The days of recruiting by shooting fish in a barrel have been gone for a while now.
Meeting Candidates Wherever They Are
Have you been following the continuing foolishness about whether Facebook or LinkedIn are the ‘best’ place for recruiting? It’s as if those pundits have not begun to grasp social media. Candidates don’t congregate where you want them to; they are in the places that are comfortable to them
The days of recruiting by shooting fish in a barrel have been gone for a while now. Recruiting is a mostly local sport that is won in the trenches on a case by case basis. The technology and the demographics have changed the game.
Any given communications channel may be exactly right or exactly wrong for your recruiting efforts.
The idea that there is one best place to recruit comes from a time when the newspapers held a near monopoly on recruitment advertising. Two or three major Recruitment Advertising Agencies ferried customer requirements to the newspapers and generated fortunes. The 1970s and 1980s were a great era for those companies and its’s been downhill ever since.
The past 20 years have belonged to the job boards (DICE was in operation in the late 1980s as a bulletin board housed beneath the founder’s bed in an apartment in San Jose.) Even though there are nearly 50,000 job boards, there was an overlap in thinking between the newspaper era and the first generation of internet Recruitment Advertising. There was still just one way to do it.(use a Job Board)
The last decade has given us an explosion of sourcing processes and techniques. What began as a few geeks learning Boolean searches and primitive web spidering exploded into an industry that may well be larger than the actual Recruiting it supports. Sourcing experts rarely agree on the boundaries of the discipline. It is definitely vast and complex.
In a nutshell the "is it LinkedIn or is it Facebook" debate is nonsense because the number of places where candidates hang their hats is exploding. What matters is not which one is the winner but which one makes you a winner. The truth only matters as it relates to your company or organization.
Every firm lives in some city and in some ecosystem. The people who inhabit that particular ecosystem do it in very particular ways. You reach out to them by going to where they are and fitting into their world on their terms.
