Using Recent Hires and Facebook to Source Candidates
Gerry Crispin has a great blog article over at ERE about how employers can use social networking sites such as Facebook to source candidates.
Gerry's idea is that, with the permission of the recent hire, the employer would market their employment opportunities to the friends of that recent hire. What he doesn't say but should be made clear to those who have little to no experience with sites like Facebook is that a "friend" on a social networking site is quite different from a friend in the non-digital world inhabited by most Baby Boomers and Gen X'ers. To those of us who are from those older, non-Millennial generations, our friends are usually in the dozens. To Millennials or those less discriminating older users of social networking sites, a list of friends can easily reach into the hundreds or even thousands.
So if you're an employer trying desperately to recruit electrical engineers for your Virginia facility and you hire a great one, it only makes sense to ask that new hire to refer their friends to you because people tend to hang out with people who are similar to them. For all of the reasons that you like your new hire you will probably also like their friends. And if your new hire is a user of Facebook, MySpace, or any of the other social networking sites, then you are now only one step removed from dozens and perhaps hundreds of other highly qualified electrical engineers in Virginia.
As put by Gerry,
Essentially firms would be able to use their employees as endorsers by tapping their employees own trusted networks -- without the employees themselves having to take any further action to forward on...or refer.
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