Social Networking in Recruitment: Build your social networking expertise to give yourself a cost-effective advantage in the hiring market with this book and ebook.

Have you noticed the ease with which some people take to the digital world? They're the ones tweeting on the bus to work, communicating with friends and colleagues through social networks and finding an intrinsic value in their time spent online. These social mavens may be using Yammer internally within an organization to engage in conversations that drive their work forward; they might be using Twitter to share and find links to useful work-related articles; they may volunteer as a community coordinator for a group's Facebook page; or they may successfully leverage LinkedIn's posts and conversation threads to engage with their professional network.

You may recognize a gap between your own capability as the HR or Recruiting Manager who needs to execute your hiring strategy and the social networking expertise of the social mavens in your organization. If this is the case, you can build the capability to connect a recruitment strategy with these online communication channels through a mentor.

Mentoring is an ideal way to build new skills, and the skills required for navigating social networks are best learned in a person-to-person way in this kind of trusted learning environment.

Imagine how difficult it would be for someone to learn how to swim from an instruction manual: can you picture the poor sap jumping into the pool, only to find that those first few seconds underwater where they feel like they're drowning aren't adequately covered in the how-to guide. When you first start seeing the volume of information flowing from an information-sharing platform such as Twitter, it can feel a lot like drowning. We'll now take some time to build your expertise in making sense of the information deluge that you'll get from Twitter. Your expertise will then be put to good use in working out how to reach your potential candidates who likewise are paddling in a river of information of Amazonian proportions.

Let's work out what kind of commitment you can make: can you devote 10 minutes of your daily morning commute over a two month period? Or, will it be easier to find 10 minutes on the iPad at the end of each work day?

However you can find this time, there's great benefit in setting aside regular small chunks of time to find your way on Twitter's microblogging platform. Along the way, we'll build a better understanding of the principles behind social networks and start to form a view of the approaches that will translate from a personal strategy to an organizational approach.

We're going to take a staged approach to build your level of comfort and limit your exposure to the wider online world until you're ready. The stages we'll go through are to firstly listen to a few people, then to speak out to the Twitterverse, and finally to engage in a conversation with a wider group of people on Twitter:

You should find you're now following a variety of topics and finding ways to make sense of the flow of information. Over time, you'll have built a flow of information that's valuable to you through following new people, unfollowing hashtags that aren't useful any longer, and connecting to groups of people online.

Now that you're on your way to mastering the Twitterverse, let's take a look at how communities come together on social networking sites. Once you've found your own way to find the communities you'd like to be part of, you'll have developed an understanding of what holds diverse communities together; you'll then be able to apply this to build a community around your organization's brand.

So, let's find your communities, those groups of like-minded individuals you'd like to connect with in your personal and professional life. Are you a new mum? A commuter cycling to work each day? A football fan? A photography enthusiast? Whatever you're in to, there's a community online to feed your personal and professional interests. As we'll discover, the ways that you find and connect with your community are the ways your recruitment strategy will seek to engage with potential employees.

Here are some ways to find your community:

You may notice we've been using a search to find someone interesting, then navigating through their publicly-known social network to find more people with a similar interest. This means we're quickly finding people who are worth listening to rather than just searching online against keywords. The people we find interesting are more likely to connect with other people we'd also be interested in.

This principle applies to recruiting for different roles, since most of your target employees aren't following your company's digital presence, and they may not even be actively looking for a job. Finding and connecting to your target candidates, who may not be actively looking for work, becomes a matter of finding and connecting to the right communities.

As you can see, there are a lot of new environments to play in if you're involved in recruitment right now. In this chapter, you've looked at how to find the social mavens in your organization and how to identify a suitable mentor. You've taken the first steps to finding your voice on Twitter and you've navigated different social networking platforms to connect to some very different communities online. Hopefully, your mentoring relationship is supporting you through your efforts to become a digital native.

Later in the book, you'll build on the understanding and strategies you've applied here to find your own community to do the same to find your target employees. You'll also look at how to build your own community around an employer brand that encourages and builds a strong relationship between a potential candidate and the organization. If you can build an online relationship with your target candidates, it's much the same as other social situations; they'll be much more receptive to your recruitment message if you already have a relationship together.