The Job Hunt Gets Social

More companies mining LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter for 'social recruiting' effort

August 14, 2011|By Gus G. Sentementes,
The Baltimore Sun

Gary Bacon spotted a Web designer job posting online several months ago and shot an email to a recruiter at Medifast Inc. But that was just the beginning.
Bacon connected with a recruiter, Caitlin Goldstein, and the conversation moved to Twitter. They tweeted back and forth, and Goldstein got to know Bacon, found links to examples of his work — and eventually felt confident enough to invite him to Medifast's Owings Mills headquarters for an interview.

Welcome to the brave new world of recruiting, which has expanded into social media. Just a few years ago, much of the action took place on online job boards, but now social networking sites such as LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter have supercharged the experience for recruiters and job-seekers alike.
"Everyone is using LinkedIn, and if you aren't, it's probably a little bit of a concern," said Jessica Lee, vice president of talent acquisition at the Washington communications firm APCO Worldwide and editor of Fistful of Talent, a popular blog about recruiting.

LinkedIn's many online networking tools have struck a chord — and opened a source of revenue — for the company in the recruiting industry. The company, valued at more than $8 billion after going public this year, derives much of its income from job ads and tools it sells to companies and recruiters looking for talent.
While job boards still fill a major need, such sites tend to attract mostly active job-seekers. Recruiters, always on the prowl for top talent to poach, are using social networks to better identify top professionals in their fields, connect with them through "word-of-mouth" approaches and lure them away with job offers.
Nowadays, a typical executive might have a resume posted on LinkedIn, a Facebook and Twitter account, a blog or their own website — and recruiters are busily mining those sites, Google and more for the right candidates.

Recruiters often are directed to find "passive" candidates — working professionals who are employed and who might not have considered changing jobs until they were made the right offer.
"LinkedIn is a gold mine for passive candidates," said Jay Feeley, practice leader and account executive at MRI GlobalSearch inTimonium.

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Should Employers Use Social Networking When Hiring?

The Debate

On the pro side, Greg Fish argued that social networking profiles aren't resumes and companies should not use them when determining if an applicant should be hired. "A public profile is a vehicle for casually interacting with others in an informal setting, on personal free time," he wrote. "When companies use these profiles to find not only a professional but also an ideological match for a job, they’re misleading themselves and building ill will with talented prospective employees, who might decline to apply for a job for fear a comment about China on their blogs makes them persona non grata."

Fish's arguement hinged on the premise that by utilizing social networking profiles in the hiring process, employees were opening themselves up to potential discrimination lawsuits, and worse may be doing so on the premise of false information.

On the con side, Timothy Lee said that there were plenty of legitimate reasons for employers to look at social networking profiles of prospective hires. "Employees in sales, public relations, and customer service function as representatives for the companies they work for, so employers have a legitimate interest in ensuring potential workers won’t embarrass the company," he wrote.
According to Lee, people shouldn't fear that an employer will get a hold of their social networking profile, but instead they should expect it and use it to their advantage. By using your social networking profile and other bits of your online persona as an "extended resume," workers can "demonstrate passion and depth of knowledge for his or her area of expertise."


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