Virtual Communities

By AIRS Staff Writers There are not many recruiters
already using the Net who haven't been hunting candidates at the big
career sites and resume banks, or posted a job on any one of the tens
of thousands of niche job boards. But what lies beyond these traditional
hunting grounds? How can recruiters tap into the many types of non-traditional
resume repositories on the Net?

Internet research indicates there are as many as ten million resumes in the free and pay resume banks. As impressive as that number is, there are ten times the number of resumes OUTSIDE resume banks. With upwards of 250 million people using the Net in the U.S. and Canada alone, the wealth of candidate resources is unprecedented. Read on and get introduced to a set of sites that contain literally millions of resumes and homepages - sites we call Virtual Communities.

Millions Served

Millions of people have put their resumes online. Some have submitted them to resume banks and career sites; others have posted them to newsgroups, but millions more have put them on the Web as homepages. One of the favorite places for people to put such pages is on a virtual community Web site. Virtual communities are Web sites that offer free homepages to the public and provide ways for people to share information, interact online and communicate with one another.

Virtual communities are, in effect, powerful databases filled with people. There are millions of candidates in each one - that means they are 5 to 10 times larger
than any job board, career site, or resume bank on the Web - yet most recruiters have no idea they exist. What's clear is that the largest virtual communities are growing by leaps and bounds. That means millions and millions of new members are posting homepages and resumes all the time. This is great news for the very few recruiters who realize these sites are out there. Best of all, these are not job-seeking candidates - these are truly passive candidates - productively working for your competitors, while they wait for the next great opportunity to find
them. That could be you.

Free Homepages and Email For many people, the initial attraction to join a virtual community is for free Web space and free email. For others, it's a fast and simple way to find and interact with people who share the same interests and concerns. In either case, more and more people are taking advantage of the opportunity to create and publish Web pages at virtual communities. Being able to tell friends,
relatives and colleagues that you've got a Web page carries a certain amount of "je ne sais quoi" in today's world. It lets people know you're a player.

Homepages Are Resumes

But are homepages what we want? Aren't we looking for resumes? In virtual communities, we can really use the words homepage and resume interchangeably. At first glance, a homepage may look like a collection of pictures, links and personal information (sometimes a bit too much personal information). But on further examination, you'll notice that the very same page often describes a person's career, skills and experience. It's not unusual for that same person to post information about where they went to school and what they studied, even
providing a link to their alma mater or alumni association.

People even use their homepages to share information about a project they are working on, with email links to other project participants. Sophisticated technical
users may post a snippet of code with links to projects they've worked on. Graphic and Web designers are taking advantage of the free server space to showcase their portfolios. A homepage may not look exactly like the traditional resume you expect, but it may provide you with a lot more information than the traditional one - and it may be just what you need to start a dialogue with your candidate.

The Character of Communities

Virtual communities are composed of a set of different communities - the way a state is composed of different towns and cities - each with its own character. Sometimes it's easy to see where your candidates gather. For example, if you're looking for programmers, you will see that many communities have established areas devoted to people with an interest in computers and programming.

Other times, however, you might not see any areas that seem promising. If you're looking for a regional sales director, you're not likely to find an area devoted
to sales directors. That doesn't mean there aren't such candidates in the community. Your regional sales director might be interested in the soccer, classic movies or holistic medicine area and set up a homepage there. By the same token, your programmer might be interested in the extreme sports, pets or gourmet cooking communities.

So when you search within these communities you want to search the entire community, not just the specific clusters, or you're likely to miss some candidates.

Explosive Growth

Though some of the virtual community sites are several years old, it has only been in the past two years that these sites have enjoyed the rapid growth experienced across the Web. This means a lot of people are congregating there and lots more are joining them every day - all of them are potential new candidates.

What distinguishes one virtual community from another is a combination of size, image and services. Communities with many members offer lots of opportunities for people to get involved and find others with similar interests; they also attract
more press. Similarly, communities that are perceived as "cool" or "hip" attract people. Although they all offer free Web space and email, they differentiate themselves by the amount of free space granted, the tools available and the quality of the chat and online forum programs. Keep an eye on the type of services virtual communities offer and the type of clientele they are trying to attract. Are the candidates you're looking for likely to come here?

Recruitment Targets

Virtual communities are ripe targets for recruitment searches since they contain millions of personal homepages. Dozens of communities exist out on the Internet and it isn't easy to tell them apart. GeoCities is the best place to start and there are several others that rank among the biggest movers and shakers. And there are dozens more out there that may or may not hold promise.

AIRS Glossary of Terms Used in This Article:
- Homepages - personal pages that individual users create to describe themselves, their interests and skills. Such pages serve as invaluable resources for finding candidates on the Web since they often provide as much information as a resume. Sometimes the term is used to describe the starting page of a Web site.
- Virtual Communities - Web sites that offer free homepages
to the public and provide ways for people to share information, interact
online and communicate with one another.
- World Wide Web - a system of servers tied together through cables and phone lines that allows users from around the world to access specially formatted data.
- X-Ray - an AIRS search technique used to look inside a particular Web site
to see what's there.

-- This article is part of a series from AIRS, a global leader in Internet recruitment, tools, news and information. Excerpted from AIRS Search Guide, Copyright 1999-2001 Hanover Capital Management, Inc. AIRS teaches recruiters and high-growth companies to find passive candidates hidden inside directories, databases, archives and the public Web servers of over 400,000 companies and organizations on the Net. For more information about our cutting edge training seminars, publications, or web applications, please go to http://www.CollegeRecruiter.com/pages/airs.php.