ConnectIT 28-May-2009 Businesses using social networking for employment branding, talent searches by Chris Talbot Social networking may have gained its popularity for personal use, but it's becoming a way that employers seek out prospects and build their employment brand, according to online talent management solutions provider Taleo. Businesses are using social media to do branding of their companies' products and their employee brand. They're using social media/networking sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and YouTube to get the message out about what kind of company they're like to work for and trying to extend their employee brand to attract potential employees to them. "What we're seeing now ... a lot more people looking for jobs now, the younger generation being much more active and interactive with social networking/social media tools, and we're starting to see the marriage of the job board and people trying to save money on recruiting agency fees and advertising. We're seeing a lot more use of mining these social networks to find both active and passive candidates," said Judy Sweeney, vice president of research at Taleo. Additionally, there are tools available, such as TweetMyJobs, that can help employers get information on people looking for jobs. "There's a whole lot of new tools that employers can use to advertise a job out there or just go look for candiates," she said. One of the things employers are doing is engaging in onboarding activities. They're looking to use social media to introduce and welcome new employees through things like Facebook groups, as well as offering new employees places to chat with existing employees about the best locations to live or get information about the community, Sweeney said. "They're using YouTube so that particulary on college campuses ... college campus students who are applying for jobs can share a little bit about themselves," she said. Collaboration tools like wikis and blogs also enable employees to work on solutions to problems together. Using such tools for business purposes is something that only larger enterprises are doing, either. Smaller companies without big advertising budgets for talent searches and employment branding are getting creative through using social media, she said. On the employee side of things, the generation most heavily using social media for professional purposes (networking, job searches, keeping in touch with former colleagues, etc.) is Generation X (aged 20 to 43). "There's a heavy use of these tools not just to chat with friends but to use it to extend their professional capabilities," Sweeney said. As to the effectiveness of using social media for job and talent search purposes, Sweeney said employers have found it more effective in finding good candidates than job seekers have found it in finding a job. "What we found is companies are actually using it first for branding purposes. They're doing it in more of a passive way. In other words, they're putting out their brand, they're talking about how good it is to talk about the company, the opportunities in the company, and then they're giving a link to link back to their Web site for how to apply for a job," Sweeney said. That's essentially the entry level way of using social networking for employment purposes by businesses, she said. Fewer companies are using keyword searches to find job candidates, but those that do are using software to search all social networks for specific keywords (i.e. project manager) in profiles. It's searching for candidates that may not be actively searching for jobs but have the skills an employer is looking for, Sweeney said.