Recruiting With Social Networking

“LinkedIn has become, in a sense, the new yellow pages,” says Rick Deare, owner of Deare Recruiting Solutions in Bloomington. “It is the most important resource out there.”

Some recruiters are using Facebook, which boasts more than 200 million users, to research job candidates. However, many Facebook members use the service only for staying in touch with friends, not with professional development in mind, so it’s not as helpful to recruiters as some of the other tools. Also, unlike LinkedIn and Twitter, most of the information on members’ profile pages is not publicly searchable.

A search within a particular social networking site is usually the best way to determine whether a social network will offer any value, says Paul DeBettignies, managing partner at Nerd Search, LLC, a recruiting firm in Minneapolis and author of the MN Headhunter blog (mnheadhunter.com). He recommends searching for industry acronyms and keywords to show you what types of conversations people are having so you can “start figuring out if people are talking in that area.”

On LinkedIn, this search can be done using the site’s search function. For Twitter, users can search messages using search.twitter.com or other Twitter search services, such as tweetzi.com, twazzup.com, and tweefind.com, some of which include the option of limiting results to users in a geographic region.

Whether a recruiter finds a relevant community to tap into will depend in part on the industry or type of job opening, DeBettignies says. A recruiter searching for Web developers or marketers, for example, is more likely to find potential connections on Twitter than someone looking to hire pipe fitters or physicians. The type of connections a recruiter maintains matters, too. “If you’re posting marketing jobs to a bunch of underwater basket weavers, that’s not very relevant,” Kahn says.

That’s why recruiters, and all professionals seeking to benefit from social networking, need to invest time in building a network long before they need to call on it. DeBettignies says social networking isn’t headhunting; it’s farming. “It will grow and turn into something someday,” he says.

Unwritten Rules of Social Networks

Social networking is a great tool for keeping track of existing contacts, but it shouldn’t be viewed as a shortcut for creating new ones. One unproductive practice, and one of Deare’s pet peeves, is LinkedIn users who send cold, impersonal connection requests using a form letter to simply collect connections.