Social networking helps find jobs and job candidates

Last week, public relations professional Shannon Palmer shared how she utilized social media tools to land a job in Southwest Florida, more than 1,200 miles away from her Boston home. This week, Lori Burke, director of human resources at Neighborhood America in Naples, reveals how employers are using the same tools to find prospective employees.

Throughout her 20 years in HR, Ms. Burke has seen the recruitment process evolve from posting a typewritten job description on an office bulletin board, to posting positions online on such popular sites as Monster and Career- Builder, to today’s more direct link to potential candidates via LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook and YouTube.

“The HR profession is still learning how to best use this. You just have to jump in,” she allows.

For example, Ms. Burke encourages employers to take a cue from technology giants Cisco, IBM and Microsoft, companies that are placing recruitment videos on what she calls the “biggest sensation” for recruiting: YouTube. “They want to make it easy for you to find them. The whole idea is to broadcast their message,” she explains.

In a company’s search for new employees, Ms. Burke recommends LinkedIn’s Recruiter product, which was launched in early 2008.

Neighborhood America spends $5,500 a year for access to LinkedIn’s entire database, which as of mid-October totaled 50 million users worldwide. Access allows Ms. Burke to search for candidates around the globe whether by location, by skill set, by job title… anything.

When compared with the cost of a placing an ad in the newspaper, Ms. Burke believes this tactic is a no-brainer.

As a LinkedIn user, she also takes advantage of the groups and associations feature. LinkedIn allows each user to belong to no more than 50 groups; Ms. Burke belongs to 48 and she advertises job openings on each group page, including those for her college alumni association, HR Collier, Florida Recruiters and the Social Media Club of Southwest Florida, to name a few.

Twitter is yet another tool she uses to connect with potential job candidates.

She warns employers, however, that while all of these sites are great, you must be careful in how you use them. In this time of high unemployment, for instance, one job opening post could inundate you with a slew of resumes, and not necessarily qualified candidates.

Once you’ve located a qualified candidate, though, it’s no longer necessary to spend precious company dollars to fly that person to you for an interview. Free services like Skype, which only requires a computer and a web cam, allow an employer to meet a potential employee face-to-face. Sure, you might not know if they are wearing their bunny slippers, Ms. Burke jokes, but you will have that eye contact and you will be able to observe their body language.

“The best thing about these new tools is the ability to modify your ad and adapt quickly,” she says. “In your overall recruitment strategy, this should supplement what you are already doing.” 