There has been a lot written about how companies are using social networks sites like Facebook and MySpace to screen prospective candidates even before the interview process begins. There has been a lot less written about how companies can use social media to recruit new employees. Enter Affinity Circles.
Affinity Circles is:
the leading provider of exclusive social networks for established, professional organizations seeking to promote career advancement opportunities among their members. Today, more than 140 top tier organizations like Stanford, Dartmouth, Michigan, Golden Key Honor Society, etc. utilize the inCircle community platform to connect over 15 million verified alumni with preferred employers like Google, Merrill Lynch, Oracle, etc. in a trusted, exclusive environment.
Chuck Taylor, VP Marketing & Business Development at Affinity Circles recently published a white paper about how he sees the online recruitment and social networking space evolving and it makes for some interesting reading. While the white paper focuses mainly on Affinity’s inCircle networks there are interesting takeaways that are worth noting.
One is that job boards are going away.
According to recruitment industry expert Peter Weddle, there are more than 50,000 job boards and career portals in operation on the Internet. The proliferation of job boards has created confusion and frustration among job seekers and diminishing returns for employers. As a result employers waste valuable resources at a time when their staffing needs are most dire.
So what will replace the giant job sites like Monster.com? How about social networking sites? As the table below shows, social networks trail only employee referrals as the best source for finding new employees.
The future of online recruiting is not just in sites like LinkedIn, but in more closed sites (closed except to professional society or college alumni memberships). CareerXroads, a widely respected recruiting technology services and consulting firm, predicts that “the growth of thousands of closed social networks (closed except to professional society or college alumni memberships) will explode in the next 18 months and offer corporations direct access to millions of professionals with relative ease.”
If you are a college senior getting ready to graduate or an alum looking for a new job then stop focusing on the job boards and instead look for professional sites in your industry or college alumni sites. This is where 65% of business professionals are connecting with each other and employers, according to a recent survey by the Institute for Corporate Productivity.
Great Article. However, you mentioned the following:
“As the table below shows, social networks trail…”
I was unable to locate your referred-to table.
Thanks again for putting some of these pieces together.
Fantastic article!
I’ve been a recruiter for 9 years now and I finally got the company I work for to let me go outside of the box to recruit top notch talent.
I wrote a blog post about this:
http://www.jeffmccord.org/looking-for-a-new-job-use-twitter/
We use social networks (Facebook, MySpace, Twitter) and other specific job-niche networks all the time to post our jobs and find people that we would otherwise never find using the typical Monsters and CareerBuilders of the world.
Jeff McCord
http://www.jeffmccord.org
“This is where 65% of business professionals are connecting with each other and employers, according to a recent survey by the Institute for Corporate Productivity”
Do you have a link to this research? Please, let me know.
Great article
This sounds horrible. If the top jobs are only being advertised on these closed sites to the graduates of affiliated schools then if you graduated from a different institution you are on the outside looking in. As well if you are entering the workforce from another country, you can have all the skills and experience in the world, you would never know about the top tier jobs. This is great for alumni organizations, however wouldn’t in the long run your business falter for not being able to attract the best global talent. Not all schools produce good alumni, even the ones with a lot of money.
They do this same thing in the College admissions process now adays. They ask students to see their facebook, etc. That way the colleges get a better idea of what they are getting. Also students these days dont realize that even when you delete something it is still around somewhere and it could come back and bite them later in life.
A different issue is that video gaming became one of the all-time most significant forms of excitement for people of various age groups. Kids play video games, and also adults do, too. Your XBox 360 is one of the favorite video games systems for many who love to have hundreds of games available to them, in addition to who like to experiment with live with other individuals all over the world. Thanks for sharing your thinking.
Facebook is increasingly being used by companies to recruit job seekers of interest. This is where social recruiting platforms such as http://www.identified.com come into play. The site provides recruiters and companies with an opportunity to find and target job candidates of relevance and interest. Unlike Linked In where users have to create profiles from scratch, identified.com extracts relevant professional information from Facebook and gives job seekers the ability to update their data and view their ranking score. Users can sign up for a free profile. Companies and recruiters can subscribe to identified’s recruiting solutions to access a wide range of professional information related to job hunters and their quantification.