The Future of Recruiting is Social, and it's Happening Now

This post was originally published as a contributed guest posting at Silicon Angle.

The past few years have seen the social web truly take off. Activity streams are replacing email and conversations are happening all the time, all across the internet. People are now more connected, more informed, more knowledgeable and more adaptable than ever before. What this means for the online recruiting world is that for every recruiter who has a job posting with a list of pre-qualifications; there are hundreds or thousands of people who would be a perfect fit, whether their resume says so or not.

Until the birth of Linkedin in 2003, the online recruiting and job board industry was dominated by a few key players; namely, Monster and Career Builder. Recruiters posted jobs, candidates applied for jobs, and sometimes a match was made. That’s it, there was no interaction, no getting to know each other, just a job posting and a resume.

Linkedin recognized that this model was not going to work much longer, so they introduced premium services that let recruiters search for, contact and learn more about candidates. Since then, the smartest organizations have slowly realized that a generic job posting will, at best, get them a generic employee. Today, if a company is only recruiting through the major job boards, they’re probably a company you don’t want to work for.

Today, the online recruiting world is officially going social, whether recruiters are ready or not. My company, Brazen Careerist, is providing recruiters the tools to see past a traditional resume to create real relationships with tomorrow’s leaders through conversations, and to get a glimpse at our members thoughts and ideas that can translate to future action. Last week we launched Social Resumes to provide tomorrow’s leaders with the tools to showcase the ideas and abilities they display every day when they participate in conversations online. The goal is to make sure our members never have to settle for a job that makes them want to jump off a bridge every day.

We’ve built our product offering and our company based on two ideas. The first idea is that people now have the power.

Despite the recession, we no longer live in a world where people feel lucky to have a job. People are all free agents, they change jobs frequently, they drop out of the workforce to start companies and they take time off to watch their kids grow up. Demanding relevant experience and telling people they should be excited to work for your company in a generic company description is a recipe for disaster.

When people have the power, recruiters have to meet them on their turf and engage them in conversation. I can’t tell you how angry I get when I see job descriptions that brag about their “great team environment” and list “superior execution and operational capabilities” as a key qualification.

When people have the power, you do not have permission to tell them that you are looking for specific experience or provide a canned description of your corporate culture. First you have to introduce yourself, join a conversation, and provide value. Then you have permission to tell someone why your job is a perfect fit, the same way you would tell a friend.

The second idea is that people make the best matches.

According to the Wall Street Journal, 90% of jobs are filled through employee referrals. The number sounds high, but when you really think about it, this makes sense. People make the best matches. Employees want to work with friends, and they’ll happily take a $5,000 referral bonus to do someone a favor – if they really believe the job is a good fit.

No search engine or algorithm can compete with a human connection when it comes to matching. There are just too many variables in place. Monster recently launched a pretty impressive Semantic search engine to try to make better matches. The technology is amazing, light years ahead of its competitors. But the truth is that the future of online recruiting is not simply in search engines. It’s in human connections and conversations.

Be Known for Your Ideas with Your Brazen Careerist Social Resume

Since diving into the world of social media I’ve had countless inspired ideas and conversations about business, entrepreneurship, Generation Y and more. I’ve also been able to create some amazing connections and relationships based on these conversations. What I’ve realized is that the social media tools we use every day give us the power to be known for our ideas. It’s pretty amazing stuff.

The only problem is that all of these great ideas get lost in the shuffle of real time status updates, endless blog archives, and short attention spans. If I wanted to show someone what my online persona was all about, I would have to dig up a bunch of old links and point them all over the internet. It works, but it’s certainly not efficient.

Today, we launched Social Resumes to combat this problem and to make your everyday use of social media truly useful for your career.

A Social Resume is the first of its kind, active, live resume that lets you showcase your top ideas from around the web and share them in one convenient place. It’s a resume that highlights your thoughts and future plans as much as your past experience.

Thousands of people are already engaging in conversations and feeding blog posts and tweets into their Brazen Careerist profiles. Now you can scan all of this activity, determine what best represents your professional brand, and add it directly to your Social Resume. If you don’t want to dig through old posts or you have some great ideas that aren’t on Brazen Careerist yet, you can go directly to your Social Resume and add a top idea in the box provided.

Here’s a screen shot of my Social Resume to illustrate:

We’ve been beta testing Social Resumes for the past week, and I’m already blown away by the ideas people are sharing and the different ways everyone is using their Social Resume.

Emily Jasper browsed through her activity and added her blog post “Hi My name is Emily and I’m pro corporate” as one of her top ideas. People can now go directly to Emily’s Social Resume to read all 12 comments and join the conversation right there.

Dale Beermann took a different angle and decided to enter some ideas directly into his Social Resume. Dale’s #3 top idea says,

“Engineering is only a means to determine and achieve a particular goal, not the goal in and of itself.”

He makes a great point.

Ellen Nordahl took an even different approach. Ellen gave a quick explanation of one of her favorite blog posts, “Starting over in the same city” and then linked directly to the post. Readers can now visit Ellen’s blog to join the conversation, or leave a comment on her Social Resume.

The coolest thing about your Social Resume is that it can be used however you choose. You have 10 chances to show the world the ideas that best compliment your traditional resume and represent your professional brand.

Traditional resumes show people your experience; what you’ve done, where you’ve worked and what you’ve accomplished. This is all useful information, but it doesn’t provide any insight into how you think or what you plan to do in the future. You show the world these things every day when you engage in conversations online. Now you have a place to showcase it all.

To learn more about Social Resume’s and see a tutorial video on how to use them, check out our Social Resume reference page.

Are Entrepreneurs Born, Or Can They Be Made?

“(Most entrepreneurs) simply got tired of working for others, had a great idea they wanted to commercialize, or woke up one day with an urgent desire to build wealth before they retired. So they took the big leap.”

Vivek Wadhwa, an entrepreneur turned academic, claims that despite the common misconception that entrepreneurs are a certain “type” of person, most entrepreneurs are not simply born with the ability to start and build businesses, they learn how to do this over time. It’s the classic nature vs. nurture argument, and many well respected people including the likes of Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures and Jason Calacanis of Mahalo, are bullish on nature.

However, Wadwha’s survey of 549 successful entrepreneurs proves otherwise. More than 50% of these entrepreneurs were the first in their family to start a business, only a quarter caught the entrepreneurial bug when in college, and very few were running lemonade stand businesses when they were in diapers.

Personally, I didn’t know I wanted to be an entrepreneur until late in college when an entrepreneur friend of mine told me he thought I’d make a good one. My parents were very interested in their jobs and often dinner conversation turned to work, but they did not run their own businesses. And sure, I may have sold Gatorade that my mother bought for a huge mark up one time when I was 8 years old, but I certainly wasn’t running a lemonade stand monopoly.

I guess I’m a lot like the people Wadhwa refers to above. One day I woke up and knew I had no interest in working for someone for the rest of my life. I needed excitement, I needed passion and I needed to do something that mattered. Now, I can’t see myself ever doing something else.

As long as you have a great idea and you’re willing to work harder than you can possibly imagine, anyone can be an entrepreneur.

What do you guys think? Are entrepreneurs born or can they be made?

Facebook Privacy Issues: Changing Society or Just a Smart Business Move?

Last week, following the recent changes in privacy settings, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg said that if he were to create Facebook again today, user information would be public by default.

Personally, I think Facebooks recent shift in privacy settings was a smart move. For the social web to truly be “social,” data must be freely available to everyone.

Twitter understood this when developing their service and we understood it when deciding to make Brazen Careerist open. Also, as services like Twitter, Blogging and Brazen Careerist have become more and more prevalent, people seem to be less concerned with online privacy. I’m conscious of what I say online, and I have nothing to hide, so privacy is a non factor for me.

But the real reason I think it’s a smart move for Facebook is because opening the site will improve their bottom line. When you open everything up, people become much more aware of what they post and what they don’t post online. And when 350 million people are consciously monitoring what they post, the number of beer bonging photos and mentions of last night’s illegal escapades will go way down. When these things go way down, advertising rates go way up..

However, this post by Greg Tracy made me think of the issue in a whole new way. Tracy argues that privacy absolutely matters for Facebook, and Twitter and blogging are terrible data points. They are poor data points because Facebook is different. Facebook is supposed to be an online extension of your everyday offline life. Offline, you have private conversations with your neighbors on the sidewalk or with your coworkers at the water cooler. These conversations would never be shouted for a neighbor down the street to hear you or for your boss in the corner office to find out what's going on.

Tracy goes on to say that people aren’t changing and Facebook will not make them change. Facebook is merely a new medium to do the same things we have always done. Twitter and Blogging are very different. Twitter and Blogging are not supposed to be an extension of your offline life. They are meant for public consumption, just like newspapers, magazines and television are meant for public consumption.

Tracy makes an excellent point. Facebook could be making a huge mistake by following the lead of Twitter and other new, open sites. But, it could also very well be that they recognize there is no money in being an extension of offline life, and they are making the smartest business decision they can by downplaying privacy.

If Facebook truly wants to be the place where you live your life online the same way you live your life offline, they are making a mistake by downplaying privacy issues. You can change the medium, but you can’t change how people fundamentally behave.

However, if Facebook believes that they are not merely a new medium to do what you have always done, but instead they are a new media tool designed to give people a brand new way to behave and communicate, then Facebook is on the right track.

I’m sure Facebook will go whatever route can make them the most money, but whichever way they decide to go, they’re going to piss some people off, and they’re going to leave the door wide open for a new service to come along and fill in where Facebook does not.

What do you guys think? Is privacy a major issue for you? Do you agree with Zuckerberg?

Use Social Media to Make Every Employee a Recruiter

Linkedin started the concept of Social Recruiting when they launched in 2003, and now it’s the buzz of the recruiting world. ERE just hosted a social recruiting conference to discuss the do’s and don’ts of social recruiting. Of course, some of the hot topics are around whether Twitter, Facebook and blogs are a good way to recruit candidates, and if so how do you go about recruiting them?

Whether or not these sites can help you recruit talent is not really a question. Of course they can. But because these sites are not built for recruiting and do not offer products to aid the recruiting process, it’s not an easy task. There are hundreds of ways to source candidates through these networks and if you spend enough time on them, you’ll find the talent your organization is looking for.

Unfortunately, sorting through all of the crap on Facebook and making sense of the rapid fire tweets on Twitter to find the right candidates takes a ton of time. Considering most recruiters are hard pressed to find an extra second in their day, it can be difficult to justify giving social recruiting a try.

One thing a company could do is ask their recruiters to work more hours. Of course, this won’t work. Recruiters will leave for another company so they can have a life.

Another option might be to have social media specialists. Put your least experienced, most tech savvy recruiters in charge of social media and don’t have them bother with phone calls or emails. Again, probably not a good idea. Phone calls and emails still work; social media will not change this.

What you should do is listen to the advice from two recent posts by John Sullivan on ERE.net. The author tells companies to stop worrying about how to get recruiters to use social media for recruiting and instead get your recruiters to start thinking of themselves as managers and organizers, responsible for getting your employees on the front lines.

Sullivan says, “Social media erupted as tools to facilitate interaction, and interaction in too many aspects of one’s life can be time consuming and exhausting! Fortunately there is an answer to this problem: don’t do it alone. Use employees to build relationships, and then take advantage of those relationships!”

There are hundreds of millions of people on social networks, and each of your employees is probably connected to thousands of them. It’s already a proven fact that the number one source of new hires is referrals. If you want to improve your situation and attract top talent, your organization should be focused on how to get even more new hires through referrals.

When you really think about it, social media is built for this; it’s the ultimate referral tool. Social media is based on relationships, conversation and existing connections. When you have those things, the need for cold calls, random job postings and advanced search techniques goes way down.

If you really want to capitalize on “social recruiting,” figure out how to make each of your employees your #1 recruiter, than sit back and watch your successful new hires go through the roof.

For some great tips on how your organization can do this, check out John Sullivan’s most recent post on ERE.