Beyond Sourcing – 15 Creative Ways Recruiters Can Use Professional Networking Sites

I gave a presentation for ERE Media Tuesday entitled “Professional Networking – Beyond Sourcing”, which focused on the many ways that recruiters can use professional networking sites to support their business and their own career, not just for sourcing candidates. The way I see it, any hack can figure out how to type a few keywords and do a search — where it gets really interesting is in all the other things you can use the tools for to grow your business, attract more candidates and differentiate yourself from the thousands of other recruiters out there.

You can download the presentation at ERE, but I tend to go for a pretty minimalist presentation style, and there was a lot of information that I covered that’s not in the slides. The topic that seemed to get the most comments and questions, but I feel is kind of short-changed in the slides, was the specific ways recruiters can use networking sites for more than just sourcing. I posted the full list as a guest post at Six Degrees from Dave (Mendoza). Here’s the short version:

1. Attract more clients
2. Get referrals, not just introductions
3. Strategic alliances
4. Media exposure and publicity
5. Become a media outlet
6. Prepping candidates
7. Candidate checks
8. Industry intelligence
9. Competitive intelligence
10. Peer benchmarking
11. Personal branding
12. Personal career development
13. General information and research
14. Find suppliers
15. Enhance your business trips

Be sure to check out the full list on Dave’s blog. To see what some recruiters have had to say on the topic, or to contribute your own thoughts, check out the question I posted on LinkedIn Answers. And for even more ideas, see Smart Ways to Use LinkedIn, a compilation of over 100 ways to use LinkedIn in your business and personal life.

Scott Allen  (299 Posts)