director of recruiting

Yet another use for blogs

In my experience, feedback is the number one thing missing from most enterprise employee referral programs. Employee submits friend, never hears back, never refers again. Or company puts up employee referral website, updates content once every 2 years, employees forget about program.

My old friend Ben Gotkin (formerly with MITRE, now with RSM McGladrey) has one potential solution: blogging. Imagine that every employee has subscribed to an employee referral feed through email (like what I have through Feedburner) or RSS. RSM's recruiting team could then provide regular updates on successful referrals (keeping the program top of mind and current); inform people about upcoming referral hiring events, critical openings and special bonuses; and even use the comments section as a way to get feedback on the program and employees' experiences.

Definitely an idea whose time has come. Incidentally, Ben's looking for suggestions on what to name the site and blog here. I would vote for Referral Madness (just to see what a pot reference - this a take on the infamous Reefer Madness - would do in a "conservative professional services culture").

Trend alert: niche social networks

Just when you're getting used to MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn and Friendster, a new shift in the way people network happens. Niche networks are starting to pop up everywhere, from recruiting (Jason Davis' Recruitingblogs.com, based on the Ning platform, which only launched two months ago but already has 60,000+ networks and counting) to physicians (Sermo, it's own platform on which doctors discuss topics like patient cases and drug side effects) to soccer fans (Joga.com, a partnership between Google and Nike). Dogs are even getting in on the action (www.dogster.com). This trend affects recruiters, candidates and vendors alike.

For potential candidates, niche social networks may sound onerous on the surface - maintaining multiple passwords, logins, etc. - but there's still a good deal of the population that haven't joined a major network but would join a smaller or niche one if invited by a close friend or colleague. In addition, we're much more used to multiple passwords on emails, content websites, online banking, e-commerce, etc. than we ever have been.

Although the prospect of searching through hundreds of thousands of social networks for the right candidate sounds daunting, recruiters may actually have the most to gain from them, as they could make it possible to find candidates online who are currently hiding out and not visible. Consolidated social network search engines like Eurekster and Wink may rise in utility if the networks themselves do not try to monetize their own search capabilities for recruiting purposes. In addition, if a network is niche enough, just finding the network itself may be enough to yield a treasure trove of information and leads for a recruiter or sourcer.   

In the vendor community, Facebook (Jobster and Vast.com partner with them) and Myspace (SimplyHired partners with them) still get the majority of headlines and would be tough nuts to crack in terms of partnerships. However, there is still room for other job boards to go niche and partner with a vendor like Ning or implement a value proposition for independent social network owners similar to the brilliant Job-a-Matic value proposition that SimplyHired offers to bloggers.

It could take a year or two before niche networks start to rival MySpace or Facebook in terms of number of users, but that shouldn't stop anyone from trying to leverage this trend now. After all, recruiters don't look for millions of candidates - they just need one good one.