The netPolarity Blog

As those of you who have signed up for our MARS mailing list already know, we have two upcoming classes in April.

First up is a full-day class on Saturday, April 7: Advanced Sourcing with Mark Tortorici. The class will be held here at netPolarity Headquarters in Campbell.

If you are looking to supercharge your sourcing skills, this class is going to do that and more. even experienced sourcers and recruiters will find Mark’s Advanced Sourcing class eye-opening and invaluable. In this class, Mark will go through cutting-edge sourcing tricks, techniques and the latest sourcing tools that will give your recruiting and sourcing skills an instant boost.

If you are out of the area and cannot attend the class onsite, we are offering a 75-minute webinar on Tuesday, April 10: Secrets of Social Media Sourcing, also by Mark Tortorici.

This session is geared for advanced sourcers who want to learn about social media searches and complex Boolean strings that very few are using. Mark will teach you how to create complex Boolean queries to manipulate front-facing social network profiles that will give you a very high yield of targeted candidates.

For more information on the above classes or to register by phone, please feel free to contact me directly at 408.385.8924 or lisaa at netpolarity.com.

Everyone knows that social networks allow groups of like-minded individuals to converse, exchange and share ideas with one another. They offer a targeted and captive audience for your message. Sourcers and recruiters know that smart use of social networks will provide a platform for the jobs and messaging that they need to get out to the rest of the world.

But with all of the available social networks out there, you can’t afford to waste time with set up and maintenance of your posts. Don’t overcompensate, just automate! There are tools that enable one message to be sent to many networks, which is a huge time-saver.

How to set it up:
By laying the foundation for your social network messaging, you can create a web of active and passive candidates that were previously unavailable to you. All you need is:

1. Social networks like Linkedin, Twitter, Facebook, Google Talk, Yahoo IM, Google+, Plaxo, etc. (setting these up once is worth it)
2. The public link to the specific job on your careers page. We want to direct people here so that they apply through the job portal.
3. A URL shortener like bit.ly or tinyurl.com – we want to post the link to your job, but use as few characters as possible.
4. An automatic tool that links whichever social networks that you want to use for your mass postings – Yoono (a Firefox/Chrome add on), or Socialoomph, or Friendfeed (there are many more that do the same thing).

You need to be able to convey your message in 140 characters. This is actually easy to do. The best people in staffing do this all day long! The posting should have #hashtags related to the company or position. #hashtags are ways for users to find other similar posts by subject.

1. Make sure you choose which networks you want your message to go out to.
2. Grab the URL of the job that you are working on and shorten it!
3. Create your short-text posting. Here is an example of one for a C++ storage developer:

Are you a C++ coding expert? http://bit.ly/onSwDx Need an expert programmer for a leading storage company. #netpolarity #storage #jobs

4. Make sure your posting is under 140 characters. A lot of social networking tools will show you this as you type. Yoono is one of them. Twitter is another, but there are many more.
5. Use an automatic tool like Yoono, Socialoomph, Friendfeed, or any other to update your networking simultaneously.
6. You can update all networks like Linkedin, Facebook, Yahoo IM, Gtalk, AIM, Twitter, Foursquare, etc. Or you can update selected ones only.
7. You are now easily utilizing the power of multiple networks!

In Conclusion:

• By increasing the number of people that you connect with in your social networks, you create a larger audience to broadcast to.

• Browsers like Firefox and Google Chrome have many search tools and customizations that can help you – use them!!

• You don’t need paragraphs of information for your job. You just need enough to interest your audience so they click through to your posting.

• You only need to set up your posting tools once. After that, it’s as easy as updating your IM status (which EVERYONE does).

Don’t be afraid to use other tools and methods that are available to you. It is easy to dismiss new methods and hold on to the “tried and true” ones. But if you keep doing the same thing, then the future will pass you by…