I've been reading a lot these days about networking in business and trying to see how recruiters can manage the candidate recruiting in today's "social networking" crazy generation. Social networking uses technology to help people make connections with other people who are friends with their friends.
At Friendster.com, for example, you sign up for the service by filling out a form (with self-descriptive information) and linking that form to all of your friends. They, in turn, do the same thing which brings their friends into your network and your friends into theirs. Try that with 100 friends, Friendster claims, and you’ll have 800,000 people with whom you can connect. Cool, huh?
But, can social networking help recruiters connect with high 'quality' candidates? Well...I think it is not if it CAN or NOT. The question is HOW?
So how does social networking work? Just as it does in the real world. You connect with prospective candidates and develop relationships with them through personal interactions. In the real world, those interactions are typically one-on-one and face-to-face. On the Internet, they are one-on-many and occur via e-mail. Traditional networking usually takes place around business meetings or at the annual conferences and monthly get-togethers of professional and trade organizations; online networking, in contrast, takes place in the discussion forums and the bulletin boards of association, alumni organization and affinity group Web-sites. In the real world, you’re talking to a single prospect, while on the Internet you’re writing to and reading posts from all of the participants in the virtual conversation.
But why go to some other site to do your networking? Why go to LinkedIn, Ryze, etc or to alumni sites, when you could interact with great prospects right in your own Web-site?
In an industry that needs everything done yesterday, where deadlines are 'kings' and priorities are 'queens', the online social networking approach to recruiting perhaps doesn’t really work. Perhaps, the
LinkedIn and Jobster models may work for some industries, or for companies that have enough time on their hands to click around a website for hours, however, in other industries this is not the case. So if you and your company are striving to win the 'War-for-the-Best-Talent' online, why not consider networking on your own corporate career site. Yeah, create a discussion forum or bulletin board on your own site that stimulates, informs, entertains and educates the best and brightest in key career fields and they will come (and, even better, bring their friends and colleagues) by the hundreds or even thousands. Already, several companies are doing this. An example is Careers Nigeria - an online careers community that connects job candidates with recruiters. With their online discussion forum, they recruit recent graduates, graduates as well as professionals.
Think about it! Get your recruitment managers and ask that they select “A” level performers to moderate your online forums and/or bulletin boards that you set up on your company's site. Then, devote the first thirty minutes of your day to reading the posts to see who stands out and to interacting with those prospects privately to pre-qualify and pre-sell them. The return on that 2 ½ hour investment each week will dramatically enhance the quality of the candidates you recruit and lower your cost of doing so.
Thus, bringing your networking “in-house,” enables you to acquire its benefits privately and brands your organization as one that uniquely walks their talk when it comes to recruiting top talents.
