates, the competitive advantage lies in the ability to  search for and find the right people to engage and attract at the right time.

I disagree with Kevin’s assessment that the need to ”apply Boolean logic to searches is no longer relevant in the majority of cases.” However, I wholeheartedly agree with his idea that data mining is an advanced skill that can facilitate recruiting success(on the same level as relationship building, no less). 

The ability to quickly and effectively extract value out of information systems containing human capital data enables a recruiter to be more productive – to do more of what most people consider to be “real recruiting.” Quite simply, the more qualified candidates you can identify, the more qualified candidates you can contact, engage, attract and recruit - with or without pre-existing relationships.

Relationships and recruiting go hand and hand. This has been long-known and well established, and there’s nothing new to discover here. However, the next frontier in recruiting lies in the effective information management – ATS/CRM solutions, the Internet, resume databases, social networks and whatever comes next.   

With more information available about more people on a daily basis, the complimentary need arises to leverage that information to find the people you want and need. The ability to query social network sites, systems, and databases to find these people to engage and recruit is a highly valuable skill and ability, and will only increase in value to organizations who wish to have a competitive advantage in the “war for talent.”

Recently, I wrote about the intrinsic issues associated with searching LinkedIn for potential candidates with specific industry experience, and how using the “Industry” field can actually prevent you from finding the people you’re looking for. 

A number of readers responded by suggesting a logical solution to the issue – searching by specific company name(s) instead of using LinkedIn’s ”Industry” field.

It is a logical solution, but a potentially flawed one nonetheless.

I’m going to show you some reasons why, and if you read this post within the next 5 minutes, I’ll even throw in a LinkedIn  company search anomaly as an added bonus.

User Generated Content has Issues

As William Uranga pointed out in his comment, “Behaviorally-speaking, you need to use the fields in your search that most profiles have completed. “Industry” is not one of them. ‘ Company name’, ‘title”, and using geographic modifiers still yield the best results when searching your network. Even ‘keyword’ is not reliable.” 

I agree that when sourcing candidates on LinkedIn you need to use the fields that most profiles have completed – but from my research, it does appear that when you create a LinkedIn profile, you actually do have to choose an industry. I tried not selecting an industry and leaving it at “Choose industry” and LinkedIn would not allow me to save my profile without selecting one from the list – I got an angry red “Please enter a value” for my efforts.

So it appears that every LinkedIn profile will actually have an industry selected – but the issue remains that it may not be the industry you’d assume people would use.

I agree with William that searching by keyword is not reliable – there are many LinkedIn profiles that do not have any text entered into the description field under each work experience. I’m curious to know the exact percentage of these “skeletal” LinkedIn profiles that only have company names and titles entered, but something tells me LinkedIn wouldn’t be motivated to release that number. If I had to hazard a guess based on my experience searching LinkedIn, I’d say at least 40%. 

Searching LinkedIn using the ”Company” and “Title” fields as William suggests generally does yield good results. However, with these fields we are dealing with user generated content. Instead of choosing from a fixed list (which has its own set of issues), people can choose to enter whatever they want into these fields – and it may not be what you’d assume.

Allow me to demonstrate…

Searching by Company

For some companies, there may only one way in which a company’s name can be expressed/written. However, there are many companies where people can and do write the company names in a wide variety of ways - not only on LinkedIn, but on their resumes as well.  

Financial Services Example

Let’s say you were looking for people with experience in the Financial Services industry, and after reading my recent article on the industry search issue, you wisely realized that people who work in the Financial Services industry might not actually select that industry when they create or modify their LinkedIn profile. So instead, you start thinking of target companies to search for using the “Company” field.

So you start selecting companies, and let’s say one of the companies you’d like to target is JPMorgan Chase. If you’re a regular reader of my blog, you’d know that the first thing you’d need to do is obey the Cardinal Rule of E-Sourcing, which states that for every term you are thinking of including in your search, consider how many ways it can be expressed.

Okay, so to find people who have experience working for JPMorgan Chase, you need to think of all of the other ways that people who’ve worked for the company can express that fact. An easy one is JPMC. Others would include JPMorganChase, “JPMorgan Chase,” and “JP Morgan.”

Here’s positive proof:

There might even be more (such as WAMU, etc.) – but my point here is that if you go beyond searching by industry (which you actually have to), you must be careful to think of all of the various ways people who have worked in your target industry and target companies could possibly express that experience.

If you don’t – you create Hidden Talent Pools of candidates that exist in LinkedIn (or wherever you search), and you cannot find them.

Pharmaceutical Example

If you were looking for people with big pharma experience, you might want to target GlaxoSmithKline. To do so, you’d quickly and correctly assess the fact that not everyone who has worked for GlaxoSmithKline will actually write it that way on their LinkedIn profile (or resume).

Similar to the JPMC example above, we can safely assume some people might abbreviate the company name down to GSK. Of course, some people might also write “Glaxo SmithKline,” “Glaxo Smith Kline,” or “GlaxoSmith Kline.” And they do:

If you didn’t think of those alternate ways of expressing experience working for GlaxoSmithKline, you quite simply would not and could not find those candidates. You would not even be aware that they exist.

Yeah, But this Doesn’t Apply to MY Industry…

If I haven’t got your mind racing on how you can apply this process to your own sourcing efforts, perhaps thinking that I picked a couple of “ringers” with JPMC and GSK – think again. This phenomenon isn’t limited to any particular industry, nor is it limited to the more obvious companies such as PricewaterhouseCoopers (PWC, “Pricewaterhouse Coopers,” etc.).

In fact, inherently one-word company names aren’t immune either.

How about Microsoft?

How could someone who’s worked for Microsoft mention the company other than “Microsoft?”

I know of at least one way:

Yeah – there’s a couple hundred of those in the U.S. alone on LinkedIn.

Are there other ways people might express working for Microsoft? Maybe

Trust me – your target industry and at least some of your target companies are not immune to this principle. In fact, it’s highly likely that you’ve been missing candidates in your sourcing efforts for a long time now because of the intrinsic issues associated with user generated content.

Going Confidential

Let’s not forget all of the people who don’t actually list the names of the companies they’ve worked for.

If you’re searching by company name, you simply cannot find people who actually work for your target company but do not list the company, who instead use “confidential” as their employer.

There’s over 5,000 U.S. LinkedIn profiles like this.

Have you ever specifically searched for people who list “confidential” as their current employer? If so, I’d say you’re a rare breed of sourcer – perhaps 1 in 100 sourcers have ever even thought to do this. It’s not rocket science by any stretch, but most people simply don’t think enough before they search for candidates. This technique is pretty obvious once I point it out though, right?

Company Research on LinkedIn

Remember that LinkedIn anomaly I alluded to in the intro of this article? 

Well, let’s say you are doing some research on LinkedIn to find the names of other companies in your target industry to include in your search, and your target industry is “Defense and Space.”

If you select “Defense and Space” from the industry list…

… you’d get 50 results.

But do you think there are only 50 companies in the defense and space industry represented on LinkedIn?

Me neither.

I noticed that when I select an industry under LinkedIn’s company search functionality, LinkedIn enters keywords for me:

I didn’t type in “Defense And Space” – LinkedIn did it for me. LinkedIn will do it for any industry you choose – try it for yourself.

Being the curious guy that I am, I wanted to see what happened if I deleted the words automatically entered by LinkedIn and searched again:

I got almost 1700 companies. 

That strikes me as more accurate than 50.

Interesting, yes?

No?

Well, it should be - because anyone who uses LinkedIn’s quite robust company search/research functionality (you do, don’t you?) may be getting seriously short-changed in their search results if they don’t delete the auto-populated keywords and re-run their searches when attempting to get comprehensive lists of companies in target industries.

I have reason to believe that at least a couple of LinkedIn employees read my blog. Let’s see how quickly they fix this anomaly. 

Final Thoughts

Hidden Talent Pools (Google the term) are very real. If you’re not careful to stop to think before you search, you can all to easily and unknowingly create pools of candidates that you cannot and do not find. But they’re there.

LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter – any social network profile consists mainly of free form user generated content (just like resumes), and when people have the ability to enter whatever they think is appropriate to describe their employers and work experience, you’re going to get a wider variety than you might assume. Before you conduct ANY search – take a moment to think about all of the various ways your quarry could possible express what it is that you’re looking for.

Oh – and one last thing: What I’ve detailed in this post also applies to X-Ray searching LinkedIn for people who have worked at specific companies within a target industry as well. 

Special Thanks

Eric Jaquith- thank you for telling my that my site looked like crap on iPhones.

At his suggestion, I installed the WPtouch plugin and now the site is much easier to read and navigate on iPhones, BlackBerries and other smart phones. From this point on, if you ever read my site using your mobile device – you owe your enhanced mobile BBB experience to Eric!

I would like to extend my sincere gratitude to you, whether you’ve visited www.booleanblackbelt.com just a few times or if you are a regular reader.  If you’ve told someone else about my site or recommended it to others – thank you very much!  

With all of the sourcing, recruiting, and social media blogs out there, I know it’s virtually impossible to keep up with them all, so I appreciate the fact that you’re making a conscious decision to spend time on my site, most likely at the expense of another site (or two). 

I started this blog back in October 2008, and you’re reading the 115th post I’ve published 14 months. This time last year, I had a total of 2200 unique visitors.

As of today (12/22), I’ve had over 50,000 unique visitors from 154 countries, averaging 1400 unique visitors per week, and I have about 1800 readers who’ve signed up for my feed/emails. I have you to thank for that!

I spend an average of about 3 to 4 hours on each post I publish (some take as many as 7 hours!), so the work you see on this site represents at least 400 hours of my personal time that I have dedicated to sharing my thoughts and experience.

I created this site specifically to share knowledge and information with others – so if you know anyone who is interested in learning how to more effectively leverage information systems and social media for sourcing and recruiting, please pay it forward, and don’t keep me a secret.

2010 should be a good year for www.booleanblackbelt.com – I have over 200 drafts of various post ideas built up! However, you won’t see another post from me until the week of January 4th – I’m going to spend quality time with my family and friends – I hope you have the opportunity to do the same.

Thank you, and Happy Holidays!