So far in this blog I’ve concentrated on using social media to promote your business. However, some questions from clients in the past few days and a couple of news stories this morning got me thinking about using social media for recruiting.

When you’re thinking of hiring, you want several things: the best candidate, the least amount of time spent sifting through totally unqualified applicants and reasonable expense. How do you do that now?

I’m not going to get into the whole assessment process. This blog is about social media for business and that is the focus here. Let me talk about a couple of examples of using social media for hiring; one unique and one fairly mundane.

The news this morning reported that Sun Peaks, a ski resort near Kamloops, British Columbia, is launching a contest for a Twittering Snowbum (my terminology). They want someone who, over a period of three months, will attract some of the attention that Whistler is getting over to their resort. The job? The “snowbum” as they call him or her, is to ski, snowboard, engage in all the activities the resort has to offer and even test out its restaurants and then blog, tweet, facebook and youtube about it. Pay? As the resort puts it, they’ll be paid in snow dollars. They have a three month, all expenses paid vacation in exchange for their social media activities. If this excites your fantasies, you can visit the “I Want to Be the Snowbum” competition site.

Okay, that was the unique opportunity. Now, the less exciting but no less necessary. I friend of mine needs to hire a part-time research person for a business publication. My advice was, rather than advertise job postings on Craigslist, where, undoubtedly she’ll receive lots of exposure and lots of unqualified applicants, she should consider a job posting on LinkedIn. If you’re registered there (membership is free) you can post a job. You can also network with people about the job opportunity. The site is much more business oriented than Facebook or Craigslist. You may miss the outreach but you may also avoid the thundering hordes.

According to an article entitled, Build a Social Media Hiring Strategy, by Chris Penttila in Entrepreneur.com,

A June Jump Start Social Media survey of 100 hiring managers at small, mid-size and large companies found 75 percent go to LinkedIn to research job candidates before making a job offer, while 48 percent check out Facebook and 26 percent go to Twitter. When asked where they find talent for job openings, 66 percent said LinkedIn, 23 percent said Facebook and 16 percent said Twitter.

If you’ve had an experience using social media for recruiting and hiring, I’d love to hear from you.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, October 1st, 2009 at 1:36 pm and is filed under General, LinkedIn, Social Media Demographics, Types of Social Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.