If you have been a recruiter for any length of time you know that the industry is evolving at the speed of the internet. When I started recruiting we relied on newspaper ads to push our jobs out to the public and cold called prospects over the telephone to pull them in to interview. We also did a lot of networking… old school networking.

This involved attending weekly luncheons and after hours meetings with the local Chambers of Commerce and local chapters of Industry Specific Groups.These could be anything from Women in Technology to Financial Executives Networking Groups. Lots of time was spent out of the office talking to people, selling yourself and your company. You might say we were the first recruiting brand ambassadors.

Enter the internet and our introduction to job boards. Recruiters had access to a wonderful new world of online recruiting… sites like Monster, CareerBuilder and Dice where they could post jobs and have resumes come pouring into their inbox. The best feature of the job boards was the ability to search their resume database. Did this mean the end of cold calling? Not entirely but it certainly made it a whole lot easier and sometimes warmed the call up a bit. We had Yahoo groups of every kind to replace our face to face networking.

LinkedIn entered the scene and was a real game changer. Recruiters now had access to an online rolodex of candidates and companies. We thought we had just been handed the keys to the kingdom. The early adopters began growing their networks, starting groups and quickly became power users.

Online took a whole new persona with the emergence of Google and their breakthrough algorithm. This also created a new type of recruiter, the Sourcer, a dedicated recruiter who scoured the internet for key skills, target companies and lists of industry speakers and conference attendees.

During this time the web evolved from 1.0 to 2.0… we had blogs and niche sites while a new industry was emerging in recruitment certification. AIRS was certifying recruiters on Boolean, X-Ray and advanced searching techniques. AIRS certified recruiters were in high demand. LinkedIn trainers were popping up everywhere, training us on how to search, post and recruit and get the most out of our network. People were blogging about best practices in sourcing and a lot of interest was being generated.

A few years ago a new term entered our vocabulary… social media. We discovered that besides LinkedIn, you could use Facebook for recruiting purposes, not just to talk to your friends and share pictures. We now have all types of apps like Branchout and BeKnown on Facebook for recruiting.

YouTube had been a channel to watch how to videos, see funny things happening to people, cute babies laughing and cats… lots of cats. We now post recruitment videos on YouTube and search for subject matter experts who post videos. Then this new player, Twitter, entered the scene. From the beginning recruiters have used Twitter to push their jobs out socially and now we are developing communities of followers and people we follow who share information and engage in conversations.

All in all the evolution has been remarkable… fast and furious with the advent of social recruiting and exciting as we learn new ways to navigate the recruiting waters. Isn’t it interesting that we seem to have come full circle? We started with personal contact to develop relationships with our candidates and now social recruiting is all about developing relationships and having conversations… we have just taken the personal contact online. We are still brand ambassadors. We just have a larger reach.

About Leslie Mason
@leslie12002 | +Leslie Mason is a Senior Recruiter and part of the award winning recruiting team at Intuit. She is a member of the Candidate Generation team where social networking plays a large part and her focus is on recruiting top talent for marketing and analytics roles.  Leslie has been successful in both agency and corporate environments wearing multiple hats of project manager, sourcer, recruiter and account manager. 

+Leslie Mason is a social media enthusiast, avid LinkedIn networker, long time blogger http://www.lesliemason.blogspot.com/ and an active member of several local recruiting organizations. She is a board member of the DFWTRN and speaks at the Crossroads Career Transition workshops. She has been a conference speaker at Onrec’s TheRecruiting Conference and TalentNet as well as co-hosted webinars and been featured on a live video chat on Social Media and Recruiting. Her complete profile may be viewed at http://www.linkedin.com/in/lesliemason.

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