Social Recruiting

Matchmaker, matchmaker, make me a match.
Find me a find, catch me a catch.
Matchmaker, matchmaker, look through your book
And make me a perfect match. (Sheldon Harnick, Fiddler on the Roof)

There is a new way to find employees - social recruiting. The basic idea is an employer would interact with a community of potential employees to see how/ if their skills/personality would match the corporate culture. This would give visibility to an individuals professional life and provide a more complete picture than the regular three or four hand picked references.

This sounds like information overload - too much. Already we have an environment where it is not unusual for an organization to take 8 to 12 weeks to find and recruit an employee, and that is just for collecting resumes and interviewing. If you are required - like public institutions, to complete a background investigation and verify education it can take considerably longer. For example, I am just now hearing back from institutions that posted positions in June that they are starting the interview process.

Of course, there is a group of people social recruiting really works for - recruiters. A recruiter can use a social website like LinkedIn or Facebook to find people - especially people who may not be currently looking for a job. It is very clear why recruiters would like to connect to as many people as possible through social networks. This is especially important for LinkedIn users because the site limits your searches to three degrees of contact - you can see the people you know, the people they know, and the people who know someone you know.  For recruiters, adding more people - even people with the wrong skill set or industry - adds all of those people's colleagues and contacts.

This raises a dilemma for the individual - are you connecting to the right set of recruiters? Are you going for find a job offer that is right for you? Or are you just going to get offers?