WEB 2.0 AND RECRUITING

I love to fly fish!  It’s enjoyable to wade through rivers looking for the big catch. The shallow streams of the Smokey Mountain National Park offer a beautiful setting to spend some time in nature. However, trying to hook the elusive Rainbow or Brook Trout is not always easy. Sometimes you have to change your bait to something agreeable to the fish or keep working you way up stream to find a place where the fish are biting. Even if your technique is good there may not be any fish in the “hole” and you have to move on to better waters.

As an HR Manager recruiting is one of my essential functions. So why am talking about fishing and what is the big fuss about Facebook?  

There are a lot of similarities between recruiting and fishing. If the talented candidates you are seeking are not “biting” on your ad you have to try something else.  Advertising in a different place or through a different media is often necessary.  You have to recruit where the people are.
According to the fact sheet posted on Facebook, there are 300 million active users! Out of that many people the odds of a user (or hopefully many) having the same qualifications and skills that I’m looking for are pretty good. Even if the “right person” doesn’t happen to see my job posting, chances are good that someone else will see it and pass the message on to someone who might be looking for a job. It’s all about networking. As a recruiter you have to be actively looking where the right people are, whether it’s at the career center at a university, or on-line at a social network site. Whatever works – you have to give it a shot.

Fishing and recruiting really share a lot of things in common!

In the next few weeks I will be posting some jobs on Facebook and will let you know how well it does.

Marty Brack
E-mail: mdbrack@crimson.ua.edu
Cell: 205-837-4098