Around 11:15 on a recent morning, employees at Red Ventures’ Charlotte headquarters concluded a meeting on how to recruit 30 new workers.
By 11:20, one worker at the Charlotte Internet marketing company had used Twitter to spread the word to 300 or so people.
A minute later, one of her Twitter connections forwarded the message to about 200 more, and soon after, a handful of people had submitted resumes.
Red Ventures has already lined up a few interviews – and has had to enlist 20 workers to help sort through the growing stack of resumes.
As the recession continues to squeeze professionals, pushing unemployment to record highs and flooding the job market with qualified candidates, more job-hunters are turning to the Internet. Now, more companies and recruiters are mining the sites for candidates, too – and more than ever, experts say, a profile on an online networking site could actually turn into a job.
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“It’s almost like networking on steroids,” said Jenny Smith of career coaching firm Right Management in Charlotte. “You can meet so many people in a short time.”
Using the Internet to search for jobs isn’t a new idea. Sites dedicated to job-hunting such as Monster.com and CareerBuilder.com have been around for about a decade. But as social and professional sites are growing in popularity, so is the practice of using them to find work, career coaches and recruiters say.
Facebook, one of the best-known social networking sites, says it has more than 175 million members.
LinkedIn, a networking site with 37 million members worldwide, has seen connections jump 26 percent in the last month and double in the last year, spokeswoman Krista Canfield said.
Job searches were up 48 percent last month from a year ago, and over the last six months, the number of applicants per job listing on the site has doubled, she said.
Smith said job-seekers use sites such as LinkedIn, Plaxo, Ryze and Facebook to search for open positions, target employees of companies where they’d like to work, and connect with people they might be unable to reach through the phone or e-mail. Networking can be faster and less intimidating online, and it can lead to face-to-face meetings, she said.
“It’s amazing how, in such a short period of time, online social networking sites have exploded in popularity,” Smith said. “During times of uncertainty, people like to gravitate toward one another.”
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More companies and recruiters are catching on, she said. While “innovative” companies, like Internet startups, might seem more likely to recruit through social and professional sites, large accounting firms and even government agencies are perusing online profiles, too, she said.
A large health insurance company recruited 10 percent of its new hires through LinkedIn, Smith said. At Right Management, of 12 people who landed jobs recently, 40 percent did so through networking sites, Smith’s colleague Karen Schuler said.
Still, experts caution that not every online profile will lead to a job. Not every company taps into the resources, and even the best online profile can’t make up for a lacking resume or personality, Smith said.
“I don’t think it’s an end-all solution,” she said. “Unfortunately, there is no magic Web site.”
Steve Aparicio of Dilworth started expanding his LinkedIn network soon after being laid off from Wachovia in August – figuring the larger his network, the better his chances of landing another job.
Aparicio, 51, started with a handful of contacts and a profile. Then, he reached out to friends and friends of friends, joined groups of professionals with similar backgrounds and identified recruiters in those fields. A few months later, he’d racked up more than 800 contacts.
The engineer found a job recently as a project manager at Westinghouse Electric Co. – through a career fair, not online – but said the networking site proved more helpful than traditional job boards and overcrowded in-person events. He found a number of leads through LinkedIn, and because of a feature that lists jobs based on a person’s connections, found “some opportunities I believe I wouldn’t have found otherwise,” he said.
At Red Ventures, using social networking sites is a way for the company to cut back on job board expenses and find forward-thinking candidates. Company officials are training employees to use the sites effectively and encouraging them to contact channels from college alumni networks to their own social networks.
Red Ventures’ chief marketing officer, Dan Feldstein, said the efforts help candidates to learn more about the company, too; they can check out its Facebook page for employee photos and a peek at the company’s culture, for instance. Red Ventures is also using the Internet to spread the word about traditional recruiting efforts such as job fairs.
But just because people are savvy enough to find that information doesn’t make them an instant fit, Feldstein said.
“The danger of these things is, it’s so easy to apply now,” he said. “The tools are great, but part of it should be, how does a candidate who fits use the tools to their advantage? Not just, OK, it’s a free-for-all.”
Charlotte IT consultant Gary Zukowski recently launched TweetMyJobs.com, a site that uses Twitter to send job postings to users’ cell phones. Recruiters and human resources teams are already on board, and more than 2,000 people have subscribed to the free service, he said.
Zukowski hopes to target more “brand-name” companies in the future, he said.
Recruiters in Charlotte and around the country are increasingly relying on networking Web sites to find candidates, said Susan Bormann of Management Recruiters of Gastonia North, a Belmont medical device recruiting firm.
She uses sites such as Facebook and LinkedIn daily, searching for candidates with certain backgrounds and qualifications, even those who aren’t actively looking for work.
Bormann is seeing a growing number of inquiries from job-seekers, too, she said.
She was talking to a man recently who found his current job through LinkedIn, she said. He joined a professional group on the site, connected with a company official and landed an engineering job that wasn’t even being advertised, she said.
Finance recruiter Mary Mallett of Charlotte just returned from an annual recruiters conference where a major discussion topic was using social networking sites effectively, she said.
She’s seen recruiters and job-hunters using the sites much more over the past six months, partly because they can see results instantly – “click, click, everyone knows someone, get the word out,” she said.
Even if that doesn’t immediately turn into an offer, it can give disillusioned job-seekers a glimmer of hope in tough times, Mallett said.
“People need to have confidence again, and this builds confidence,” she said. “Social networking sites can truly turn the doom and gloom around.”
By Kirsten Valle
March 22, 2009
source: charlotteobserver.com