I've been reading up a bit on how to boost your facebook presence - or more specifically, how to get better results from posting on your Facebook Page. Put simply, with a userbase some five times that of LinkedIn, Facebook remains a social platform that recruiters simply can't afford to ignore.
 

Hence when I came across the following infographic with 18 tips to boost the effectiveness of your postings on your Facebook page, I thought this well worth sharing. Especially as many of the ideas resonate with what I would consider to be best practice in other social recruiting channels, eg:

• Making sure your posts are interesting, informative or entertaining
• Being sure to include a visual element to your Facebook posts
• Keeping your posts concise
• Asking questions to gather valuable feedback and to start dialogues
• Being consistent in your posting patterns
• Paying attention to the analytics showing how successful your Facebook presence really is
• Ensuring you're responsive
• ...

I hope that - like me - you find this a great resource for figuring out how you might improve your Facebook presence. If any of the ideas particularly resonate - or you have other ideas that have worked particularly well for you - please do share in the comments section below!
 

18 Key Insights To Boost Your Facebook Presence
 

18 Sweet Tips for Facebook Page Posts infographic

I’ve been troubled by something of late: a dark side of social media. Hear me out if you will…

Imagine for a minute that social media could be harming equality and reinforcing class divisions, undermining legislation and government policies whose aims have been to do the exact opposite. That’d be pretty shocking right?

Unfortunately I fear this may be exactly what is happening.
 

Rewinding to the Recent Past

In recent years, great strides have been taken to try and create a level playing field for anyone wanting to pursue career opportunities. Discrimination in the jobs market on the basis of age, sex, race – all have been outlawed. Increasingly job applications were being submitted where this information was not disclosed and so couldn’t form part of the interviewing selection process.

Of course people’s connections and “the Old Boys’ network” still meant some were better placed to achieve career success than others. But I viewed social networking as the great leveller. If your upbringing and social standing meant you didn’t have the same connections as someone else, here was a medium you could invest your time in to dramatically close the gap.

Not so Fast

What’s come to concern me of late is the dramatic rise in the use of social platforms (eg. LinkedIn) for corporate recruiting purposes. Major corporations around the globe have been investing in internal recruiting teams to go out and proactively approach people they’d like to employ, with social media as the tools enabling this change. The use of recruitment agencies and headhunters has fallen sharply as a result – and some commentators are even suggesting that fewer and fewer vacancies are ever openly advertised in this new recruiting era. I’m certainly seeing this in the markets I’m connected to.
 

Two Reasons to be Concerned

There are two aspects to this that concern me:

The first aspect is of greatest concern – and that is the fact that in this new era, fewer and fewer candidates are going to be considered for top career openings. If you didn’t go to the right school, haven’t worked for the right companies since graduation, aren’t a perfect match for the job spec… well you’re out of luck, perhaps today more than ever before.

In the days when recruitment agencies accounted for a high proportion of all hires, I used to recommend that candidates should work with one if they were finding it hard to secure interviews (because they weren’t quite the right fit for the roles they sought). Often times, a recruitment consultant would meet the candidate and would advocate to the major corporate that they should interview them, irrespective of their shortcomings, based on the calibre of the individual they’d met and the potential they believed that candidate had. Recruitment consultants played a valuable (albeit unintentional) role in ensuring equality of opportunity.

Fast-forward to today and you have corporates who are seeking out candidates via social media and approaching them to be interviewed for roles that are never advertised. The decisions they are taking about who to interview are based purely on the strengths of people’s social profiles – that’s to say whether they attended the right schools, worked at target competitors and so on. Well to me this is hiring to a mould. If you fit the mould you’re in with a chance. If you don’t fit the mould you never even get to be considered as an applicant.

Social Mobility In Jeopardy

But wait! Increasing social mobility requires companies to be increasingly willing to hire outside of the mould. Opportunities should fall to those most capable of doing the job, rather than to those who went to the right schools. Yet the recruitment and advertising offerings of social media sites achieve the exact opposite. They enable corporates to only open their plum jobs up to a highly select group of target candidates. They facilitate jobs being filled without ever having been advertised at all.

Now as the economy turns around, to a degree this problem will recede. As companies find it harder to make the hires they need, the goalposts invariably get moved in a way that means a broader pool of candidates are considered for the openings. But the fact remains - irrespective of the economic climate, we have a jobs market now that deters social mobility more than if social media had never been invented.

But wait, there’s more – the second aspect of social media that concerns me…

Think now of the information that businesspeople are more or less compelled to make available to employers via social networking sites. If you consider it essential for your business standing to have a LinkedIn profile – as I think could be argued to be the case in many many sectors – then what information do you find yourself having to divulge to a prospective employer? Everything that legislation has sought to remove from the job application process – sex, race, age – is information we inadvertently share with prospective employers through our social profiles.

Given that many employers say they now turn to a candidate’s social profiles as one of the first things they do when reviewing their job application, it’s hard to imagine that this hasn’t set the equality movement back considerably. Instead of reviewing applicants’ details without any access to discriminatory information, they’re now doing so with all this information in front of them. Indeed, they could even have chosen who to approach about the job in the first place based on that information.

Concluding Remarks

You can imagine this has been a hard post for me to write. I created Social-Hire because I was excited by the possibilities social media offered for opening up the jobs market and allowing anyone to network their way to greater careers success. I still believe this aspect of social sites is a very important means of empowering people to fulfil their aspirations. But I’m also seeing the dark side of social media at work and felt a duty to open your eyes to what I believe is happening out there. I’d be very interested to hear your take on this. Please do share in the comments section below.

Image courtesy of Pinstamatic

Using Google+ in your job search – is that shrewd? Essential? Overkill? In this article I’ll share with you my thoughts on the effectiveness of using Google+ in your job search – along with the steps you can follow to get yourself up and running as a Google+ job seeker.

(Note: whilst written with the job seeker in mind, much will also be relevant for recruiters wanting to explore a new social recruiting tool)
 

Google Communities: Job Search Advice + Recruiter Contacts

Background: Using Google+

So Google+ has been through the mill the last couple of years. Launched to great fanfare, it was both praised and ridiculed during its infancy. Praised for much of the functionality and interface, plus the way it lends itself to being a more business-oriented / professional social networking site. Praised for the speed with which the platform gained users. Yet ridiculed because the time spent on the network by each of its users was truly pitiful compared with Facebook and Twitter.

Fast-forward to today though and you now have a social network recognised as being the second largest in the world – sat behind Facebook but miles ahead of LinkedIn in terms of user base. The active user base long since shot past the 300 million users mark. Compare that to the 200 million total users that LinkedIn has just reached (a proportion of whom are inactive accounts) and you can start to see the potential reach Google+ can give you in your job search is enormous.

As its fans will tell you, the fact that people spend far less time on Google+ than on Facebook or Twitter is a reflection of people’s activities on each platform. Gossiping with friends, sharing family photos and the like from the environment of one’s home is invariably going to eat up hours in a way that sharing great business content and striking up business relationships never could. LinkedIn and Google+ are quite alike in this sense, as figures for time spent on site show (see Mashable’s time spent on social media piece)

So if Google+ has far more active users than LinkedIn, lends itself to business networking (and dare I say it, suffers far less from spam)… then the case for using Google+ as part of your job search is stronger than you might have imagined. Whether it’s right for you will depend on the sectors you operate in (and the geography), plus the traction you already have on other social networking sites; most crucially, it’ll depend on whether the employers / recruiters you want to reach are active on the site and therefore there for you to reach out to.

Let’s assume that your research shows this to be the case. What steps should you then be taking to use Google+ as a job seeker?

Using Google+ in Your Job Search: 7 Steps To Follow

Below are the 7 things I'd recommend you do if you want to incorporate Google+ into your job search strategy:

1. Create a professional and keyword-optimised profile

Create your Google+ profile as if it were your LinkedIn profile. Assume it will be looked at by recruiters and employers – and therefore is i) professional in its entirety, ii) comprehensively filled out and iii) consistent with your CV / Resume.

Keep in mind that recruiters actively search platforms such as LinkedIn and Google+ for candidates who may be a fit for their openings. It’s therefore critical that you take a few minutes to do some research and keyword optimise your profile in ways that maximise its chances of showing up in recruiters’ searches. If you need some ideas on how to do this check out the earlier post on optimising the wording of your LinkedIn profile.

2. Organise your activity around targeted circles

A great feature of Google+ is the ability for you to organise the people you follow (“add to circles”) by circles whose names and activity you control. You can create as many circles as you need and add people to as many circles as seem relevant. Other people will not know the names of your circles or how many circles you have added them to. They will simply be notified at the point when you first choose to add them to one of your circles.

This is a really powerful feature for a job-seeker. Just think for a moment…

• You can now create a Circle for people at each employer you aspire to join.
• You can create a Circle for contacts you’ve made within HR departments / Recruitment teams.
• You can create a Circle for recruitment consultants who serve the markets you are interested in.
• You can create a Circle for people who share great content relating to the industry you work in.

The possibilities here are endless. What’s powerful though is that – depending on the stage you’re at in your job search process – you can focus in on the activities of particular circles. At the point you’ve secured a job interview with a particular employer, you’re going to want to monitor what the people working at that employer are currently talking about. You’re also going to want to step up your efforts to engage with the people working at the target companies where you have yet to secure a job interview.

3. Explore Google+ Communities

If you’re not familiar with them already, Google+ Communities are Google’s take on a LinkedIn Group. The downside of Communities is that they are very new – and so the membership of each is only a fraction of what you’d find on LinkedIn. But the flipside is that Communities seem far less prone to spam – and the engagement levels you’ll enjoy within Communities certainly seem higher. Have a search to see what Communities there are serving the markets and geographies you are interested in. If there are some already established, they may offer up quick wins for you to engage with recruiters and helpful contacts in a short space of time.

(You're welcome to join our Google+ Community for job seekers and recruiters to see how they work)

4. Get on other users’ radars!

As with other social media, you want to get on people’s radars in ways that are unobtrusive / helpful / engaging (as opposed to coming across as a needy / desperate candidate!). As has already been remarked, adding someone to your Circles will result in them being notified that you have done so – and therefore being prompted to check your profile. One element of using Google+ in your job search is certainly to find and “add to circles” relevant recruiter and business contacts. A portion will choose to follow you back – and thereafter will see your updates via Google+.

Other things you can do that will have a similar effect are to comment on their updates, especially where you can add value to the post or stimulate further discussion and debate. This can very quickly lead to a situation where you are engaging and interacting with that person rather than merely circling them.

Similarly, mentioning people (by typing + and their name) when you are sharing an update can be a great way of getting on their radar. Perhaps you’re sharing information they authored, or content you became aware of because of them. Acknowledge this and it helps raise their profile (and makes them aware you’ve done so). If you see a recruiter posting updates about forthcoming recruiting events or new content they’ve just posted on their careers blog, consider sharing it to further their reach. Remember, helping other people is always a great way of sparking a relationship.

5. Share interesting content in a way that stimulates discussion and interaction

The most surefire way to build up a solid network on any social network is to share content that will be valuable to others. Use your circles to target with laser-precision the articles and resources you share. Employees at a particular company will value market updates and competitor interviews. Members of recruiting teams will value insights into the strategies other companies are using to recruit. As you conduct your job search activities, you will come across lots of information that would be valuable to others in your network. The key things are i) to segment what you share with whom, so that your content shares are always highly relevant and ii) to share them in a way that stimulates discussion and interaction – say by sharing an article as an open question to your contacts, asking others to share their insights, etc.

6. Maintain your presence using scheduling

In my experience, it’s beneficial on all social networks to be “active” on those networks during whatever are the daytime hours of the geographies you are targeting.

Since using Google+ is hopefully only one element of your job search strategy, you’re often times going to be out at meetings, networking in person, attending interviews (even taking time to recharge) - at precisely the times you might want to be appearing on people's radar via Google+. The point being, you will want to schedule some posts to your Google+ profile and/or shares with your circles so that you’re there to be engaged with, even at times of the day you’re not able to do these things in person.

With Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, candidates have many options – including Hootsuite and Buffer – to spread their posts out through the day. With Google+ the options are very limited. But one I can personally recommend you take a look at is Do Share (available as a free service from the Google Chrome Store)

7. Be in it for the long haul

As with all social networking, the greatest results come to those who take time to invest in their presence, build their network and nurture their relationships. The weakest results are achieved by those who dive straight in looking for urgent help from people they have no relationship with.

If you’ve been out of work for some time and are looking for a quick fix, I’d therefore be reluctant to suggest Google+ (or indeed any social networking platform) as the remedy to your situation. Notable results will take many months (rather than hours) to come to fruition. But if you’re someone who is starting to consider their career options and conscious that you may want to make a move at some point in the coming year, using Google+ is definitely a job search tactic you’ll want to at least explore.

What are your thoughts and first-hand experiences of using Google+? Please do share in the comments section below.

I'm writing this as a wake-up call to you. And you. And you.

I'm writing this for every executive and professional job seeker out there who believes they're above making silly mistakes that'll cost them a job. Believe me - you're not.
 

This article was prompted by something that happened just recently (though in truth it happens with alarming regularity). I was approached by a connection savvy enough to know that having their application passed straight to the recruiting decision maker by a trusted contact would greatly increase their chances of being invited for interview.

So far so good.

Except this was a position baking bread and yet the CV started with a declaration that the candidate was looking to secure a job driving trains.

A Lucky Escape

Fortunately for the candidate in question, I took the time to review their resume - as I wanted to write an introduction to the ultimate recipient that accurately reflected the candidate's credentials. Had I not done that, someone would now be discarding an application for a job as a baker from a candidate who'd professed their passion to become a train driver.

(Baking and Train Driving being purely illustrative of a real-life situation that involved prestigious business careers)

I don't know what's more shocking - that a professional of such high standing should be so sloppy, or that this happens with such frequency that I feel the need to write about it!! But before you roll your eyes and surf to another page, let me assure you that these are invariably high calibre candidates making these mistakes... and they're always shocked to learn they could have been so careless.

Mistakes You Should Be Wary Of Making

So let me wrap things up with some bullet points of things to watch out for in the coming weeks as you're going about your next job search. Be wary of:
 

Submitting a cover letter that is blatantly a copy and paste job. If you can't find anything noteworthy to say about their company, the position and why you're a great fit, don't bother submitting a cover letter at all (and maybe ask yourself what you're doing applying for that opening in the first place)

Failing to tailor your application so that within seconds the recipient can see what a great fit you are for the role and the fact that you've taken the time to craft an application just for them.

Overlooking the need to change your privacy settings before making sweeping changes to your LinkedIn profile and connecting with large numbers of recruiters there.

Ignoring the need to sort yourself out with a professional looking email address for your applications. Anything that's not simply yourname@ has the potential to set alarm bells ringing.

Inappropriate CV / Resume file naming. Including _for_baking_jobs in your CV filename immediately begs the question "what other jobs has this candidate been applying for?" Including a date makes the recipient worry about how long you've been job hunting - or worse still tells them you've been looking for ages if you don't remember to update the filename. Similarly v1, v2 and the like can set off alarm bells.

Honestly I could go on and on. But invariably these blunders are a result of candidates rushing to get things done - and therefore not stopping to take the time to assess what they're doing and apply a bit of common sense. My advice - cut back on the number of applications you're submitting and use the time you save to make sure those you do submit are absolutely flawless. Good luck.

Image source: kyz

Whether you're a recruiter looking to make your next hire, or an executive wanting to improve your networking, there are some important LinkedIn success principles you should be following.

This isn't a "15 steps to follow on LinkedIn" type post, a checklist of things you can make sure you are doing. It's more about how you should behave on LinkedIn (and indeed all social media) if you're looking to foster strong business networking relationships.

The post was inspired by a great new infographic I came across about LinkedIn - which I've shared below. The core message is one I believe in very strongly - the effectiveness of which I see played out on social media each and every day.

It's all about your mindset and how you approach other people.

You see my experience is that people - be they recruiters or candidates - are still naturally inclined to advertise and shout when they start out with social networking. Maybe it's because of all the advertising we are exposed to nowadays; maybe it's because we've grown up professionally seeing email marketing being used in this way.

I'll admit I don't know exactly why.

But the upshot is the same. Too many people launch into social networking looking to broadcast their messages as their principle goal. This quickly spirals into them posting more and more often... and more and more widely. With the outcome being that their messages are filtered out by the intended recipients as spammy noise.

Compare and contrast that with the approach I advocated in Social Networking Tip: One Simple Change That Will Help You Strike Up Relationships With Employers - where I suggest that focusing on engaging people one on one (and providing them with value and benefit rather than seeking this for yourself) is a far more effective approach.

It's a similar line of thought when you're getting started on LinkedIn, which is why I wanted to share the LinkedIn success principles in this infographic. The key is to treat the LinkedIn medium as the opportunity to engage with people one on one, rather than as a mass marketing channel. Hence the focus on personalising your invitation messages to people, figuring out ways you can provide value and help them. The idea of being a connector who can help bring together other people who will benefit from being introduced to one another.

A decade or so after LinkedIn came onto the scene, I still see far too many people doing things in a "quick and dirty" fashion on LinkedIn - and too few people focused on ensuring people feel like they're being engaged with one-on-one. Well whether you're a recruiter, a candidate or just a regular businessperson going about their day job, it's the latter approach that is producing the results and so it's these types of LinkedIn success principles you should be focused on following...

I Have A LinkedIn Profile, Now What? [INFOGRAPHIC] infographic by sociallysorted.

In survey after survey I see the same results emerging. Networking is one of the most critical elements in a successful job search strategy!

Recruiters consistently report that the hires that prove most successful for their business are those who've come via some kind of referral. Such recruits are likely to be hired in a shorter timeframe, have a better cultural fit with the organisation and be most likely to still be with the company many years later.

Candidates similarly report that securing a job via networking is their preferred means of landing their next role. Yet when you talk to candidates about how they are actually investing their job search hours, it's amazing how many are procrastinating and putting off networking activities.

So to help you shake the networking tree, here are 5 great tips that will help you get some momentum into your job search...
 

5 Ways to Stay in Touch with Your Professional Network

by Heather R. Huhman

Networking, networking, networking. It’s one of the most emphasized job search methods out there. The problem: most job seekers who think they’re networking aren’t actually accomplishing anything.

It’s not enough to connect on social media and then forget about them. Stay in the minds of your professional network by keeping in touch on a regular basis.

Here are five ways to stay in touch with your professional network:

Social media. True, it’s not enough to simply add someone as a social media connection, but social media is still important.

Facebook and Twitter allow you to share content directly with the people in your network. Use them to send interesting articles to the professionals who might find them relevant. LinkedIn keeps track of changes in your connections’ careers. Pay attention to these updates and congratulate people in your network when they get a promotion or start something new.

Email. Sending an email to someone is much more direct and personal than social media. Email is more likely to result in a back-and-forth conversation, so take advantage of it.

Like with social media, you can start a conversation with an article or some congratulations. Another idea is to let them know when you start something new or accomplish something important, and ask them for advice.

Phone calls. Sometimes a quick phone call is all it takes to learn something new.

Call up your contact and say, “Hey, I’m really interested in learning more about this part of your job. Would you chat for a bit to share insights on how you do it?” If they have the time, they’ll probably talk to you. If they’re busy, chances are they’ll tell you to call back when they have the time. Either way, be prepared with questions to ask.

Greeting cards. A fun way to reach out to people is by sending greeting cards.

A simple handwritten note is all it takes. It can be to say thank you or even for a holiday. Send these to people you have connected with in the past, or people you have just met. No matter who you send these to, be sure to thank them for their time.

Invite them out. Whether it’s lunch or just coffee, face-to-face communication is always the best way build and maintain a relationship.

Do research beforehand and come ready to discuss the latest trends your industry. Have a strategy and goals for the conversation. What do you hope to gain from your meeting? Ask for career advice. If you show you want more than just a connection to a job, most professionals will be happy to help.

When you keep in touch with your professional network, they are much more likely to help you out when it’s time to look for a new job. Maintain a genuine relationship with these people and the rest will be easy.

What are some other ways you find effective for staying in touch with your professional network?

Heather R. Huhman is a career expert, experienced hiring manager, and founder & president of Come Recommended, a content marketing and digital PR consultancy for job search and human resources technologies. She is also the instructor of Find Me A Job: How To Score A Job Before Your Friends, author of Lies, Damned Lies & Internships (2011) and #ENTRYLEVELtweet: Taking Your Career from Classroom to Cubicle (2010), and writes career and recruiting advice for numerous outlets.

Image source: Andres Rueda

These Facebook ideas really caught my attention. Conventional wisdom is that a good LinkedIn profile can enhance your professional standing and career prospects; whereas your Facebook account is most likely to detract from your online reputation.

Hence this contribution from the ComeRecommended team really stood out, focusing as it does on the ways you can proactively use Facebook to actually improve your online reputation. The ideas aren't rocket-science, but at the same time I suspect they're things that the vast majority of business professionals and jobseekers have not remotely considered taking the time to do.

I hope the ideas prove helpful to you - and if you've any other suggestions please do add them in the comments section below...

How Facebook Can Help You Improve Your Online Reputation (via A Hire Calling)

The following is a guest post by Mike Zammuto. It goes without saying there are certain things you just don’t do on Facebook—especially if you are in the market for a new job. Job seekers are advised to keep slovenly, drunk photos off of their public profile — and to abstain from using coarse…

 

One of LinkedIn's biggest shortcomings has just been addressed with the launch of LinkedIn Mentions.

The seasoned social media users amongst you will know that mentioning other users is one of the most effective ways of getting yourself on their radars in a positive, low pressure manner. It's a tried and tested business networking and recruiting approach on other platforms like Twitter and Google+.

If this isn't an approach you're familiar with, in brief you ensure your updates are both informative and draw other network users into the conversation - or give credit to them - by mentioning them in the post. On Twitter this would involve including the @ twitter handle of the user in your tweet. On Google+ this would involve including the +username link of the person in your update. On both platforms the person mentioned is then made aware of your update and drawn into starting a dialogue with you. It's an extremely effective way of starting discussions and opening doors into companies.

That's why the launch of LinkedIn Mentions is such a long-overdue and exciting development. For recruiters, LinkedIn Mentions offers the potential to engage with your candidate network in a more personable way. For candidates, LinkedIn Mentions opens up the enticing prospect of being able to engage recruiters on the platform in a far more real-time and effective manner.

Below is a short slideshow illustrating how the service will work. The service is being rolled out initially to English-speaking members and then to the global membership. Further analysis will have to wait until I've had the chance to try LinkedIn mentions out for myself. For now, my only reservation is how long it will take for LinkedIn Mentions to be rolled out fully. At the time of writing, I'm still waiting for the ability to embed videos and webpages on a profile to be rolled out onto my account - and that's functionality that started being rolled out several months ago! Let's hope this new service doesn't take so long - in the interim it's certainly going to be frustrating to be mentioned in a post by then not be able to reply with a mention in kind...

Have you seen the ability to use LinkedIn Mentions on your account as yet? If so, please share your experiences in the comments section below.

Using social media to reach out to - and engage with - potential hires. That's the essence of social recruiting. But if there's one thing I've learnt since I became immersed in the world of social recruiting, it's that the "best way" of doing things doesn't remain that way for very long. Social networking platforms change, functionality evolves, free services are retired, new apps are launched.

To be at the top of your game, you have to constantly be looking out for the developments that could be next to shape social recruiting best practice. There've been quite a few to consider this year, not least the launch of Google+ communities, new look LinkedIn profiles and functionality, Facebook redesign and Twitter API changes. But few announcements have caused as much of a stir as the launch of Facebook Graph Search. We'll be watching this space closely in the coming months to ensure we continue to bring you the best possible insights.

Below is an introductory post and infographic courtesy of Heather R. Huhman, in addition to which we'd point you to:
 

• Facebook Graph Search: What It Means For B2B
  (Social Media Today)
• Diversity Sourcing is a Breeze with Facebook Graph Search
  (Boolean Black Belt)
• 3 Recruiting Tricks with Facebook Social Graph Search
  (SmartRecruiters)

For further updates, keep an eye on our Recruiter Picks for the latest social recruiting and recruiter insights
 

Social Recruiting with Facebook Graph Search [INFOGRAPHIC]

On January 15, 2013, Facebook’s much anticipated search engine, Facebook Graph Search, finally launched, making finding the people you’re looking for on the platform that much easier. For social recruiters, it means finding candidates in much more targeted way since searching has become more insightful.
 

In order to illustrate some Facebook Graph Search best practices, this infographic, compiled by social employee referral management platform Zao, shows you how to get started in order to find the best employees. Some takeaways to note include:
 

• 47% of new hires are generated from Facebook
• 1 in 5 had a contact share a job on Facebook
• 92% of users are connected by only 4 degrees
• 52% of job seekers use Facebook to help find work

Check out the full infographic below and let us know your thoughts in the comments!
 

What do you think? Would you use Facebook Graph Search for recruiting?

Heather R. Huhman is a career expert, experienced hiring manager, and founder & president of Come Recommended, a content marketing and digital PR consultancy for job search and human resources technologies.

One of the biggest social media challenges of the day is determining where to invest your time. What’s worse, the ever-changing social ecosystem means that the right strategy 12 months ago may no longer be right today.

A particular challenge for people wanting to connect and build a brand for business or recruiting purposes is weighing up time invested in Google+ vs. LinkedIn. Here I’ll share my experiences and insights, in the hope they’ll help you figure out your own strategy for the coming year. I've also added a fun poll below so we can see where you are all planning on investing your time...
 

We’ll take it as a given that you are being socially astute rather than spammy in your use of these sites – ie. you’re sharing good content and engaging with people rather than pumping out a stream of pure promotional messages. If you need to review why that’s important see Talent Acquisition - A Key Lesson In Social Media Effectiveness

Here are some of the things you may be striving to achieve with your social networking activities - and my score for whether Google+ or LinkedIn is coming out on top in that area...

Immediate Traffic To Your Careers Pages or Blog or Website

Assuming you’re not one of the earliest adopters of Google+ – and so aren’t in the Circles of tens of thousands of Google+ users – my experience is that you’re most likely to see significant web traffic to the links you share from being active on LinkedIn.

By joining and contributing to relevant LinkedIn Groups, it’s possible to be seen by thousands of your target candidate audience. Should your links start being shared by other members of the community, some may be featured as trending items and so get much wider exposure across the site. Plus – in case you hadn’t noticed – LinkedIn has been going to great lengths to ensure that users spend increasing amounts of time on the platform – so links you share will be seen on the site.

The same is not yet true on Google+. Communities (the Google equivalent of Groups) are in their infancy and in most sectors I think recruiters will find it hard to discover communities where there is anything like the same membership as in comparable LinkedIn Groups.

Generating several thousand monthly visits to your site from active participation on LinkedIn is wholly achievable in my experience. If you have a recruiting team of several people, multiply up and that could start to be a significant chunk of your total career page / blog traffic that’s there to be generated (for free) via LinkedIn. Google+, by comparison, is more time-intensive to be active on and in my experience yields only a fraction of the same web traffic as LinkedIn.

Google+ vs. LinkedIn – the point goes to LinkedIn

Long-term Traffic Boost Through SEO Improvements

In the search engine marketing world, it’s the accepted wisdom that search engines are increasingly taking social media shares into consideration when ranking websites in their search results. That’s to say the more social shares your content is getting, the more likely it is to be boosted in the search engine rankings.

Now traffic from other search engines is nice to have, but be under no illusions that Google is the main game in town here. If there’s something you can do that will boost how Google perceives the content on your careers site / blog / company website, that has the potential to translate into significant long-term advantage for you or your business.

Since Google isn’t in the habit of divulging its search algorithm, I can’t tell you definitively which social shares are going to carry the most weight in future search engine ranking performance. But given Google’s investment in its Google+ product, I wouldn’t want to bet against Google+ shares becoming an increasing determinant of website ranking on Google search results pages. Would you?

Now let me share a social media secret with you. When you read content on the web, you’ll tend to see that content is shared most widely on the social networks where the author or business owner themselves has the strongest presence. That makes sense right? If you have lots of Twitter followers, for example, but haven’t done much on LinkedIn, then the people most likely to see your content are Twitter users and the sharing that is easiest for those people to do is to continue sharing it on Twitter.

I’ve seen this in practice on Social-Hire, where we’ve invested in having a strong Twitter and LinkedIn presence, but put far less effort into Facebook. Our sharing stats are a mirror image of this. I could give you countless other examples, LinkedIn networkers whose content is mostly shared on LinkedIn and so on.

The obvious conclusion is that if you want to be well positioned to be getting social shares of your content via Google+ – and therefore raising the profile of your content in the Google ecosystem – then a key component for achieving this is becoming more active on Google+ yourself.

Google+ vs. LinkedIn – the point goes to Google+

Ultimate Candidate Reach

This point can be made pretty succinctly. LinkedIn has taken a decade – give or take – to get to the point where it has 200m profiles on the site (and that’s before we discount all the profiles that are out of date or not being actively used). In a fraction of this time, Google+ surpassed double that figure and continues to grow strongly. Its routes to reach people are far more extensive than LinkedIn’s, so I don’t expect any change in this trend. Also Google’s ability to bring people back to Google+ is pervasive. Every day people use the Google search engine, Gmail and the like – and so see their notifications alert for Google+ without having had to consciously return to the site. LinkedIn doesn’t have anything like the same daily visibility unless you actually choose to return to the site (or use their apps).

So in terms of sheer reach Google+ wins hands down. Add in the fact that LinkedIn increasingly requires you to buy a subscription to access the lion’s share of its network, whereas Google+ is free. Your potential to reach out to people for free is unquestionably greater on Google+. If you have a corporate account on LinkedIn and can reach the whole network and send targeted mails to candidates of interest, this undoubtedly gives you the edge in terms of reaching lots of relevant people for a particular role quickly and effectively. But in terms of who will be better positioned to succeed in the future, I’d bet my money on a recruiter who’s built up a sizeable Google+ presence rather than a similar time invested in LinkedIn.

Google+ vs. LinkedIn – the point goes to Google+

Wading Through Spam

This point is even more succinct. LinkedIn users are drowning in spam. I’ve read that LinkedIn are taking steps to try and counter this, but as things currently stand lots of Groups have been destroyed by the all-pervasive product spammers you find there. So considerable time has to be invested in choosing the right groups to join and in hand-selecting the connection requests to accept (as every profile has to be thoroughly vetted, so prevalent are the numbers of professional-looking spam profiles springing up on the site). It’s also not easy to see which profiles are guilty of spamming until you’ve actually connected with that person, so time is also lost cleaning up those who choose to waste your time.

The Google+ experience, by contrast, is a most pleasant one. What users are doing on the platform is far more transparent, so you can see in a flash whether someone is a value-contributor on the network or not. For Communities, Google+ also has a spam detection system – where people posting potentially spammy content are flagged to the moderator and this content only appears in the community once approved. This is such a revelation compared to LinkedIn, a real blessing for any recruiter thinking of creating a Group or Community for their business.

Google+ vs. LinkedIn – the point goes to Google+

Targeted Approaches and Community Building

LinkedIn’s trump card is, without doubt, the structured data it’s collected on its 200m+ accounts. If you’re looking to target candidates from a particular company in a particular location with a particular skillset, LinkedIn can generate a target shortlist for you in a way that Google+ cannot emulate. If you’ve got access to their premium services, you can also fire off messages to your target candidates in an ultra-efficient way.

That’s what’s needed to deliver on your immediate hiring needs. For the longer term success of the company, building a community of fans and potential employees is also an important consideration. With its Company Pages, geographic tailoring and the ability for users to follow these, LinkedIn has a strong offering here too. But Google+ is no slouch either. However, its focus isn’t purely on the needs of the corporate market and so I imagine the ability to build a community of advocates and potential employees will remain a stronghold for LinkedIn – albeit one that Google+ may erode as its userbase continues to grow.

Google+ vs. LinkedIn – 2 points go to LinkedIn (but it's a close call on the 2nd point)

Concluding Remarks

So there you have it, final score:

Google+   3   –   3   LinkedIn

As of right now, I’d have to rate it a score draw as to where you should be investing your time as a recruiter. However, the above suggests LinkedIn is where I think you’d get the most short-term upside from your investment in social media. So if you need traffic to your careers site today and shortlist candidates in for interview later this month, LinkedIn is where to invest your time.

But if you’re a recruitment business owner, or a corporate recruiting team mapping out your recruitment strategy for the next years, it’s hard to argue that the biggest benefits aren’t going to be had by investing more of your time in your Google+ presence. So the question is, are you playing the short-term game or the long game?

Let’s Have A Bit Of Fun!

Just as a bit of fun, I’m experimenting with adding voting to this post. Take a second below to vote up whichever of Google+ and LinkedIn you plan to invest more of your time in this coming year. Thanks – and will watch the results with interest!!
 

You know the feeling. After hours searching for potential job leads, you find a role that looks perfect. Everything you'd been looking for in your next career move. You can hardly wait to fire off your application and progress through the interview stages...

Except that disappointment is often what greets job seekers next. Rejection is never easy to take. But understanding why you've been rejected - and what you might be able to do better next time around - is a key step in moving on. So for that reason I'm most grateful to Heather R. Huhman for sharing this guest post, aimed squarely at helping you to understand - and overcome - setbacks in your job search.

You’re feeling lucky. You found an opening for a job you would love to have, your resume made it through screening, and you had a decent interview — but somehow you still received a rejection email. What went wrong?

With the national unemployment rate resting at an uneasy 7.9 percent, it’s safe to say the job climate is highly competitive. In fact, 29 percent of candidates never even hear back from a hiring manager after applying for a position. While you may have made it far in the hiring process, there are many reasons you weren’t considered to be a perfect match.
 

7 Reasons You Didn't Land The Job

Here are seven common reasons you didn’t land the job:

1. Your qualifications didn’t quite match up. While you may have felt you had the necessary skills and experiences to match you to the position, your potential employer didn’t feel the same way. This error is usually due to job seekers misunderstanding what an employer is looking for, or the simple misjudgment of their own qualifications. Just because you didn’t get the job doesn’t always mean you were under-qualified – there’s also the possibility you were overqualified or just altogether an inappropriate fit with regard to the company.

In the future, consider spending a significant amount of time matching your qualifications and skills with those required for the position. If there isn’t a close fit, it might be best to refrain from applying.

2. You don’t look good on paper. You may have the exact qualifications for a position, but if you can’t present them to your potential employer, it’s unlikely you’ll be hired. Aside from grammatical errors on your cover letter and resume, it’s also important to look at formatting, relevancy, and whether you’ve gone above and beyond to stand out. If your resume and cover letter are generic and vague, don’t expect to be hired. Put the time and energy into creating a customized cover letter and resume for every position you apply for, and make sure you spend time showcasing why you’d make a better fit above other candidates.

3. Your interviewing skills held you back. Just because you answered every question you were asked doesn’t necessarily mean you wooed the hiring manager. Think back to your interview… Were you enthusiastic, positive, and did you showcase a personable depth to your professional personality? Too many job seekers get hung up on knocking out the technical questions and miss the chance to build a connection with their interviewer. Always remember to come to an interview well-researched, practiced, and eager to showcase why you’d be an outstanding addition to the team.

4. Your overall presentation needs some work. If you arrived late to an interview dressed in wrinkled clothing, you aren’t exactly presenting yourself as a stand-out candidate. From your resume to your face-to-face interview, presentation matters in every part of the hiring process. Attitude and body language fall into the category of presentation. Many job seekers let their search for employment get to them — they come off as negative, unenthusiastic, or uncomfortably confident. Focus on presenting yourself in a way that encompasses your unique personality traits, as well as highlights your overall togetherness.

5. You didn’t fit the culture. Fitting into a company’s culture is a must. You may have more than enough talent to get the job done, but without the proper chemistry, it’s unlikely you’re a match. Companies seeks out individuals who share the same values as they do. During your job search, it’s crucial to understand the culture of each company you are applying at. This will help you figure out whether you’d fit in, and it will also help you tailor your resume and properly prepare for an interview.

6. You didn’t showcase your competitive advantage. Did you go out of your way to present yourself as the best candidate for the position? It’s easy to get caught up in fitting the mold and completely miss out on an opportunity to inform the hiring manager of why you’re the best option. This should start in your cover letter and carry into your interview. While you may be able to get the job done, how can you do it better than anyone else?

7. There wasn’t actually a job in the first place. Just because a company has an opening posted doesn’t mean it’s actually available. Many companies hire from within but are still mandated to post the opening. Other times, a potential employer may face a last-minute budget cut, with the position being completely eliminated.

Receiving a rejection is never a fun experience, but it’s important to learn from every aspect of your job search. While there are many reasons you could have slipped up, it’s also important to remember there are a lot of factors at play when it comes to hiring a new employee.

How do you cope with being turned down from a job?

Heather R. Huhman is a career expert, experienced hiring manager, and founder & president of Come Recommended, a content marketing and digital PR consultancy for job search and human resources technologies. She is also the instructor of Find Me A Job: How To Score A Job Before Your Friends, author of Lies, Damned Lies & Internships (2011) and #ENTRYLEVELtweet: Taking Your Career from Classroom to Cubicle (2010), and writes career and recruiting advice for numerous outlets.

Image source:  Tilemahos Efthimiadis

Your social network is a powerful asset. Those of you who've followed my job search tips and recruiting advice will not be surprised to hear me say this. You'll have seen me write passionately about how to be effective at social networking, talk about the impact your social network is having on your job search and how you can use your social network to effectively engage with potential employers.

The impact on your career though is much more profound than just the effect it can have when you're next looking to change jobs. It can also help you to grow professionally and to be more effective in your current role. For thoughts on why this is the case, I'm delighted to share with you the following guest post from Heather R. Huhman. Do let us know your observations in the comments section below. Enjoy!
 

7 Career Benefits of a Strong Network

What’s your secret weapon when it comes to your career?

If you’re feeling unsure, there’s certainly one fail-proof way to impact your career for the long-term — develop and maintain a vast network of contacts. While you may have originally been prompted to build your network during your job search, a large pool of professional contacts has more to offer than just connections to job openings.

The benefits to establishing a strong network for your career are seemingly endless. Here are just a few to consider if you’re looking to boost your career with the foundation of a strong network:
 

1. Guidance. Whether you’re just entering the workforce or you’re a veteran executive, guidance is something you should never be short on. Building and maintaining a network of industry contacts is one simple way to ensure a continued level of guidance throughout your career. It’s up to you to decide how to use your network to gain insight.

The need for guidance throughout your career seems to be highly understated. You may be considering a career change or the potential for a promotion — these circumstances are sometimes more easily solved with careful help from others. While some may choose to develop professional mentor-mentee relationships within their network, others may find a level of guidance from regularly attending industry outings.

2. Opportunities. A vast, well-maintained professional network will likely be ripe with opportunity. While you may not be actively looking to change positions, it’s likely your network will regularly pass along insight into a variety of career opportunities. This means you’re getting the first look at a position before anyone else. (In fact, according to a recent Jobvite study, employees hired through referral are hired 55 percent faster than those who come from a career site.)

Even if you rarely — or never — bite at the opportunity, there may be a time when you are given word about something that completely changes your career perspective. Aside from opportunities in the realm of employment, your network may also offer you a chance to explore volunteer work, hobbies, or even new industry-related trends and techniques.

3. Support. You’re likely to be faced with a variety of trials and tribulations throughout your career journey. A strong support system will help you manage your challenges and celebrations more effectively. Calling on your professional contacts in times of needs might take some getting used to, but always remember it’s a two-way street. Open chains of communication with your network will allow you to provide a mutually beneficial setting for the daily encounters of a successful career.

4. Discovery. Many individuals lacking a professional network risk limiting their experiences in continued learning. Your network is likely to provide you with an outlet for discovery which you might not otherwise have had access to. For some, this means gaining keen business insight through forum conversations on social platforms, while others may learn innovative tips from a chance meeting with an industry contact at a seminar.

5. Growth. Personal and professional growth is crucial to a successful career. Similar to the guidance and support provided by a portion of your network, some of your contacts might also be beneficial in helping your reach new heights within your career, whether it’s pushing you to apply for a position you initially felt was out of your realm or simply inspiring you to work harder on a daily basis.

6. Status. When it comes to your career, sometimes an aspect of power lies within you who know. While simply having the business cards of a thousand individuals within your industry won’t give you status, maintaining strong professional relationships with a handful of them will. Expert status usually comes down to the success of your personal brand, but it’s important to note that the most successful brands are also backed by a significant and influential network of contacts.

7. Resources. A strong network can easily be utilized as a resource center for a variety of your career needs. Consider each of your connections as a one-of-a-kind book of experiences. Your network is likely to be exploding with information with regard to every aspect of career success and challenge.

Let your network be your secret weapon when it comes to your career. It’s never too late to begin building a vast network of beneficial relationships.

In what ways has your network / social network benefited you throughout your career?

Heather R. Huhman is a career expert, experienced hiring manager, and founder & president of Come Recommended, a content marketing and digital PR consultancy for job search and human resources technologies. She is also the instructor of Find Me A Job: How To Score A Job Before Your Friends, author of Lies, Damned Lies & Internships (2011) and #ENTRYLEVELtweet: Taking Your Career from Classroom to Cubicle (2010), and writes career and recruiting advice for numerous outlets.

Image source: apparena

I’m writing these social networking tips having been stung into action by the unbelievable demands of a so-called “social media guru” this last week. More on this in a moment, but before reading any further please pause and ask yourself:

• Why do your social networking followers continue to follow you?
   
• What is it you provide to them that they value, find informative, believe will further their career, are entertained by?...

Now please make a note of your answers before continuing any further...

I put it to you that in a world where our lives are increasingly crammed with information, updates, connections and distractions, you need to be highly tuned to why your social networking connections continue to give you a sliver of time from their daily lives. Understanding this – and building everything you do on social networking around this – I believe is the key to building an engaged and loyal following. Let’s not forget that you’re only a bad update away from having followers desert you; one promotional tweet too many and your social influence could crumble.
 

Recruiters: Focus On Being Valuable Rather Than Promoting Your Openings

For the recruiters reading this post, your reasons for investing in social networking may well be that you want to attract talent and make hires. But very few of the quality candidates you want to engage with woke up this morning thinking “what I really need in my life is a load more untargeted job alerts!”. What they are much more likely to be thinking is:

• I need to stay on top of developments in our industry so I appear knowledgeable in job interviews
   
• I’d love to get some insider insights on what it’s like to work in my target companies
   
• It’d be a massive help to me if someone could share the most important business updates about this company
   
• If I could connect on social media with some more people from the organisation I’d be better placed to research them and make the right career decision
   
• I wonder if I could spark a conversation with one of the hiring managers or executives from the company?
   
• ….

The list could go on and on. But in essence, if you want to be someone who your followers really pay attention to – and whose every update they look out for – then you need to be someone who feeds their hunger for information and insights, not someone who is filling their timelines with poorly targeted updates and a stream of promotional messages. Try sharing links to your company’s stock market updates; to interviews with key figures from the business; to industry publications that would be of value to your target candidate audience; to the profiles of decision makers and recruiting team members within the business. Help candidates to be more informed – and to accelerate their networking efforts – and you will set yourself apart as a recruiter who really has candidates’ interests at heart. When it’s time to share the occasional job announcement via social media, try to do it in a way that’s engaging, funny or insightful rather than purely pumping out a job listing:

• “This one’s for anyone out there who has a blend of marketing and direct sales experience…” is far more conversational than “Wanted: Marketing Executive with Direct Sales experience”
   
• “So here’s a role that’s not for anyone shy about picking up the phone! Telesales Executive in Atlanta…”
   
• “Wondered if anyone can recommend a great salesperson in the Atlanta area for this role… Any questions let me know!”
   
• “Just to give you a little more insight into this latest role – ….. – what we are looking for more than anything else is someone who can…”

This is worlds apart from the recruiters who are simply pushing out job listings with little effort at engagement. You’ve made yourself available to answer questions, you’ve provided extra insights into the role so candidates can determine if this is worth them investigating further, in short you’ve got involved in helping candidates in their job search. Be seen as someone who is personable, truthful, approachable and helpful and I have no doubt you will go a long way in achieving your social recruiting goals.

Social Media Guru? You Decide...

To wrap things up – and to solidify the difference between good and bad here – I’ll just recount what it was that angered me sufficiently last week that I felt the overwhelming need to write this post. So I’m someone who is followed either by candidates looking for job search advice, or by recruiters looking for recruiting insights. I share a lot of updates about how social media can be used by job-seekers and recruiters too. But in essence, if you’re not a job-seeker or a recruiter you’re unlikely to be following me. It goes without saying therefore that I try to always share updates that will be highly relevant and valuable to those in job-seeking or recruiting mode.

Well last week I had the galling experience of being berated by a “social media guru” for not having shared their updates. They’d shared some of mine – and I’d not reciprocated! Well those of you who know me know I’m a great believer in paying it forward and expecting nothing in return. If you help enough people out there then good things will happen to you in turn. But this particular person’s updates and blogs – whilst professional – would have been of absolutely no interest to either job-seekers or recruiters. None of you would have thanked me for sharing the content, as it’s not the sort of content that caused you to choose to follow me in the first place!!

I paraphrase, but “shame on you for putting the needs of your followers ahead of helping those who’ve promoted your posts”  was the gist of the abuse I then received. Would you have thanked me for sharing irrelevant content with you, for filling your timeline with updates that wouldn't help you? I thought not!... and in which case, make a conscious effort to check that you in turn are not doing that to your candidate followers. Then think this again each time you post to your networks - how is this adding value to my followers, am I making them warm to me or alienating them? This is the fine line between social networking success and failure.

If the above resonates with you, feel free to follow me: @tonyrestell

Social media has been a revelation. Want to complain to your mobile phone operator in public? Want to get a response from a previously unresponsive service provider? Social media has opened up lines of communication in ways that I'd say are as powerful as the invention of the telephone!

Can you sense there's a "but" coming?...

The "but" relates to job-seekers and the impact of social media on the job search process. It's an acknowledgement that it's possible to expend huge effort on social media without your job search seeming to progress at all.

You see on one hand social media has transformed the job search process. Where once applications would have disappeared into a black hole, candidates now have a means of following up with employers and their recruitment agents. Indeed before even applying, candidates can seek input and insights about a company that they never had before. They may be deterred - or made more determined - by what they learn. They may even find routes into a company that previously weren't open to them.

In many ways, social media has been an enabler in - and brought a more level playing field to - the hiring market.

But what it cannot do is change the fundamentals of the market. The vast majority of recruiters you engage with on social media will NOT have any vacancies for which you are the ideal candidate. Most will not have the time to give you detailed feedback as to why your application failed.

You see social media hasn't suddenly granted recruiters free hours in their working day that they didn't have before. Nor has it made the businesses they serve any less demanding in terms of the candidates they will consider a suitable fit for one of their openings. So most expressions of interest by a candidate are still likely to end in rejection - and in that sense a reality check is very much needed.

What has changed is that there are now new ways in which you as a candidate can be found by recruiters; and new ways in which you can network to potentially find openings to which you are more naturally suited as a candidate. Tracking down that rare vacancy where you are genuinely the perfect fit - or ensuring recruiters find you - is still the number one challenge facing candidates today; it's just the means of doing so that has changed.
 

Image Source: Casey Fleser

I see danger everywhere. Danger that we get sucked in by the message that one size fits all. Danger that we believe there’s a magic formula we simply need to follow to achieve dramatic social results.

Now I’m commenting with my social recruiting hat on. The Adzuna data I’m going to share below relates specifically to reaching job seekers via social media. But the dangers could actually harm anyone looking to exploit social media and social technologies to further their businesses.

Fundamentally, the message recruiters – and indeed businesspeople in general – need to take on board is that you mustn’t believe everything you read, but must test ideas out for yourself. Only by doing this will you ensure social media has a profound impact on your business.

Let’s backtrack and think about a few of the headlines doing the rounds right now within the recruitment space:

• LinkedIn will eat the recruiting industry alive; every employer needs to be active on LinkedIn
   
• Job boards are dead
   
• Social recruiting is an essential part of the recruitment mix
   
• Employers are achieving huge cost savings by bringing all recruitment activities in-house
   
• Referral hiring has been catapulted to new levels of success thanks to social media

Social Media Wake-Up Call: Does The Data Back Up These Claims?

Before proceeding, just let me sow the seed that there are LOTS of parties with vested interests and sizeable budgets who stand to gain financially by having the focus on these headlines magnified. The social platforms themselves, the technology enablers, the consultants and advisers touting new approaches, RPO businesses. All stand to gain from you swallowing these headlines hook, line and sinker.

But is it really a case of one size fits all?

Now I’m a huge advocate of social recruiting – and the impact social media has had on the hiring landscape. But from my years in the online recruitment industry, I’m also a huge advocate of looking at each client’s business circumstances and hiring needs in turn – and devising a bespoke strategy that addresses their needs. That always was the best approach – and still is in the age of LinkedIn, social recruiting, referral platforms and the like. It’s simply not the case that one approach is right for all.

So what prompted this post? Well my concerns have been simmering for some time, but recent data sent through by Adzuna I found eye-opening. Their infographic is shared below, but what I found particularly interesting is:

• Facebook is nearly twice as popular as LinkedIn for job search networking in the UK
   
• LinkedIn is more popular with men for job search networking; but Facebook is more popular amongst women
   
• There’s a huge geographical split in how job-seekers are incorporating social media in their job search. Whilst LinkedIn is best for some geographies, Facebook is best for others
   
• Only a tiny fraction of candidates found their last job with help from their social networking friends, the overwhelming majority found jobs through more traditional routes

What this means for recruiters – and indeed for businesspeople at large – is that we should be very wary of the One Size Fits All stampede. I can accept that in some areas job board response rates are suffering. I know that in some areas LinkedIn is an essential component in the recruiting mix. But I’m also quite certain that for every employer where this holds true, you can find just as many where the opposite recruiting approaches would yield far greater results.

The conclusion? Treat every headline you read with healthy scepticism. Be wary of statistics thrown at you by those with a story or a service to tell. Instead, take soundings from your peers and get impartial views on what’s proving to be effective. Then test everything for yourself. Reach your own conclusions about what works and what doesn’t work for your business – because the candidate profiles you’re targeting, the resources you have available, the appeal of your brand… well they all differ and so too, therefore, will the best approaches for appealing to your target candidate audience.

And Finally...

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Author: Tony Restell