Talent webs

When business is good, it makes sense to hire more people with specialist expertise to meet the company’s growing needs.

 

Problem is, that’s often the toughest time to do it: you finally have the income to start hiring, but you’re so busy earning that cash you barely have time to eat, let alone search for, hire and train new talent. And often when you do finally source the perfect person, your competitors are head-hunting them too. 

 

It’s in situations such as these that job boards have become a mixed blessing. The recruitment process is time-consuming when your business is growing and, for candidates, being one of a faceless mass of resumes makes it hard to stand out from the crowd. 

 

No surprises then that most business owners will tell you their best hires have come from referrals. Social networks are a powerful way to find and filter the right person for a job. And fortunately, exploiting networks is exactly where the next generation of online recruitment platforms is heading.

 

Sociologists have been fascinated by human networks since the 1960s, when Harvard professor Stanley Milgram discovered the distance between any two people in the US was ‘six degrees’. While knowing people is one thing, finding a job or an employee requires an entirely different kind of network. 

 

In May 1973, Mark Granovetter published a paper called The Strength of Weak Ties, which stated that when it came to new things, such as landing a job or launching a restaurant, it was the people we didn’t know who were the most important. Our circle of contacts tends to be close-knit, and all the information in that group is already known by those in it. To find new ideas or opportunities, we need to create links with other social clusters. 

 

And that’s exactly what many of the emerging Web2.0 networking sites are allowing business owners and employees to do. 

 

Although designed originally for college students, many companies are now starting to use websites such as Facebook to tap into talent pools. Search for a job on Linkedin and it will show you people inside the company that are within a few degrees of people you already know. In the US, online recruitment giant monster.com has acquired a bunch of networking focused assets such as Tickle, which uses viral social games to widen its candidate pool.

 

Putting networks to work in the recruitment space is not always easy. Local media giant Sensis has struggled with Linkme, while US recruitment player Jobster has been through two CEOs and numerous business model changes. And, of course, many companies still frown on using social networks at work. 

 

Nevertheless, during the next 18 months, we’re likely to see more local activity in the space. JobX, a start-up I’ve been advising, is taking on Seek and the newspaper classifieds by building a platform for smart people to communicate their skills and make connections. As a database of talent, rather than just a container for job ads, it’s an important shift. When there is no such thing as a job for life, personal brands matter.

 

The next workforce generation has already figured that out. In a competitive marketplace, there is considerable value in increasing your personal profile through creating web content. 

 

By keeping blogs on topics relevant to their industry, using social networking sites to widen work contacts, and managing the way their names turn up in search engines, smart-thinking professionals are giving themselves an edge in a new world that rewards being plugged-in. 

 

The good news is talent webs will make it easier to find smart people. The bad news is more companies will be vying for them. #