Have you discovered a reason to be social online, such as promoting yourself, engaging customers, finding candidates for open positions, or branding and protecting your business? Social media is all the rage these days. It’s cheap, in most instances free, and can greatly improve your recruiting if used the right way. Social media is literally everywhere today as well, especially with the rapid adoption and use of mobile devices, including smart phones such as the iPhone, and free Wi-Fi enabling laptops and netbooks in major cities worldwide. If you are relatively new to the scene or need a quick social tune-up, here are three ways for recruiters to get started:
Discover Tools to Listen, Measure and Engage the Web
Many tools are now available to help navigate the social web. These include search engines, dashboards and social search tools. ScoutLabs, Radian6 and Trackur are among dozens of paid tools. Free options include the likes of Google Alerts. Being a user of many of these tools, I find that you generally “get what you pay for.” Free options and work-around solutions for scouring the web can be good, but don’t always have enough features for ample coverage. ScoutLabs is my social media weapon of choice currently as it offers a dashboard look into mentions of keywords and conversation of my choice happening on blogs, forums, photo sites, video channels and on Twitter. It searches millions of sites and online content to find job seekers, potential leads and like-minded people in recruiting and HR. It essentially puts me right into the conversation, saving hours of search in the process. This provides significant value in the social web for a low fee. My advice here is to choose a tool that best suits your needs and budget, then dive in. The learning curve for using most is not very steep.
Craig Ferguson of The Late Late Show on CBS has a robot sidekick, and his name is Geoff Peterson. Hey wait a minute, that's my name! I know this not because I watch his show or am a fan of his, but because Google told me.
About two months back I noticed an unusual amount of "mentions" on Twitter of my name. For those of you not familiar, mentions are references to your name on Twitter and are followed by messages. Well, I have been getting dozens of them at a time referencing a robot skeleton. What? There has been nothing in these messages of my recruiter training or sourcing work, no reference to my recent mobile presentations, no talk about my HR field at all. Just robot skeletons.
Messages have ranged from questions, to amusing comments to blatant insults. Originally I brushed this off thinking it was a mistake, a joke or just spam in the Twitter community. But after hundreds of these messages amassed on Twitter, I did some investigating of my own. A quick Google search was all it took. I discovered that Craig Ferguson and CBS had chosen my name, Geoff Peterson of all names for a robot sidekick comedy gag on The Late Late Show. CBS is now using my name with accounts set-up on Twitter, YouTube and other social media outlets online to benefit the Craig Ferguson show. This has all been too ironic for me, in that the name is spelled Geoff (the uncommon way to spell it) and not Jeff, the fact that the robot has a last name (my last name Peterson) and that the robot has a spiked mohawk (I have a spiked haircut). Coincidence?
There are plenty of people currently building great online brands, personas and reputations for themselves with the help of the Internet and social media. Dan Schawbel is a perfect example of someone that comes to mind. Google his name. You won't find any confusion there over who he is. Dan is a personal branding expert. When you Google my name, there is plenty to be confused about now that my name is associated alongside a robot comedy gag on Craig Ferguson's late night show on CBS.
Want to find the next outlet for recruiting talent? For starters, stay clear of recruiting communities, HR sites and your recruiting industry peers. Step "outside of the box" and your comfort zone with those in recruiting and HR, and get a completely new perspective. I was an early adopter of popular recruiting destinations today including LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter. Currently I'm working with newly emerging location-based recruiting technologies for mobile recruiters using Foursquare and Loopt. I credit my early adoption and findings to three main areas: social sites, blogs and news destinations, and content channels. If used properly, you too can stay ahead of the curve in the ever changing recruiting landscape. Here's some additional insight and tips into these areas.
Camp Out on Social Sites
Keying in on social sites should be a top priority for recruiters. With these sites, it's one thing to follow conversation from other recruiters and your peers, but it's another thing altogether to get an outsiders opinion. Friend, follow and listen to the wisdom of the crowds on Twitter and Facebook in particular. There are a variety of tools to help you get started with these social sites. Try TweetDeck and work to customize your columns with prominent people in the technology space, as well as people in marketing, sales and other areas that have some relevancy and crossover into recruiting. Pay attention to how people in these fields are being successful at their jobs and what tools, sites and strategies they are implementing to stay ahead of the pack. Check Tweetmeme to see what is popular on any given day. Look at popular Twitter lists on Listorious, as well as directories on WeFollow and Twitr to discover new people. I highly recommend Robert Scoble and his lists to get your feet wet here. Also in Twitter, watch the "trending" topics from your home page which will give you an indicator on what's most actively talked about. Regarding other networks, make sure to pay attention to conversations in technology and marketing related groups on Facebook and LinkedIn. Don't forget about Ning communities, Yahoo Groups and even MySpace. Active on your mobile? Check out MocoSpace, a mobile-based social network.
Have you noticed most recruiting strategies today are technical, revolving around social networks, the blogosphere or search engines? Forget Google. Drop Twitter. Leave LinkedIn. Disconnect from everything that's technical and has you glued to your computer or mobile device to recruit talent. There are plenty of other effective ways to reach job seekers without being dependent on machines. Packed inside this article are 50+ no-tech (no technology required) ideas to help recruiters build awareness for their careers offline and get a potential edge searching for candidates. Most are designed to get you out of your chair and hit the streets in one way, shape or form.
Events
Join the speaking circuit and offer to speak at local events. Find your local SHRM chapter or technology council. Attend Toastmasters, Dale Carnegie speaking courses or other networking events. Connect with The Chamber of Commerce on professional groups. Set-up a booth at a trade show or job fair. Contact local schools, churches and associations about classes, seminars and lectures you can speak or teach at. Offer demonstrations of your services or products in person at local stores or businesses. Pick a target audience and create a contest focused towards them, but make sure to offer a substantial prize that will raise eyebrows and get good word-of-mouth and traffic. Sponsor a local business event or even a sporting team in a little league. Don't overlook recruiting specific events from the likes of ERE, SourceCon and Onrec as well.
Have you heard? Twitter is changing the world. Never before has there been such a diverse and dynamic network that allows recruiters, technology enthusiasts and others a place to share, learn, search, grow community and reach people all at once. Twitter now has over 105 million registered users, and is much larger than most people and analysts had predicted. With Twitter developing recent partnerships with search engines Google and Bing, your tweets are not only being broadcasted to your followers on Twitter or those in the community, but literally to the whole world. This is huge! Tweets and status updates on Twitter now carry real power, and can show up in real-time on Google for example. With that in mind, tweets can be search engine optimized to get more attention by the search engines and ultimately produce more traffic to your career site, job openings or blog for example. The following is a 9 minute video that outlines my findings around Twitter, Google and SEO.
Some additional food for thought. I tested Google's real-time search engine with an SEO optimized tweet. I posted a tweet with the key words "recruiting videos" as the first characters and words in the tweet, provided a link to my site, and added in a descriptive hashtag. Sure enough, it appeared in Google (see screenshot). Due to Twitter traffic, with significant click-through to the link provided in my tweet, both my tweet and link appeared at the top of the updates page on Google in under 30 minutes. I also had tweets for "location-based recruiting" appear in real-time on Google's home page last week mixed in with other webpages and links, so it really works!
Let's talk sourcing. What does your playbook look like? How are you developing leads, traffic to your job listings, traffic to your career site, and traffic to your email inbox and phone? Are you primarily relying on paid methods such as job boards like Monster and Careerbuilder, and paid search listings on Google, or maybe even paid services such as Jobs2Web to produce desired job seeker traffic? These are paid strategies and can be very expensive. Also, guess what? Your competition is doing the exact same thing! But you already knew that didn't you? It's time to think in terms of organic for your sourcing strategies moving forward, as in ramping up organic traffic vs. paid traffic. It's a lot cheaper than paid strategies. In fact, it's free! Let's explore this concept of organic sourcing further.
I'm no SEO expert, but I've been tinkering with using different sites and communities online to generate organic traffic, as well as trying new things with this site right here. Specifically, I've been playing with metadata, metatags and watching and using specific key words carefully in each place I post something, say a job posting for instance. My ROI has been pretty good. I've been measuring with Google Analytics and a few other tools to get a clear picture of where my traffic is coming from, and see what's been working and what hasn't.
Here are a few things I've noticed that I think most recruiters will find helpful. First, Google works fast! I'm talking 24 hours fast. I put the keywords "location-based recruiting" in a recent post on this site (in several key areas of the post and in the metadata), and within a day, I was the #1 result on Google for that term: location-based recruiting. Getting into every specific detail on how to arrange your key words and other SEO tricks could fill a book, but I will give you a few things to explore on your own. Take a look at The New Community Rules: Marketing on the Social Web and also Search Engine Optimization for Dummies. No joke, these two books helped give me a new perspective on how to improve my sourcing skills, specifically in pulling more traffic and leads organically.
Do you have a social media policy in place for yourself? Does your company? How are you policing yourself in the ever-evolving social media landscape today, consisting of popular destinations like Twitter, Facebook and millions upon millions of blogs, forums and communities?
The phrase promiscuous linker has been tossed around online for those who friend, connect to, or follow everyone they possibly can. A good bit of recruiters I know are guilty of this very thing, and why wouldn't they? In order to be an effective recruiter, you need to be connected to as many people as possible in order to find the right, qualified talent to fill your positions. Does this sound like you? I know for a fact that it's me. I'm guilty of having bloated networks of people across various sites online. When I took a hard look at these communities recently, I realized that I didn't know 10% of those I was following, friends of, or connected to. The big difference though between myself and others is that I have been making strides this year to introduce myself to many of these people, making a real connection with a real person. I've been taking my online connections offline. I've been using the phone and also meeting people face-to-face. What a novel concept!
With that in mind, I decided to take it a step further and put a social media policy in place for myself, a social media "recruiting" policy in fact, to better navigate the social waters each day, instead of the unstructured approach I've taken the last few years. For this policy, I wanted to key in on a few areas that I believe most people in the recruiting industry can relate to. This social media recruiting policy will always be a work in progress, as the landscape of tools, sites, communities and especially rules of engagement continue to evolve.
Here are three areas my social media recruiting policy is focused on:
1) My Social Media Goals. To be me. To be authentic. To be personal. And with that, let the chips fall where they may. Using social media has been a true work in progress. At first, I was in the shallow end of the pool, simply watching, listening and only chiming in with very careful and calculated updates, tweets and comments. I made it more about me, less about others. Fast-forward to today. My social media game has been taken to new heights simply by getting more comfortable. I'm in the deep end of the pool now, engaging people in discussion, helping, sharing, and building a brand for myself and my company. I want to continue to add value to communities I'm apart of. I'm going to strive to make more introductions to people I don't know. I want to build an audience and community around things I care about, including recruiting and sourcing. I want to protect my name. All of this in mind, while continuing to exercise good judgement and represent my company and others that I consult for the best I can.
Are you using location-based services yet? Chances are you've received a "use your current location" pop-up message on your mobile phone by now. That message is being directed from a site you're visiting on the mobile web or from an application you've downloaded to your phone. These services want to use your current location to update you on local events, news, weather and even special offers and coupons from businesses nearby to you. The use of location-based services is an emerging trend being adopted today on mobile devices, smartphones in particular.
What does this mean for recruiting? Simply put, it's the closest thing to "real-time" recruiting we've seen yet. It allows several ways to not only discover new talent, but pinpoint exactly where they are at a given moment. This is a big-time game changer for the entire recruiting industry.
Here are the top reasons why recruiters need to pay attention to the location-based trend today:
1) Discover More Networking Opportunities. By now, you or your company should already have a presence on the most popular social and business networks including Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. While away from your desk or working remote, mobile devices have their own separate services, such as Loopt and Mocospace. These mobile social networks provide recruiters with yet another avenue to reach new talent that are unaccessible or not found through other means. For some, mobile networks such as Mocospace are the only means they have of being social online, as they do not have a computer at home or access to social networks at work. Statistics show that hispanics and households with lower incomes do not have access to the Internet from a PC. Recruiters must pay special attention to mobile networks for this reason alone.
Will the iPad turn recruiting on its head, much like the iPhone and mobile recruiting are right now? We're going to find out real soon! I picked up an iPad Friday and have been locked in my office since trying to find answers to that question. Here is what I've come up with so far:
Over the past year, I have recognized that the mobile space is the next frontier, the next evolution for recruiting. I have since developed my own mobile recruiting strategies and opinions, and had the opportunity to share them at ERE in San Diego last month in my mobile recruiting workshop.
The iPad is a gorgeous piece of technology that will bring out the "geek" in just about anyone, especially recruiters. Tablet PC's have been around for awhile, but nothing out there compares to what Apple has just unleashed. It has 150,000+ applications to start working with right out of the box, and 3,000 that are iPad specific. It's blazing fast, humming between anything you touch, search or command it to do. It's portable, being small enough and light enough to take with you on the go. It's not as small and convenient as a smartphone, but you'll want to make room in your work bag for this trust me. It's got enough under the hood to technically be a laptop minus the physical keyboard and extra bulk. However, once you start using it, it's clear the iPad is creating a category separate from smartphones and PC's.
How will recruiters use the iPad:
1) Work-around solution for restrictive environments. No access to Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter at the office? I understand. I've consulted with many companies that wouldn't let me get to these sites. The iPhone or smartphones offer a way to recruit through the popular social networks today, but are really only good for short periods of time. Bite-sized tasks. Enter iPad. The screen is 9.7 inches and gives you exactly what you need either through the web or social networking applications. TweetDeck for iPad is hands-down the best Twitter client on the market.
Is your profile open on Facebook? Yes, No. Not sure are you? I bet there's information sitting on your Facebook page right now that you might not want everyone to see. The problem with Facebook is that there are a ridiculous amount of settings for users to keep up with. I counted 105 individual settings between Facebook account settings, privacy settings and basic application settings. I didn't even factor in each individual application I have set-up for my Facebook profile, which would have put the number through the roof. Who can possibly keep up with all that? The average user doesn't. This is why Facebook is a goldmine for recruiters to discover talent. After all, Facebook has over 400 million profiles and is the largest social network on the planet. Facebook is all fast closing in on being the #1 most trafficked site in the world as well.
The search features on Facebook have their limitations. Ask anybody on that. But with all the settings and privacy loopholes for users to keep up with, recruiters can pull back a ton of free information from profiles. Don't worry about the search problems. Don't put too much stock in friending people to get the information you need. Just dig. This three minute video gives you an idea of what I mean.
This past month, I had the privilege of presenting on the topic of mobile recruiting at the ERE Expo in San Diego, California, and at First Interview in New Orleans, Louisiana. I have a strong passion for mobile technologies and mobile recruiting and sourcing in particular, as is evident in My Mobile Recruiting Starter Guide, a previous post last year.
The following is an abbreviated version of my three hour ERE workshop and my one and a half hour talk at First Interview on mobile recruiting titled, The Mobile Recruiting Experience. This slideshow gives an overview of mobile technologies and the mobile recruiting landscape. The reason for not including the original presentation is that it is loaded to the gills with hundreds of slides that require a personal guided tour. The full presentation will be made available upon request.
While some in recruiting at AT&T, Hewitt, KFC and CollegeRecruiter.com are making successful strides into mobile recruiting, I have found that mobile is a virtually untapped market. Most in recruiting haven't realized that mobile represents a smart and cost-effective means for finding, sourcing, recruiting and hiring talent today.
Is it just me, or do you get an obscene amount of spam these days? I'm talking about digital spam (emails, direct messages and texts). It can't be just me! I'm getting unsolicited spam in my email, in my Twitter stream, in my Facebook profile and pages, in my LinkedIn account, even on my cell phone by way of text messages. It's everywhere! I'm getting signed-up and opted-in to everything I come into contact with directly or indirectly. With so much unwaranted, unsolicited and unasked for marketing messages, sale inquiries and junk hitting me every day, it makes me want to jump off the "grid" altogether.
Being in the recruiting industry, I've found that in order to be successful, you have to be open. This means dropping pieces of your digital identity everywhere you go online. My details are now everywhere. You can find my work and cell phone numbers, as well as personal and work emails in social and business network profiles, job postings, user groups, associations and countless other sites. In my experience, you need to find creative ways to attract talent and bring them to you. This means being open and sharing ways to reach out to you directly. Now while this has really helped my recruiting game over the past several years, it has also opened the flood gates for anyone and everyone to reach me. The reality is hundreds pieces of unsolicited spam find me every day.
Quick disclaimer: I admit that I've been guilty of sending a piece or two of unsolicited email in the past. Who hasn't? I bring this topic up because it has reached an unprecedented level. A great deal of individuals and companies have taken it upon themselves to "opt" anyone within their reach into their messages whether they want it or not.
Here are three specific examples of how we live in the "Opt-In Age" and why we have no choice:
1. Connections on social and business networks. Belong to a few? I bet you do. LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter are among the most popular for business or personal use today. These networks are by far and away the best places to grab contact information on you. This is the #1 place I've witnessed spam originating from. Why? Because it's so easy. If you leave your email address on any online profile, know that anyone can simply grab it and add you to their marketing list. It's unfortunate but it happens. I've noticed many LinkedIn members have become very opportunistic, with some putting "fine print" in their profiles. They state that if you connect with them, you are subject to "updates" from them. Updates? Huh? When you become 1st degree connections with another LinkedIn member, they can see your contact information, including your email addresses. Take a look at Chris Shoulet's profile on LinkedIn and see what I mean. Also, don't get me started on the rash of @ and direct message spam flowing on Twitter.
Do you have a 
Is it just me, or do you get an obscene amount of spam these days? I'm talking about digital spam (emails, direct messages and texts). It can't be just me! I'm getting unsolicited spam in my email, in my 
