Recruiting Through Social Media

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.

Filed under Social Media Marketing, Social Media Optimization : Comments (3) : Mar 21st, 2008

3 Responses to “Recruiting Through Social Media”

  1. Adamant Solutions Says:
    March 21st, 2008 at 6:59 am

    Recruiting Through Social Media…

    […] Courtesy of Social Media Optimization […]…

  2. Michael Langham Says:
    May 12th, 2008 at 11:26 am

    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.

  3. Jeff McCord Says:
    June 21st, 2008 at 4:02 pm

    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

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