Which Social Network is best for Talent Sourcing? This question does not have a good answer, because:
- There’s no need to narrow our search to one set of data (it would be silly, right?)
- We can communicate with the prospects using a different site than the one where we found them.
A better question is – What makes a Social Network valuable?
I think a Social Network is valuable for searching if it has:
- Plenty of professional profiles and extra info, containing those backgrounds that we search for;
- Convenient, “deep”, structured, within-budget, search capabilities, that allow identifying those professionals.
If the Social Network also allows to reach out to prospects, that is a plus too!
Over the last few years, we have all been feeling that Facebook’s role in Sourcing and Recruiting will grow – along with widening dissatisfaction with LinkedIn. It’s time to closely look at Sourcing on Facebook if you haven’t.
How does Facebook do in terms of the above criteria? Let’s take a look.
- “Plenty of professional profiles”.
While a large percent of Facebook members don’t post their professional information, there are obviously many more professionals – and professional data – there. Just take a look at the numbers:
Facebook has a huge amount of professional information, more than any other Social Network does.
2. “Convenient, “deep”, structured, within-budget, search capabilities”.
Searching on Facebook in my and our colleagues’ experiences, takes some getting used to. If you are used to searching for the field values, such as the job title and location, in a resume database, – get ready; this search is different. We need to learn some ART of Facebook searching. For example, we can search Facebook for fields such as a job title, but doing so is not straightforward. Sometimes, similarly-phrased searches produce different results (which is good to know, to get more results for a search). Facebook’s search results are, of course, produced by software code, not by a human, but often seem rather “informal”.
With the ART, we need to learn some SCIENCE – you might need to produce technical-looking searches, such as
While no technical background is necessary to learn to “speak this language”, creating queries like the above would require some learning curve. But the results would be rewarding. Best of all, the search is completely free (compare to the cost of LinkedIn Recruiter!).
You can learn much more at the Facebook Sourcing Mastery webinar recording, which comes with the slides and one month of support as well.