PrintOnline networking tools such as Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter have already changed our orientation to the job market, adding dimension - and transparency - to our professional identities. Now, in today's highly competitive job market, squeezed by rising unemployment rates and continued downsizing, many companies are inundated with hundreds - even thousands - of resumes for each new vacancy they post. This is especially true in hard-hit areas like the Inland Empire, where unemployment levels are about 13 percent. If you ask recently hired individuals how they landed their job, chances are they won't tell you it was through Monster or a newspaper classified ad, particularly if theirs is a white-collar job. With fewer positions to fill and market conditions in their favor, many companies are taking the time to conduct more targeted searches for the best candidates they can get, especially when looking to fill top-tier positions.
"It depends on the company and hiring manager," said Lisa Pierson, president of Riverside's Kimko staffing agency, "but right now I think clients are looking for very, very specific experience. I think that the hiring process is taking longer, we're seeing people holding out waiting for that perfect candidate, because they believe the unemployment rate has created an environment where those people exist." Knowing that the employment landscape will continue to shift, many human resources departments are exploring new ways to interact with and recruit candidates. With a vast network of professionals grouped conveniently by searchable topics and keywords - and leagues of detailed background and ancillary information available at the click of a mouse - online social and professional media sites are a recruiter's gateway to this select talent pool. Still, the phenomenon is slower to catch on in some geographic locations and industries than others, and managers are largely unsure of exactly how to exploit the new media to their advantage. Social networking: utilizing the medium Easy to dismiss as the latest fad - and often associated with the informal marketing culture of MySpace - social or professional online networking now appears to have more longevity as an employment mechanism than many might have guessed. "It's very interesting, and I don't think any employers have figured it out," said Jason Otero, technical staffing manager for ESRI, a GIS software company based in Redlands with about 1,800 local employees. "There are multiple types of networking all being lumped into social networking. Employers need to figure that out - how to utilize the medium." According to a 2008 survey published by Careerbuilder, an estimated 22 percent of human resources managers (out of a surveyed pool of 3,259) said they use social networks to research job candidates, an increase of 11 percent from the previous year. Another 9 percent of the surveyed group said they don't currently use social networking tools but plan to start. However, the overall figure could be larger still. Zolio.com, a new resume portfolio service for job seekers and hiring managers, compiled its own research based on surveys from execunet.com and found that 85 percent of hiring managers are Googling employees for background information - which of course will lead directly to a listing of social networking pages. "I don't think job seekers realize how much they're doing it," said Andria Trivosonno, Zolio's co-founder and CEO. But what may start as a simple employee background check has the potential to become a very effective tool for hiring managers, if they choose to utilize it. ESRI has been using LinkedIn "aggressively for the past 13 months," Otero said. "A number of us have been using LinkedIn for longer, but we've been making a concerted effort, a department initiative, in the last year." In the HR industry as a whole, said Otero, "some people are more aggressive, willing to try (new things). We're a little more conservative, focusing on our opportunities with LinkedIn - but looking at other possibilities," including Twitter. The Kimko staffing agency has also had success with LinkedIn over the past year. "And we continue to get better at it all the time," Pierson said. "It's an evolving tool, but I'd say over the last four to five months it's become a more sophisticated approach for us for finding key talent." And Ontario-based HMC Architects has "just started (to use) Twitter and (is) looking at RSS feeds on our site," said Tracy Black, vice president of marketing, "which we see as one of our biggest recruiting tools." The company's human resources manager, Lisa Lynch, said that the majority of new hires are based on employee referrals. Networking, on steroids If the popular adage "70 percent of all hiring is networking" is correct, then the exponential potential of social and professional online networking looks as if it could far exceed the limitations of older models. Whereas traditional networking might have meant you were connected to everyone an associate or acquaintance knew, networking in the digital age casts a much wider - but often more targeted - net. Job searches, alumni groups, professional associations - all these social formations offer a more targeted means of finding the right person for the job. "What I'm seeing is tools like LinkedIn have groups within their search," said Pierson, who uses these groups to posts jobs for her staffing agency. Within those groups, posted information is then made available to many, many more connections in a thread. "You have to understand that we're in an era where `search' drives everything," said David Bloom, a Los Angeles consultant on social media relations. "Social networks allow people to self-organize around areas of interest and find each other." And, said Bloom, they also "reduce the friction of social interaction for businesses as well as personal use, and that has a great deal of value." Industry professionals are slowly taking note of this value and looking for how they can best use hypernetworks like LinkedIn to their advantage. Meanwhile, candidates are also waking up to the importance of a polished public profile as it becomes an increasingly common medium of business interaction and hiring. A more effective poaching tool LinkedIn is already filling a very specific need for hiring managers. As Otero points out, sites like LinkedIn are an important means of discovering and staying connected to an industry's more coveted candidates. "Social or professional networking does provide an opportunity to communicate with people who are termed `passive candidates,'" he said. "Our goals are usually A-level, hi-pos (high-potential) top performers - better employees, because we're always seeking to find the best talent available." And these candidates, said Otero, "don't tend to utilize Monster and Careerbuilder." "With recruiters or hiring managers," agrees Zolio's Trivosonno, "they're not going to Monster and filtering through thousands of resumes; they're going to LinkedIn and (sites like) Zolio, looking for passive candidates." High performers are probably compensated well, reasoned Otero, "so they don't have to look for jobs - or they're a known commodity in the business, so they have a network of people." The premise behind using these sites, he said, "is to look for people who are looking for professional networking - not just a job." Otero likened it to "a version of headhunting - which traditionally revolves around referrals (networking). This is similar, but you don't have to go through the cold calling, just do it all electronically." Over the past year, Otero said his department has found five or six people from LinkedIn, all passive candidates, high-performers who they were able to recruit away from another organization. Importantly, some of these were distant connections. "I was three-removed from this person and was (still) able to recruit them away," said Otero, adding, "We wouldn't have found them otherwise." A little behind? It may seem that every company with at least one employee younger than 30 has tapped into the benefits of social media to market themselves. Many human resources managers are still dancing around the inherent privacy issues with more personal social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace, figuring out the differences and the options. Some are jumping in head first. But many large employers in the region still fill managerial positions the traditional way - by moving people up through the ranks, internally. Sue Mitchell, co-founder of Riverside Staffing Agency, is hopeful but more reserved in her estimate of how well companies are taking to social media in the region. "I see people moving from traditional yellow pages and classified to online forums and Web sites, but I don't know that we've moved to social networking and Facebook," said Mitchell, who has observed hiring practices change over the 30 years since she started her business. The Inland Empire, she said, "might be a little bit behind what might be happening in Los Angeles and New York - but I think we're moving. Some of us don't quite know how to use it effectively, but (we know) there might be something there." On the other end of the spectrum from ESRI, companies such as BNSF Railway and local staple Stater Bros. stick to traditional hiring practices and have no immediate use for social media. Jack Brown, CEO of Stater Bros., one of the region's largest companies with 19,000 employees, noted the logic of keeping promotions in-house: "One of the advantages of hiring at the entry level is that when a person moves up in the company, they know what we do. So even if they're in accounting, they understand what our business is about." A recent Web site with company information, instructions for candidates and dial-in numbers with which people can find out what jobs are available spell the extent of technological advancement for the grocery chain. At BNSF Railway, which employs about 1,500 workers in the area, job announcements have made the leap from print to digital, but promotions are largely in-house, said the company's director of public relations, Lena Kent. "We would put (ads) in the newspaper, but now we've gone to an Internet-based system and people submit their application online. Even if we don't have positions available, they can still submit - that certainly wasn't the case when I hired on 14 years ago," she said. With new hires coming to a grinding halt and 3,000 furloughs, however, the company seems unlikely to seek out new hiring avenues in the near future. However, looking ahead - and after 30 years and three recessions, none of which she said even remotely compares with the current situation - Mitchell knows that when a recovery happens, companies will have to act quickly to make up for all the downsizing. "I do think most companies have cut back so much that when there's any recovery, there's this pressure to start rehiring soon," she said, adding that her industry will be a major indicator of that recovery, as employers will make the transition through temporary staffing. Making the most of social media For many employers and job seekers, LinkedIn is the most logical weapon of choice, but some are testing the waters with Twitter and other new media. "We're still trying to figure out how best we can utilize it," said Otero of Twitter, the micro-blogging network rated by Nielsen as the fastest-growing "Member Communities" site in March 2009, with a growth of 1,382 percent. "We don't see the same potential concerns that we do with Facebook and MySpace, no personal information. We'll definitely be doing more with it in the near future," he said. Otero's department also has a careers blog, "where we talk about different jobs that are new and hot, events, work environment," as well as a YouTube page where "we put videos of employees' profiles, questions and promote ESRI as a company." Among the most obvious benefits of such social media sites is the fact that they're absolutely free. In projections for the 2009 job market, Careerbuilder - which also collaborates with Facebook and engages in virtual career fairs - references a December 2008 survey in which it polled hiring managers about their budget plans, including for recruitment spending. At 7 percent, the number of managers who plan to invest in social networking sites is relatively low, compared with how many plan to invest in other tools: online recruitment sites (19 percent), newspaper classifieds (15 percent), career fairs (12 percent) and staffing firms or recruiters (12 percent). However, this figure might also be misleading if one were to consider the fact that "recruitment spending" might not directly apply to the use of a free service. Business vs. personal information Meanwhile, potential candidates - and professionals of all persuasions, for that matter - might also have some catching up to do in order to effectively harness the technology, especially as the job market continues to decline. According to another Careerbuilder survey of 8,785 full-time (not self-employed) workers in 2008, only about 16 percent have modified their social media profiles with potential employers in mind. More may want to start, given the increasing interest among HR professionals in researching and recruiting people through these channels. Of the human resources professionals (22 percent) who said they use social media to research candidates in the Careerbuilders survey, 34 percent said they found cause to dismiss a candidate after looking through his or her online profile. However, 24 percent said they found information that helped them decide to hire the candidate. Consultants and hiring professionals will recommend that candidates maintain the integrity of their public pages and keep the private ones that way, but social media can be much more than this minimalist interpretation. David Bloom points out that professionals, whether actively seeking jobs or not, also have a lot to gain from exploring tools like Twitter. "There are opportunities for using some of the new tools in a really pain-free way," he said. "For example, by using Twitter to raise your visibility. If you have a focused Twitterfeed in a specific topic area, you can link it back to your LinkedIn page." "Getting known" as a professional in your field who thinks about the industry in a strategic way, he said, can be invaluable in attracting employers. "If I am hiring people, whether looking for a consultant or a full-time employee, I might want to go onto Twitter and do a search for a specific topic area and see who comes up - see who is writing about these areas. As an employee, one way you can build some idea as a thought leader in a given field is to create a very focused online presence." While offering a forum for self-presentation with the same kind of focus that a blog would, Twitter entries are short (limited to 140 characters) and therefore take up a lot less time. Users can create links to news, developments and trends in their field or submit a very brief perspective on the issue, Bloom said. The idea is to establish a recognizable presence, an authority, and following that positions an employee as a "thought leader" in the field. And, said Bloom, "that's exactly the kind of big-picture person (employers) want in these higher-level jobs." Wider applications coming When the economic recovery does happen, many of these practices might well have a little more traction and a lot bigger user base - not to mention the fact that other forms and uses will inevitably evolve to serve the changing market. If they do, companies such as Zolio - which is based in part on the fundamental acknowledgment that our online identities are now a huge part of how we do business - are well-positioned to capitalize on the comeback. "Instead of a hiring manager filtering through pages of links, we're giving them everything all in one location, all in one link, and all the links can be constantly updated," Trivosonno said. "That manager is seeing your most recent work, including visual materials, work samples, videos, recommendations, etc." Launched only six months ago, Zolio is focusing on target markets including students and young professionals 18 to 30 and exploring other options. They include business solutions for hiring managers and organizations that integrate the company's technology into their own systems, as well as partnering with behavior and personality assessment companies to make the hiring process even more streamlined and thorough.