By Barbara Ling
One of the great things about the Internet is it encourages people to form
communities about common interests.
You can take advantage of this and learn lots about your candidate base by
reading or lurk on forums that are centered upon the field in which you
recruit.
It's easy to find good forums to watch. Simply go to
ForumOne - it's a search engine for forums and bulletin boards of all kinds!
Once there, search for your topic. Perhaps you recruit for Cobol folk.
Searching on
cobol
will return many forums you can use.
But you can expand that search capability so much more!
Perhaps you recruit for the accounting industry. Go to
Altavista at
and search for
+title:accounting +title:forum
Nice, huh?
Don't neglect
Yahoo! either! If you were to visit Yahoo and search on
engineer forums
you'll find over 40 you can peruse.
What do you do with forums once you find them? You can lurk to see when
folks ask employment questions. You can offer to sponsor prolific boards
and have your banner on the main page! If you're familiar with the trade,
you can even answer questions related to the field - this is a great way of
increasing your professional reputation.
Remember that forums are, first and foremost, community builders. Like
newsgroups and mailing lists, you should never just barge into one,
unannounced, and start throwing out job offers like party favors - many
recruiters have already given the industry a bad name with that practice.
Showing respect and restraint, however, will go a long way when impressing
your future candidates.
Take this concept to the limit! Have you considered putting up a board of
your own? Just think of how rather impressive it would be for candidates to
find a forum dedicated to their employment needs on a recruiter's site!
Putting up a board isn't difficult at all. Several superb, free programs
exist - you can find them at
Cgi Resources. I myself use
WebBBS - the set up is easy, and you can even take advantage of their
help bbs's for free.
What should you as a recruiter provide? Let's say you recruit Unix folks.
You could target your board on how to find Unix jobs, all about the
communities in which you recruit, skills that are helpful for achieving high
pay in Unix, and the like. Make sure to include a prominent link to your
jobs on this page - instant visibility!
The recruiter who takes the available technologies and turns them into tools
and resources for their candidates is the recruiter who will stand out in
the candidates' minds. And after all, isn't that the best way to generate
referrals?
Article courtesy of Barbara Ling. For more information, please go to:
RISE seminars at:
http://www.riseway.com or
The Internet Recruiting Edge at:
http://www.barbaraling.com/recruiting.html.
