wow - job fair on Twitter

Nearly 90 percent of employers are using social media to connect with potential employees

Friday, July 15, 2011, By Jennie L Phipps | MLive.com Contributor

MLive.com
If you're not using Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn to  help you find a job, you're missing the boat.

According to a survey of U.S. companies released this week by Jobvite, which provides companies with recruiting software, 89 percent plan to recruit through social media this year, up from 83 percent in 2010.

About 64 percent say they use more than one social media website. But if you feel like you have to pick just one, make it LinkedIn. The survey found that 73 percent of all social media-based hires came from LinkedIn, with only 20 percent from Facebook and 7 percent from Twitter.

On Tuesday, July 19 at noon, a website called TweetMyJobs.com is having a job fair on Twitter. It doesn't cost anything to sign up for the site or the job fair -- and who knows, you might make a connection.

Five Ways Social Media Can Help Your Recruiting Efforts

Hiring activity is predicted to increase for the second half of 2010, so recruiters must have their candidate pipelines primed to compete for talent. Here's why social media, such as blogs and social networking sites (e.g. LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook), should be part of your recruiting strategy:

Blogging drives traffic to your site and builds brand recognition
If you have the resources, i.e. the time, energy and a bit of skill, regularly blogging about your industry or about career-related issues can generate significant brand awareness and drive traffic to your website. A blog on your domain can attract links, attention, publicity, trust and increase your site's search rankings. (Because blogs are generally updated more frequently than regular website pages, they can rank higher in searches.) Offering comments that add value to someone else's blog is another way to generate a following.  [Read more]

Marriott creates Facebook game for international recruitment

The gamification trend has been going strong in recent months, but until just recently we hadn’t seen it applied to recruiting. Sure enough, though, none other than hospitality giant Marriott International is now using a Facebook game to try to fill some 50,000 open jobs by the end of this year.

At My Marriott Hotel on Facebook, gamers begin by managing a virtual hotel restaurant kitchen, including buying equipment and ingredients on a budget, hiring and training employees, and serving guests. Much like in the wildly popular Farmville game, players earn points for happy [read full story]

PS -- best part of this story is that I heard about it on Twitter - hr tools gone socially viral :-)