Category Archives: Social Recruiting

How to Use Facebook for Social Recruiting Messaging

 

When it comes to sourcing and recruiting, you should not ignore the potential of Facebook given that it has 1.38B monthly active users and 890M daily active users.

Also, you should know that according to Jobvite’s 2014 Job Seeker Nation Report, 76% of social job seekers found their current position through Facebook.  Jobvite also found that while job seekers flock to Facebook, recruiters prefer LinkedIn when searching for potential candidates.

Jobvite 2014 Job Seeker Nation Report

That’s understandable, as LinkedIn is a professional social network and some profiles are as detailed as resumes. While Facebook users seem to be adding more professional information on a daily basis, that information is quite limited.

As I’ve written recently, even though Facebook’s Graph Search isn’t as powerful as it once was, finding people to recruit on Facebook is remarkably easy. If you want even more information on using Facebook to find people, check out Todd Davis’ Ultimate Guide to Sourcing and Recruiting on Facebook.

However, one thing that isn’t being written about much is using Facebook to reach out to potential candidates. Some people simply may not know all of the ways you can message people on Facebook (there is more than meets the eye, as you will see), and many sourcers and recruiters seem to get caught up on thinking that people will be “weirded out” by getting messages from them on Facebook – I’ll be addressing this as well. Continue reading

Insights from LinkedIn’s 2015 Global Recruiting Survey

 

LinkedIn Global Recruiting Trends

Job boards vs. social media: What’s the most significant source of hire for companies globally?

LinkedIn recently surveyed over 4,000 talent acquisition leaders in 31 countries, gaining insights into source of hire, quality of hire, quantity of hire, talent brand, the future of recruiting and more, so if you haven’t already downloaded and reviewed LinkedIn’s 2015 Global Recruiting Trends e-book, I highly recommend you do so by clicking here.

While I’m going to share a few of the insights from the Global Recruiting Trends e-book (including the job boards vs. social recruiting), I highly encourage you to compare them with LinkedIn’s country specific recruiting and staffing e-books (Southeast Asia, Australia, India, U.K., Italy, Belgium, etc.) which can be found here. There are some significant differences, specifically when it comes to source of hire.

Continue reading

14 Tips on How to Use Twitter for Social Recruiting

 

My tweet about seeing a recruiter with 3 followers tweet about a job opeingTwitter’s been around for nearly 8 years and has always been popular in recruiting circles, but there are still plenty of recruiters  who don’t use Twitter to its full potential or are simply new to using Twitter for recruiting.

For example, just the other day I noticed in one of my Hootsuite streams a recruiter with 3 followers tweet about a job. I found this interesting so I decided to tell the world what I had seen via Twitter and LinkedIn to see what kind of a response it would generate.

I got a surprising number of responses in defense of the unnamed recruiter, even though there was no attack to defend against, which I found very interesting.

Many of the responses were “Hey, you gotta start somewhere,” which of course is true. However, I would argue posting jobs without a decent number of followers from your target talent pool is like buying a lottery ticket – it is a hope based action/strategy.

Seeing a  senior recruiter with 3 followers tweet about a job and seeing the small flood of comments I received on my observation, I decided it’s time to create a guide detailing the recipe for successfully using Twitter for recruiting. Continue reading

Social Recruiting w/Facebook – One or Two Facebook Profiles?

Philosoraptor asks - facebook recruiting, one profile or two?Do you use Facebook to source and recruit potential candidates?

  • If yes, do you have one or two profiles?
  • If no, why not? (two words: Graph Search!)

One of the most common social recruiting questions I get is whether or not sourcers and recruiters using Facebook to search for and engage potential candidates should have 1 or 2 profiles (one “personal” profile and one “professional”).

I always answer that my recommendation is for recruiters to use only 1 Facebook profile (read further to learn why), but I can certainly understand why some people would want to use 2.

To see if I was alone in my position, I was curious what the folks in my network would say regarding the use of 1 or 2 Facebook profiles for recruiting, so I decided to ask them (on Facebook – where else?!?). Continue reading

100+ Free Sourcing & Recruiting Tools, Guides, and Resources

 

It’s been a LONG time coming, but I finally got around to updating my free sourcing & recruiting tools, guides and resources page where I now keep a current list of the best of my work all in one place for easy bookmarking and reference.

You can find it here on my main page:

 

Here is where you can find all of the best of my Boolean Black belt content all in one place - free sourcing and recruiting how-to guides, tools, presentations, and videos - be sure to bookmark it, and if you're feeling  friendly, tweet it, share it on LinkedIn and/or +1 it on Google Plus.  Many thanks!

 

Additionally, I thought I might as well put all of my best work all in one blog post as well – over 110 of my articles in one place for easy referencing!

My blog is a pursuit of passion and not of profit – if you’ve ever found anything I’ve written helpful to you, all I ask is that you tweet this out, share it on LinkedIn, like it on Facebook, or give this a +1 on Google.

Many thanks for your readership and support – please pay it forward to someone who can benefit.

Big Data, Analytics and Moneyball Recruiting

Big Data, Data Science and Moneyball Recruiting

The Moneyball Recruiting Opportunity: Analytics and Big Data

Human Capital Data is Sexy – and Sourcing is the Sexiest job in HR/Recruiting! 

Is Sourcing Dead? No! Here’s the Future of Sourcing

The End of Sourcing 1.0 and the Evolution of Sourcing 2.0

How to Find Email Addresses

How to Use Gmail and Rapportive to Find Almost Anyone’s Email Address

Social Discovery

2 Very Cool and Free Social Discovery Tools: Falcon and TalentBin

Talent Communities

The Often Overlooked Problem with Talent Communities

Lean / Just-In-Time Recruiting / Talent Pipelines

What is Lean, Just-In-Time Recruiting?

Lean Recruiting & Just-In-Time Talent Acquisition Part 1

Lean Recruiting & Just-In-Time Talent Acquisition Part 2

Lean Recruiting & Just-In-Time Talent Acquisition Part 3

Lean Recruiting & Just-In-Time Talent Acquisition Part 4

The Passive Candidate Pipeline Problem

Semantic Search

What is Semantic Search and How Can it Be Used for Sourcing and Recruiting?

Sourcing and Search: Man vs. Machine/Artificial Intelligence – My SourceCon Keynote

Why Sourcers Won’t Be Replaced By Watson/Machine Learning Algorithms Any Time Soon

Diversity Sourcing

How to Perform Diversity Sourcing on LinkedIn – Including Specific Boolean Search Strings

How to Use Facebook’s Graph Search for Diversity Sourcing

Social Recruiting

How to Find People to Recruit on Twitter using Followerwonk & Google + Bing X-Ray Search

Google Plus Search Guide: How to Search and Find People on Google Plus

Facebook’s Graph Search Makes it Ridiculously Easy to Find Anyone

How to Effectively Source Talent on Social Networks – It Requires Non-Standard Search Terms!

How a Recruiter Made 3 Hires on Twitter in Six Weeks!

Twitter 101 for Sourcers and Recruiters

Anti-Social Recruiting

How Social Recruiting has NOT Changed Recruiting

Social Recruiting – Beyond the Hype

What Social Recruiting is NOT

Sourcing Social Media Requires Outside the Box Thinking

Social Networking Sites vs. Job Boards

LinkedIn Sourcing and Recruiting

Sourcing and Searching LinkedIn: Beyond the Basics – SourceCon Dallas 2012

LinkedIn’s Dark Matter – Profiles You Cannot Find

How to Get a Higher LinkedIn InMail Response Rate

The Most Effective Way to X-Ray Search LinkedIn

LinkedIn Catfish: Fake Profiles, Real People, or Just Fake Photos?

LinkedIn Search: Drive it Like you Stole It – 8 Minute Video of My LinkedIn Presentation in Toronto

How to Search LinkedIn and Control Years of Experience

How to Quickly and Effectively Grow Your LinkedIn Network

How to View the Full Profiles of our 3rd Degree Connections on LinkedIn for Free

How to Find and Identify Active Job Seekers on LinkedIn

LinkedIn Profile Search Engine Optimization

Free LinkedIn Profile Optimization and Job Seeker Advice

Do Recruiters Ruin LinkedIn?

The 50 Largest LinkedIn Groups

How to See Full Names of 3rd Degree LinkedIn Connections for Free

How I Search LinkedIn to Find People

LinkedIn’s Undocumented Search Operator

Does LinkedIn Offer Recruiters any Competitive Advantage?

Have You Analyzed the Value of Your LinkedIn Network?

Where Do YOU Rank In LinkedIn Search Results?

What is the Total Number of LinkedIn Members?

Beware When Searching LinkedIn By Company Name

LinkedIn Sourcing Challenge

How to Search for Top Students and GPA’s on LinkedIn

What’s the Best Way to Search LinkedIn for People in Specific Industries?

18 LinkedIn Apps, Tools and Resources

LinkedIn Search: What it Could be and Should be

How to Search Across Multiple Countries on LinkedIn

Private and Out of Network Search Results on LinkedIn

How to “Unlock” and view “Private” LinkedIn Profiles

Searching LinkedIn for Free – The Differences Between Internal and X-Ray Searching

Sourcing and Boolean Search

Basic Boolean Search Operators and Query Modifiers Explained

How to Find Resumes On the Internet with Google

Challenging Google Resume Search Assumptions

Don’t be a Sourcing Snob

The Top 15 Talent Sourcing Mistakes

Why Boolean Search is Such a Big Deal in Recruiting

How to Become a World Class Sourcer

Enough with the Exotic Sourcing Already – What’s Practical and What Works

Sourcing is So Much More than Tips, Tricks, Hacks, and Google

How to Find, Hire, Train, and Build a Sourcing Team – SourceCon 2013

How to Use Excel to Automatically Build Boolean Search Strings

The Current and Future State of Sourcing

Why So Many People Stink at Searching

Is your ATS a Black Hole or a Diamond Mine?

How to Find Bilingual Professionals with Boolean Search Strings

How to Best Use Resume Search Aggregators

How to Convert Quotation Marks in Microsoft Word for Boolean Search

Boolean Search, Referral Recruiting and Source of Hire

The Critical Factors Behind Sourcing ROI

What is a “Boolean Black Belt?”

Beyond Basic Boolean Search: Proximity and Weighting

Why Sourcing is Superior to Posting Jobs for Talent

The Future of Sourcing and Talent Identification

Sourcing is an Investigative and Iterative Process

Beyond Boolean Search: Human Capital Information Retrieval

Do you Speak Boolean?

Is Recruiting Top Talent Really Your Company’s Top Priority?

Sourcing is NOT an Entry Level Function

Boolean Search Beyond Google

The Internet Has Free Resumes. So What?

How to Search Spoke, Zoominfo and Jigsaw for Free

Job Boards vs. Social Networking Sites

What to Do if Google Thinks You’re Not Human: the Captcha

What if you only had One Source to Find Candidates?

Passive Recruiting is a Myth – It Doesn’t Exist

Sourcing: Separate Role or Integrated Function?

The #1 Mistake in Corporate Recruiting

How I Learned What I Know About Sourcing

Resumes Are Like Wine – They Get Better with Age!

Why Do So Many ATS Vendors Offer Such Poor Search Functionality?

Do Candidates Really Want a Relationship with their recruiter?

Recruiting: Art or Science?

What to Consider When Creating or Selecting Effective Sourcing Training – SourceCon NYC

The Sourcer’s Fallacy

Sourcing Challenge – Monster vs. Google – Round 1

Sourcing Challenge – Monster vs. Google – Round 2

Do You Have the Proper Perspective in Recruiting?

Are You a Clueless Recruiter?

Job Boards and Candidate Quality – Challenging Popular Assumptions

When it Comes to Sourcing – All Sources Are Not Created Equal

Boolean Search String Experiments

Boolean Search String Experiment #1

Boolean Search String Experiment #1 Follow Up

Boolean Search String Experiment #2

 

How to Find People to Recruit on Twitter with Google & Bing

 

With over 200 million active Twitter users, you cannot and should not ignore Twitter for sourcing and recruiting talent. Here's how to find the people you need on Twitter using good old fashioned X-Ray search via Google and BingThere are over 500 million Twitter accounts with over 200 million represent active users globally. I’d say that qualifies it as a solid source for finding and engaging talent for recruitment.

Of course, you can’t engage someone you haven’t found in the first place, and it’s been far too long since I’ve posted an update to how to search Twitter to find people – can you believe it’s been 4 years?!?

It was just the other day that I was hacking around on Google and Bing trying to find people on Twitter based on the text in their bio’s (yes, I am familiar with Follwerwonk – you’ll see why I prefer Google/Bing in a moment) and while I was getting some results, I wasn’t getting as many as I thought I should, nor were the results as “clean” as I would like.

That led me to a few minutes of tinkering with Bing and Google and I made a few discoveries with some simple pattern recognition that I would like to share that will help you quickly find your target talent pool on Twitter.

I use two main examples – mechanical engineers in South Africa and software engineers in Chicago – you can of course fork my Boolean strings to suit your specific sourcing needs replacing my titles and locations with yours.

How to X-Ray Search Twitter with Bing

While I do search for what people tweet about, I prefer to search for information contained in Twitter bio’s/profile summaries where people often identify themselves by what they do for a living (e.g., software engineering, accounting, etc.).

Twitter bio example

Furthermore, I prefer to search for bio data using Google and Bing, as there is no service/app I am aware of that indexes as many Twitter profiles as the 2 search engine titans. When I was using Bing to search for Twitter profiles the other day, I was looking for patterns in the results that were consistent across my desired results (actual Twitter profiles) and not my undesired results (Tweets and jobs/job posting-only accounts),

I noticed that Twitter profiles all mentioned “followers,” “tweets” and “following.”

Twitter Bing 2 

I simply added “tweets” to a basic X-Ray search of Twitter and a little bit of magic happened. For example: site:twitter.com tweets “south africa” “mechanical engineer” 

Twitter Bing 7

Here is an example of a positive hit in the search results:

Twitter bio example South Africa Mechanical Engineer

Getting back to the Bing search results – you probably noticed the top 3 results were for “jobs” accounts.

I did too.

I tried adding a simple -jobs to the string and for some reason it kills the search and returns 0 results.

Then I noticed that many of the job posting accounts have “jobs” in the title lines, so I simply added -intitle:jobs to the string.

site:twitter.com tweets “south africa” “mechanical engineer” -intitle:jobs

As you can see below, only 1 job posting account was able to sneak in – the rest are profiles of people.

Twitter Bing X-Ray Search mehanical engineers in South Africa

Simply overlooking the job spewing Twitter profiles is easy – I often advise people that an acceptable percentage of false positives is fine with any search. Trying to “over cleanse” results can have undesired consequences, such as eliminating valid results.

Always remember – every search you run both includes AND excludes qualified people/desired results.  Think before you tweak!

So how many results would Follerwonk return in a Twitter bio search for mechanical engineers in South Africa? 51 vs 88 for Bing.

FollowerWonk search mechanical engineer south africa 

While there are no doubt a few false positives in the Bing search, I didn’t have much trouble quickly finding people in the Bing search results that Followerwonk did NOT find.

This confirms my concern with any search app/service like Followerwonk – they simply don’t index as many Twitter profiles as the major search engines such as Bing or Google.

Feeling pretty good about what I had found using Bing to find mechanical engineers in South Africa, I tried searching for software engineers in a large U.S. city.

site:twitter.com tweets “software engineer” “Chicago” -intitle:jobs

As you can see, 6 out of 12 of the first page results are people, and most of the other Twitter accounts are for actual companies, not just job spamming accounts.

Twitter Bing X-Ray Search software engineers Chicago 1

Twitter Bing X-Ray Search software engineers Chicago 2

Moving to page 2 of the results, 100% of the results are individual profiles of software engineers. Sweet!

Twitter Bing X-Ray Search software engineers Chicago 3

Twitter Bing X-Ray Search software engineers Chicago 4 

How to X-Ray Search Twitter with Google

When I switched over to Google, I tried the same search I used on Bing:

site:twitter.com tweets “south africa” “mechanical engineer” -intitle:jobs

As you can see from just the first page of results, Google turns up more job posting accounts than Bing, which returned only 1 job posting account with the exact same search. Google only returned 4 real people in the results.

I find it interesting to see the differences between Google and Bing, especially when it comes to such a simple search!

Google X-Ray Search of Twitter for Mechanical Engineers in South Africa 1

I’ve been trying to tell people for years that Bing is a bit “cleaner” than Google with regard to searching sites like LinkedIn and Twitter. The results above offer further evidence to support my claim.

Anyhow, I looked at the results and noticed a pattern in the false positives (job spewing/non-people Twitter accounts) – most mentioned “status” or “statuses,” so I decided to exclude those terms from the URL’s.

site:twitter.com tweets “south africa” “mechanical engineer” -intitle:jobs -inurl:(status|statuses)

Much better, yes?

Moving on to the search for software engineers in Chicago, I went a little crazier and added a number of additional exclusions, as is often necessary with Google: site:twitter.com tweets “Chicago” “software engineer” -inurl:(search|favorites|status|statuses|jobs) -intitle:(job|jobs) -recruiter -HR -careers -job Only 1 sneaky job posting account was able to slip past this search:

Google X-Ray search of Twitter for Software engineers in Chicago

Final Thoughts

As you can see, Twitter search services like Followerwonk do a good job of making it easy to search for and find people on Twitter, but they don’t index as many Twitter profiles as the major search engines such as Google or Bing.

As such, if you’re only using Followerwonk or similar sites to find people on Twitter, you’re only finding some people – and certainly not all of the people that are actually on Twitter.

Also, when it comes to any information retrieval exercise, a little bit of pattern recognition goes a long way.

Hopefully I’ve provided you with at least a couple of new ways to search Twitter via Google and Bing to find people with specific skills/titles in your target locations while reducing false positive results. Grab these bits of Boolean and add your location and title/skills:

Bing

site:twitter.com tweets -intitle:jobs -recruiter [location] [keywords]

Google

site:twitter.com tweets -inurl:(search|favorites|status|statuses|jobs) -intitle:(job|jobs) -recruiter -HR -careers -job [location] [keywords]

Of course, you should always be careful when searching social media/networking sites – especially Twitter. People can and do use non-standard terms to describe themselves and their locations. For example, here’s a project manager in “Chitown” that you can’t find by searching for “Chicago:”

 

Twitter Chitown nonstandard language location

Also, we’re lucky that this person took the time to explain what a “code sensei” is – if they didn’t make mention of “software engineer,” no one could find this person by searching for that title:

Example of non standard Twitter title software engineer cose sensei 

Imagine how many people describe themselves and their locations with non-standard terminology and you have a glimpse into the hidden talent pool waiting for you to explore on Twitter, Google Plus and other social networking sites.

Happy hunting!

 

2 Very Cool and FREE Social Discovery Tools

 

Today, I’m bringing you not one, but two very cool and free social discovery tools to your attention.

While I am a bit late to the game in publishing  my take on the first one I am going to review (Bill BoormanMarc Drees and a few others beat me to the punch – I need to clone myself!), my first exposure to Falcon’s social discovery tool actually came from Chris Cruz on 1/7/13 when he  responded to my post on how to use Rapportive and Gmail to divine and confirm almost any email address.

First, I’ll review Falcon’s solution, including a 2 minute video hands-on demo and then I’ll cover TalentBin’s social discovery tool.

Falcon.io

Falcon.io's social discovery results for the Dalai Lama. Looks like he doesn't follow anyone - how engaging. It appears enlightenment via Twitter only works one way. :)Gwendall Esnault has whipped up something very interesting in Falcon, which was actually developed after he created Hackerface.

Falcon allows you to find people’s “social details” by hovering their names on certain sites. In other words – you can use one social profile to discover many of the other social profiles that the person might also have. For example, from someone’s Twitter handle, you could quickly reveal their Facebook and Github profiles.

While the Falcon.io site mentions that the Chrome plugin/extension leverages Hacker News, Tweetdeck, Twitter, Github and Dribble, there isn’t much documentation to be found on exactly what other sites Falcon leverages.

However, a little exploration and experimentation shows that the Falcon social discovery tool also supports (to a lesser or greater extent):

  • Google+
  • Foursquare
  • Klout,
  • Facebook
  • Slideshare
  • Instagram
  • StumbleUpon
  • YouTube
  • Vimeo
  • WordPress

It very likely works with other sites I have yet to discover. However, there is one key site that it doesn’t seem to work with – LinkedIn.

In addition to working by hovering your mouse over certain social links, you can also enter and search for specific social profiles. I’ve entered and successfully searched for Facebook, Google+ and Quora profiles.

Here’s a short video detailing how Falcon works and what you can do with it:

 

 

TalentBin’s Social Profile Appender

TalentBin Social Discovery ResultsIf you like what Falcon can do for you, then you might also like TalentBin’s free social discovery tool.

If you’re not familiar with TalentBin, their “talent search engine for the entire web” is what I would consider to be one of a few sourcing solutions available on the market today that harnesses the power of big data when it comes to sourcing and recruiting.

In addition to their premium solution, the wonderful folks at TalentBin whipped up a free Chrome extension/plugin that allows you to perform social discovery from any one of a number of sites.

As you can see from the image to the right – TalentBin cross references a HUGE number of sites. It also leverages an incredibly simple and easy 1 click functionality to serve up results – no mousing over links or entering URLs to search for results.

The only catch (and it’s a BIG catch) is that you have to be a premium user to take action on the data, including the “contact vectors” that TalentBin conveniently serves up to you (which is a fantastic feature, btw).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I know some people may be less excited about a freemium tool, but I think TalentBin’s expansive social search and simple execution is impressive. I also think it provides insight into what’s to come with regard to social aggregation empowering research, sourcing and recruiting. Plus, sometimes you do get what you pay for.

Here’s a short video detailing how TalentBin’s free social discovery tool works and what you can do with it:

 

 

Here’s how to get TalentBin’s social discovery tool. If you have any trouble downloading and installing it (I did), this link will help you get the job done. I’m also proving the steps here:

  1. Download the extension file from the website and save it to your computer.
  2. Click the wrench icon on the browser toolbar.
  3. Select Tools > Extensions.
  4. Locate the extension file on your computer and drag the file onto the Extensions page.
  5. Click Install.

 

Final Thoughts

TalentBin’s Chrome extension cross references a surprisingly large number of social sites that it can leverage cross for social discovery. This impressive functionality is no doubt a direct result of the work they’ve been performing on their premium solution. As such, while TalentBin’s browser extension is free, you can’t make much use of it without being a user of their premium product.

On the flip side, while the Falcon social discovery tool isn’t as comprehensive as TalentBin’s, it’s 100% free to use and take action on – thanks Gwendall!

If Gwendall’s open to suggestions, I would recommend adding support for LinkedIn profiles, as well as functionality similar to TalentBin’ simple one-click execution over having to hover over links or search for URL’s.

However, I’m certainly not complaining about Falcon’s functionality – I’ll gladly use Falcon as is!

 

Top 15 Common Talent Sourcing Mistakes

Practically everything I have learned about sourcing and recruiting didn’t come from a mentor or any formal training.

Instead, I learned how to become a top performing recruiter “the hard way.”

What that really means is that when it came to finding top talent, I tried a lot of things that didn’t work, and because I refuse to make excuses, give up, or accept anything less than the best results, I kept experimenting until I discovered things that enabled me to find people that others can’t and don’t.

With over fifteen years of experience in sourcing and recruiting, I’ve made my fair share of mistakes along the way. I’ve also had the opportunity to assess, train and coach corporate and agency sourcers and recruiters, which has exposed me to many myths, misconceptions and mistakes when it comes to leveraging information systems for sourcing and recruiting.

Here are what I believe to be some of the most common productivity-robbing and results-reducing mistakes sourcers and recruiters make when looking for the right match.

In no particular order… Continue reading

How to Effectively Source Talent via Social Media & Networks

Sourcing talent via social media requires an entirely different mindset than sourcing with other forms of human capital data, such as resumes/CV’s, employee directories, conference attendee lists, etc.

Back in early 2009, one of only 2 guest posts ever co-written on my site was published on the topic of non-standard descriptors and the role they play in social media. Valerie Scarsellato was a Sr. Sourcer at Intel Corporation at the time when she put together the framework for the original article on sourcing via social media, and she has now moved into a Segment Marketing Specialist role at Intel and is loving it. For those of you who feel that employer marketing/branding/communications is a logical extension of sourcing, Valerie would wholeheartedly agree with you – check out this video in which she discussed her award winning _codehearted; work for Intel.

Now that nearly 2 years has passed since the Searching Social Media Requires Outside-the-box Thinking article was published, social media usage has continued to explode – monthly visitors to LinkedIn and Facebook have doubled, they’ve nearly quadrupled for Twitter , and we now have Google+, Pinterest and others springing on the scene, making the topic even more relevant today. As such, I wanted to rework the original piece and update it with a few more examples.

The primary challenge when leveraging social media for sourcing talent is that nonstandard terminology is prevalent – it’s generally acceptable to use slang and other verbiage that would otherwise never be found on a resume, even when it comes to describing one’s profession.

If you use the same query terms when sourcing LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, etc. as you would when searching for resumes, you will certainly find people. However, you will also exclude a decent portion of the available results, unknowingly relegating them to Dark Matter and otherwise undiscovered talent. This is because you can only retrieve what you explicitly search for. Continue reading

What is Your Talent Sourcing ROI?

Anything worth doing is worth measuring, and sourcing isn’t exempt from this.

If you want to know which method of sourcing has the highest ROI in terms of enabling a person to find more of the right people more quickly, then you’re in luck – because that’s what this post is about.

Human capital data comes in many forms – resumes, social network profiles, blogs, bios, press resleases, etc. – and I have found that a key and critical aspect of sources of human capital data that many people fail to formally recognize is the depth and completeness of the data that can yield information through review and analysis.

When it comes to leveraging information systems such as the Internet, applicant tracking systems, social networking sites, job board databases, etc. for sourcing and recruiting – the operative word is “information.”

Data is the lowest level of abstraction from which information can be derived. For data to become information, it must be interpreted and take on a meaning.

Generally, the quality and amount of information that can be gleaned from any particular source is directly linked and limited to the quality and amount of data present to be reviewed and analyzed. How useful is an information system supported by only a small amount of limited data?

In this post, I will:

  • Review the major sources of human capital data
  • Examine sourcing return on time invested
  • Explore the potential candidate’s point of view
  • Ask you to take a quick sourcing test

Ready? Continue reading

Is Finding and Recruiting Top Talent Really Your #1 Priority?

Do these quotes sound familiar?

  • “People are our greatest asset.”
  • “The only real sustainable competitive advantage of any company is the recruitment and retention of great people.”
  • “Talent is our #1 priority as a company.”
  • “Your technologies, products and structures can be copied by competitors, but your people can’t be.”
  • “No matter what kind of business you are in, having the right people determines your company’s success or failure.”
  • “The ability to find and hire the right people can make or break your business. It is as plain as that. No matter where you are in the life cycle of your business, bringing in great talent should always be a top priority.” – Michael Dell

How many times have you read or heard something similar?

The ubiquitous “people are our greatest asset” sentiment sounds good, and no doubt feels good to say, but whenever I hear or read it, the first question that comes to my mind is “What are you doing to ensure that you are identifying and acquiring the right people?”

If you believe that finding and acquiring top talent is your #1 priority, then I have a few questions for you.

Continue reading

Anti-Social Recruiting

AntisocialAlthough I’ve often joked about the concept of anti-social recruiting (as if there was anything other than “social” recruiting), anti-social recruiting does exist, and it is unknowingly practiced by many people and top companies as well.

Confused?

Allow me to explain.

Social,” as defined by Merriam Webster, is “…the interaction of the individual and the group,” and “tending to form cooperative and interdependent relationships.”

What most people refer to as “social recruiting” is 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.

However, simply using social media is not enough. Social media has the potential for social interaction, but is not automatically or intrinsically “social,” defined as interactive. For something to be interactive, by the very definition of the word, it must be “mutually or reciprocally active” and involve two-way communication (e.g., a phone conversation).

Not all people and not all companies using social media in their recruiting efforts are actually engaging in two-way communication with potential candidates. However, the two-way engagement, communication and relationship building is (and always has been) the “social” part of recruiting.

Anti-Social Recruiting

To be antisocial is to not be interactive, and to not form relationships.

If, as I suggested earlier, recruiting has always been social, how can anti-social recruiting even exist? Unfortunately, quite easily. Anti-social recruiting exists whenever their is a lack of interaction.

Here are a few examples of anti-social recruiting: Continue reading

Having Trouble Attracting the Right Candidates?

Venus Flytrap While attending the Social Recruiting Summit in Minneapolis back in May, I made specific note of a common sentiment expressed by recruiting representatives of two social recruiting powerhouses – Best Buy and Facebook: They don’t have any trouble attracting people, but they do have a tough time attracting the right people.

Recruiters in attendance scoffed at the thought that these two great companies with fantastic brands would have problems attracting talent.

However, I wasn’t surprised – not in the least. And I’ll tell you why. Continue reading

What if You Only Had One Source to Find Candidates?

question markImagine that you were just assigned a position to recruit for and that you needed to present 2 fully screened, highly qualified and well matched candidates within 5 business days.

Your manager/client is requesting candidates with:

  • 3-5 years of related work experience (your choice – something not too vanilla/easy/common, but not “purple squirrel” either)
  • Experience in a specific industry, and experience working in a similar environment (size/scale/team/software, etc.)  to the manager’s/client’s
  • Bachelor’s degree in a related discipline

Furthermore, let’s say that you don’t have any qualified candidates in your pipeline, so you are essentially starting from scratch.

Under those conditions and assumptions, if you were limited to only 1 method/specific source for identifying candidates to contact, engage and recruit, which would you choose, and why?  Continue reading

Recruiting Pulse – Your Single Source for All Things Recruiting

Recruiting_Pulse_ScreenshotOverwhelmed by the sheer volume of sourcing, recruiting, social recruiting and HR blogs?

I know I am – a new recruiting blog seems to pop up almost daily!

So how can anyone possibly stay on top of all of them? Subscribing via email? Using an RSS reader?  

My initial approach to not missing a post from my favorite recruiting bloggers was to use Google’s Reader. However, I found that over time, I simply stopped reviewing all of the posts and articles that were piling up.  Admittedly, my Google Reader is now essentially a dumping ground.

I switched to email subscriptions, but I found that to be equally unmanageable.

Then, not too long ago, I stumbled across a couple of interesting sites – Alltop and POPURLS – and I started to think…why not create a similar site that is focused 100% on aggregating sourcing, recruiting, social recruiting, and HR blogs?

So I did create one – and thus Recruiting Pulse was born.

Recruiting Pulse features the most recent 3 posts from over 50 sourcing, recruiting, social recruiting, HR, and UK recruiting blogs. On the main page, you will find a mix of 40+ blogs from all categories.

At the bottom of the page, you will find links to pages where blogs are arranged by category:

So What’s the Big Deal?

I didn’t say it was a big deal. :-)

I simply created the site as a blog post dashboard of sorts to enable people (including myself, I must admit) to easily stay on top of the content generated by over 50 of the top sourcing, recruiting, social recruiting and UK recruiting blogs.

Mouse over a link and you can see the beginning of each post.

Recruiting Pulse Mouse Over Post Overview

If you like what you see, you can click the link to be taken directly to the entire post.

It’s that easy.

A Work In Progress

I did not intend to make Recruiting Pulse a site that tracks every last sourcing, recruiting and HR blog in existence – that would defeat the purpose of what I am trying to accomplish.

To keep it manageable, I chose a combination of blogs from HR Examiner’s Top 25 lists and some blogs I read on a regular basis written by people I respect.

However, I am open to suggestions – so please feel free to let me know if there is a high quality sourcing, recruiting, or HR blog you think should be added to the site and I will take it into consideration.

I must say there are a few well known sourcing/recruiting blogs that I wanted to add to Recruiting Pulse, but I could not find an RSS feed for their blog (which is odd), and I found some Ning-based sites that only offered a “recent activity” feed as opposed to feeds for posts or discussions.

If you are a blog author and don’t see your blog on any of the pages of Recruiting Pulse – please let me know if you would like to be added. I can’t promise to add every blog/site as I am looking to keep Recruiting Pulse to a relatively reasonable size. However, I am open to adding blogs with quality content and at least weekly posts.

I do plan to modify the site in the future to feature even more specialized categories (e.g., global recruiting) – so let me know if you have any ideas there.

I hope at least a few people find the site helpful!

LinkedIn Network Connections: How Do You Measure Up?

LinkedIn_Network_Stats_3.7.10You’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: Continue reading

Social Media and Recruiting – Beyond the Hype

Social Media Bandwagon by Matt Hamm via Creative CommonsI’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, LinkedInFacebook 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. Continue reading