Social networking used to recruit talent

“Social networking: how it changed networking and the next generation of online tools” is the title of a white paper published by Taleo. The document made me think of the two sides that recruiters face looking for job applicants in the cloud, one side is the broad availability of candidates and the other side is the overwhelming from hundreds or thousands of unqualified applicants. We all know that there are millions of people looking for jobs, recruiters need to understand how to filter information in order to get the right candidates; fortunately technology helps.

Social networking is still growing, there are people who haven’t tried sites like LinkedIn, Twitter, and so on; therefore, they won’t be found by recruiters using social media; there are traditional recruiting methods still in use, but for how long?. It seems like in the future almost everyone will be using social media and this technology will play an essential role in finding jobs/applicants. We as HR professionals have to be prepared to sort the huge amounts of information that we’ll be getting and we need to learn those technology applications that will make our work more efficient.

I recommend this white paper as a way to learn all those websites that people use; I found particularly interesting the fact that certain groups of people use some websites that are completely unknown by people with other characteristics. This knowledge might be useful when looking for candidates and at the same time we should keep in mind that we don’t want to violate equal employment opportunity regulations.