Tag 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

Excellent New Twitter Talent Sourcing and Recruiting Tool

 

Tactics CloudDo you leverage Twitter in your sourcing and recruiting efforts?

If NO – I strongly recommend you read my 14 Tips on How to Use Twitter for Social Recruiting and see the two comments from Matt Chiasson.

If YES – would you be interested in a better way to search for and find people in your target talent pool on Twitter?

Look no further!

I received a notification from the Google+ Social Recruiting community last week that Hung Lee believes he found something that “pretty much destroys FollowerWonk as a Twitter sourcing tool.

“Destroy” is a strong word, but I would say Tactics Cloud gives FollowerWonk a thorough beating and I will be using Tactics Cloud as my primary tool when searching for people on Twitter. 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!

 

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

 

Facebook's Graph Search options of special interest to sourcers and recruiters: Employer, Position, Employer Location, Time Period, School, Class Year, ConcentrationAs 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 dating, Yelp and others in services, travel and entertainment, and yes, even LinkedIn and Monster in recruiting.

When Mark Zuckerberg himself says “One of my favorite [Graph Search] queries is recruiting. Let’s say we’re trying to find engineers at Google who are friends of engineers at Facebook,” it’s hard to not get excited about the possibilities of tapping into the data Facebook has on over 1,000,000,000 users globally, and over 167,000,000 users in the U.S. alone.

Don’t worry – this isn’t another Facebook-Graph-Search-is-an-awesome-disruptor article.

Rather than throwing fuel on the Graph Search fire, I am happy to throw a wet blanket instead.

Don’t get me wrong – I’m excited to use Graph Search, and I know sourcers and recruiters will be able to make use of it. However, there are some major limitations to Facebook and Graph Search specifically that I want to recognize and bring to light that will clearly explain why it isn’t a threat to LinkedIn. Continue reading

What’s Wrong with Job Boards?

What’s wrong with job boards?

Nothing, in my opinion.

However, from the ridiculous overabundance of articles, comments, and recruiting conference content that trashes job boards as if they are the worst source of hire, I am obviously in the clear minority.

I continue to see and hear well respected thought leaders in the staffing industry make claims that the value of the job boards is waning and that the quality of candidates on the job boards is low, and it hasn’t slowed down.

Because there is such a strong belief that job boards somehow only offer low quality candidates, I am taking the time to offer a different point of view, as well as leverage statistics to prove that the job boards have the same percentage of “A” players as LinkedIn or any other source of hire.

News Flash: Job Boards Still Very Much Alive

Weren’t the job boards supposed to die, like, 5 years ago?

Funny how that didn’t happen.

It so didn’t happen that they are responsible for more hires than any other source other than referrals.

The most recent CareerXRoads Source of Hire Report showed that job boards are still pretty effective, weighing in at the #2 spot.

 

 

The facts do not support the belief that job boards are an “ineffective” source of hire.

As you can see, job boards also solidly crush social media as a source of hire, which I am sure most people find a tough pill to swallow, especially given that “social recruiting” is supposed to be a magical solution to all hiring troubles.

Um, wasn’t social media supposed to kill the job boards?

I am sure that it’s supposed to happen any day now, but something tells me that even in the next few years, while the talk of social media killing job boards will continue, the source of hire statistics and surveys will continue to tell a different story. Continue reading

Do You Have the Proper Perspective in Recruiting?

Perception and PerspectiveIt is all too easy for sourcers, recruiters, HR professionals, and hiring managers/teams to develop a skewed, distorted, and decidedly one-way view of the world. Perhaps spending 99% of the time on only one side of the recruiting process is to blame.

Regardless of the cause, it is absolutely critical to regularly take the time and think about, understand, and appreciate the recruiting life cycle from the candidate’s side – the job seeker, the passive candidate, the non-job seeker, and the elusive “A+ player.”

In this article I’m going to walk you through over 10 different scenarios in which I think recruiters and hiring teams can benefit greatly by taking the candidate’s perspective into careful consideration.

If you don’t take well to being challenged to think differently from time to time, or if you don’t like long blog posts, you may not want to read any further. This one clocks in at 3700+ words.

Consider yourself warned. :-)

Continue reading

Why Sourcing is Superior to Posting Jobs for Talent

Posting a job online is perhaps the first action most companies take to attract talent when they have an opening.

However, posting jobs in an attempt to attract qualified talent has many intrinsic flaws, and here are the top 4 in my opinion:

  1. Posting jobs a passive strategy
  2. Posting jobs offers no control over candidate qualifications
  3. Job advertisements only attract candidates who are actively looking
  4. Posting jobs isn’t social!

In comparison, sourcing from Internet, LinkedIn, online resume databases, ATS/CRM systems and similar resources to discover and identify qualified candidates is an active strategy which offers significant control over candidate qualifications, can be used to specifically target passive and even non-job seekers, and is 100 times more social!

Read on for a more in-depth analysis of posting jobs vs. sourcing candidates, as well as to have your eyes opened to a new way of looking at the value/ROI of posting jobs. 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

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

What Social Recruiting is NOT

Social_Recruiting_NotAfter 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. Continue reading