Success with Online Social Networks

Wait! Don’t just click past all those invitations to LinkedIn; they may just be your ticket to finding some of the most successful candidates before anyone else does. Peter Marinelli, CPC, CSP, managing partner at Target Consulting Group, sales placement specialists, has had major success with online social networks such as LinkedIn, Facebook, and MySpace when recruiting potential candidates for his clients.

"It’s a tool that recruiters can use to find passive candidates – the people who are happy and successful in their jobs and not necessarily looking to make a change," Marinelli says. "While we have a lot of success with online job boards, finding the successful candidates who are working and happy has been a challenge. When we connect with them on these social networks, we are able to get to them before they go to the job boards and are contacted by every recruiter."

Marinelli also uses these networks to get through gatekeepers and to pre-qualify candidates by viewing what they’ve done in the past.

Not only can sales managers and other recruiters find candidates on these networks, they also can help candidates find you. The key, says Marinelli, is to make sure you make it easy for people to contact you by following this advice for creating a personal company profile:

• Describe what your company does in plain English. Don’t use corporate jargon.
• Use references and testimonials to your advantage; they lend credibility.
• Post your resume, experience, and even your alma mater on your profile so that people can reconnect with you.
• Include a professional picture of yourself to put a face with the name.
• Link to your Website and email address.

Once you create a profile, for example, in LinkedIn, you can use it to search for people using key words. For example, you can search under financial sales or enterprise software sales – any niche. You can get referrals through the network, too.

Each network has its pros and cons, says Marinelli, but in a nutshell, LinkedIn is a professional business networking tool, Facebook is geared to Generation Y, but it’s starting to become mainstream, and MySpace caters to personal networking. There are other online networks and some even encompass various niches – Latino Professional Network, CEOSpace, Jigsaw, and Zoominfo are just a few. The more networks you join, the more you are referenced on the search engines such as Google and Yahoo. "These social networks provide you with access to potential candidates and information 24/7," says Marinelli. "They’re always working for you."