I always see comments on recruiting blogs and ERE about the use of Twitter as a sourcing tool.  Twitter broadcasts about your status in short, text-based posts.  It’s a great way to stay in touch with friends and other people with similar interests.  You can even follow the postings (or Tweets) of famous people like John Mayer, Heidi Montag, Gavin Newsom, Al Gore, Lance Armstrong, or John McCain (if you’re into that sort of thing).  I, myself follow some of my favorite musicians, directors, and staffing professionals like: Trent Reznor of NIN, Imogen Heap, Lisa Nova, Michael Ian Black, Kelly Dingee, and Jim Stroud.

But can this cool, connected medium be used for sourcing?  The answer is yes! And to help illustrate, I have enlisted the services of my friend, Plugged-in Pete.  He is going to demonstrate the benefits of using search.twitter.com with the right search strings.

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Great demonstration from Pete! By entering some simple words or phrases that a software engineer might “tweet” about, you can get yourself a geographically targeted list of passive candidates. Here’s the example of the search we used:

coding OR “source code” OR compile OR compiler OR OOP OR OOD OR “object oriented” near:”mountain view” within:50mi

Even though Twitter profiles have limited contact information, there is enough to go on so that you can track down the individuals. They contain name, location, and sometimes personal websites or company references. From this point, you take all that information and start your sourcing to find the individual’s contact information. For more help on that, see my other posts about finding people online:

People who need Pipl 1, People who need Pipl 2, and People who need Pipl 3.

Happy hunting!

- Mark

Video Resumes, Video Cover Letters or Video Interviews - The benefits of video services like Vipe, as shown by Plugged-in Pete.

I think that these video resumes, or as I call them, “video cover letters” can be a very good initial representation of a candidate. This is the candidate’s opportunity to get their best foot forward when presenting themselves. Or I guess in this case it’s their best face forward!

Sure, they can be done over and over again before they are sent, but that’s the point. If their best video still doesn’t make a good impression, then you have just saved yourself the headache of flying out a candidate for a potentially expensive interview. Let’s take a practical look at this newer and very useful approach with Plugged-in Pete.

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There are services like Vipe that allow candidates to record answers to questions that the client specifically asks of the interviewees. Others include Hirevue, Recruitv, and LiveHire, but the interface & simplicity of Vipe seems to resonate with their users.

Mark

Just when you thought it was safe to have a separate work/life existence, they find yet another way to keep you connected to the world!!! But don’t worry, at least this one is fun! What am I talking about? I’m talking about micro-blogging!

Micro-blogging can give your personal network constant updates regarding your status. These can be sent from anywhere in the world. The great thing about micro-blogging is that you probably use one of these tools already. Whether it’s Twitter, FriendFeed, your Facebook status, your cell phone’s SMS texts, or your Gtalk status. These are just a few examples, but the more important thing to think about is how you can connect these.

Some of these sites like Twitter, can receive text message updates from your phone. Are you running late and need to update your status message for your network to see? Send a text message from your phone to Twitter and it will automatically update it.

Other sites like FriendFeed allow you to share videos, photos, links, bookmarks, blogs, books, news, and status between your network. The major benefit to sites like these is the fact that you can set them up to share information, and then you only have worry about updating one website status! To illustrate this concept, I have enlisted the help from a friend of mine named Plugged-in Pete.

Click on the image below to see:

Now how can this be used in the world of recruiting? First of all, you can search status messages within a network or with some sites you can go beyond your network. This is still a relatively new medium, so there aren’t a lot of hard-lined rules yet. I also have another article that details how to search with Twitter.

Now, since some of these sites tie into SMS text applications, they must follow the 155 character limit for SMS text. Now how can you send super-long URL’s if you only get 155 characters for your message? The answer is with tinyurl’s. These 2 sites: tinyurl.com and snipurl.com allow you to take a long URL and save it as a very short URL. Now you can post that super-important YouTube Video or news article and not have to worry about space.

Stay tuned for future episodes of Plugged-in Pete and Recruiting Today.

- Mark