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 … Read More

Important Facebook Graph Search Developments

  It is difficult to ignore the potential of Facebook when it comes to sourcing and recruiting given that it has 1.38B monthly active users and 890M daily active users. When Graph Search was introduced back in 2013, it was an amazingly powerful people sourcing tool.  However, recent changes have somewhat reduced its efficacy. While some people might think that … Read More

Facebook’s Hiring Surprise is Good For Sourcing & Recruiting

  Nearly a year ago I stumbled across an interesting post on LinkedIn that revealed that Facebook’s single biggest recruiting focus was NOT what most people would assume. Can you guess what it might be? Software engineering? Nope. Infrastructure? Wrong. People and recruiting? Not even close.

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

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 … Read More

How to Find Military Veterans for Sourcing & Recruiting

In a similar vein to my recent diversity sourcing article, I wanted to create a resource for people looking to effectively search for and identify military veterans for recruiting. While this posts focuses on the U.S. armed forces, I encourage folks from other countries to create and distribute similar searches to identify their own military veterans. If you’re interested in … Read More

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:     Additionally, I thought … Read More

Facebook Now Charges Users to Send Messages?

  If you live in the U.S. – have you noticed that Facebook now charges $1.00 for you to send a message to someone that you’re not “connected to” on Facebook? No? Go ahead, give it a try. You might encounter something like this:     If you’re in the U.S. and you don’t get a message like the one … Read More

Facebook Graph Search Sourcing and Recruiting Initial Test Drive

    For those who don’t yet have access to Facebook’s Graph Search – I put together a video detailing 5 live searches for: product managers who work at Microsoft and live in Seattle software engineers who work at Google and live in New York (developer OR programmer OR engineer) underwriters in Charlotte accountants who live near Alpharetta I must … Read More

Why Facebook Graph Search is No Threat to LinkedIn…For Now

  As with all new and bright shiny objects, people are quick and eager to make blind and wild predictions, and Facebook’s Graph Search is an excellent example. Facebook announced Graph Search on January 15th, and there are already 100’s of articles published on the possibilities, including how Graph Search will challenge Google in advertising, Match.com & eHarmony in online … Read More

One Job Board to Rule Them All? Hint: It’s not Facebook.

Like many people in HR/recruiting, I recently read about Facebook making the jump into offering searchable jobs. What took them so long anyway? Apparently, Facebook is planning to launch its own job board later this summer, and the board will aggregate the job postings of third-party providers, making them available for search by Facebook users. This comes after Facebook announced … Read More

Searching Facebook for Sourcing and Recruiting

As Facebook approaches 1 billion users globally, it would be folly to ignore the vast amount of human capital data that Facebook has to offer. However, as I have written and spoken about many times, the value of data is directly proportional to the ability to retrieve it. And therein lies the rub of Facebook. It’s just not very searchable, … Read More

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 … Read More

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 – … Read More

Social Media and Recruiting – Beyond the Hype

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 … Read More

U.S. Visitors to Facebook Declines in August

I’ve been making a habit of posting the U.S. traffic data for the “big 3” social media sites (Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter – the ones that seem to matter most to sourcers and recruiters) on a monthly basis. Last month, I predicted that all 3 of the sites would experience a decline in monthly unique U.S. visitors, and as it turns … Read More

Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook July 2009 Traffic Data

I’m always interested in the traffic for the “Big Three” social media sites (Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn), and I discovered today that  www.compete.com just released July’s data.  And here it is! Facebook While Facebook’s been on a tear of growth as it passed the 250M member mark, Facebook only added 117,142 unique U.S. visitors in July 2009 . That seems like a large number – … Read More

Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook June 2009 Traffic Data

I routinely check www.compete.com for the latest traffic data for my favorite social media sites and was pleasantly surprised to find June’s data has been released. I will review the June traffic data for Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook (aka, the “Big Three”). Twitter Twitter experienced explosive growth from February 2009 to April 2009, going from 7.9M to 19.4M unique U.S. visitors before leveling … Read More

How to X-Ray Search Facebook for Candidate Sourcing

I recently wrote a post on how to search for candidates on Facebook where I featured all of Facebook’s “built-in” search capabilities. Shortly after publishing the article, I received a question from one of my regular readers asking why I did not include searching Facebook using the site: query modifier (as Google calls it), also known as X-Ray search. It was a … Read More

How to Search For Candidates on Facebook

If you’ve been reading my blog for a while now, you already know I am a fan of highly searchable, “deep” sources of human capital data. Unfortunately,  Facebook isn’t deep on professional data nor is it very searchable. When it comes to social media/networking sites, nothing comes close to LinkedIn when it comes to the “searchability” and depth of professional information … Read More

Searching Facebook for Candidates

I recently received a request from a reader to come up with some example Boolean Strings for finding software engineers on Facebook who are from Top 10 schools (Stanford, Berkeley, MIT, CMU, etc) and live in the Silicon Valley. ***Quick disclaimer*** I am definitely not a Facebook sourcing guru – I don’t see it as a high yield source for … Read More