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Cloud Recruiting Demystified
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Top of the morning to you! How has your day been treating you? Me, well, as always, I’ve been spending me time writing, getting the kids to school, avoiding the highly-painful pouncing attacks my two eldest always try on me (we take karate together) and similar activities as well.
Excitement, thy name is Ling. But I digress! 
Tell me now….
Have you ever heard of Cloud Recruiting?
No? Contrary to what you might think, no, it’s not mobile recruiting while traveling in an airplane, nor is it a meat market for meteorology. Instead, it’s a term that refers to using the plethora of virtual networking tools and opportunities at hand to help you recruit the best possible candidate.
Cloud recruiting has you active in Facebook, Twitter, and other social networks, while also building up your business reputation by avid participation in areas where passive candidates gather - community sites, forums, etc.
Now, if you’re saying to yourself right now "Jeepers Barbara, isn’t that very similar to what you’ve been teaching since 1998 (ie, become part of the candidates’ network and also a trusted value-added resource)?", the answer is….yes indeed! ‘Cloud recruiting’ is simply the Web 2.0 marketing term for it; I’ve been advocating this approach now for over a decade (although back then, ’social networks’ were defined to be forums, discussion groups, email lists, netnews, etc.).
So. Now that you know what Cloud Recruiting is, how can you benefit from it?
Got a couple of days? :) Here’s 3 ideas:
Idea 1.) Become a recruiting authority in your industry niche
You have a recruiters website, right? And I’m certain you have a link for individuals to submit their resume, correct?
Do you also have:
- A blog? A blog allows you to write industry-specific career-related posts (and because search engines love blogs, chances are, those pages will be indexed in a jiffy!). What a great way to show you know the current industry-related news!
- A career resources section? Let’s say you recruit in the healthcare industry - do you know the certifications taht are required for job advancement? Resources to deal with difficult colleagues? Ideas on how to balance work and family? The more you showcase you know about the industry, the more comfortable candidates will feel trusting their career future to you.
- A career ezine? A passive candidate might not be open to a new job right now…but certainly they’d want to look out for Number 1 (ie, themselves). Create an ezine that delivers a 3-4 paragraph industry-related how-to article; every week your name would be re-branded in the candidate’s mind. I myself use aWeber for my ezines; if you need assistance in creating your own issues, you can check out Instant Niche eMails for a quick-start creation tool.
Next, take advantage of:
Idea 2.) Set up your Industry and Recruiter Social Networking profiles
Sure, LinkedIn and Facebook and MySpace etc. are, ahem, groovy places in which to connect with friends and the like…but were you also aware they have targeted niche subgroups and communities within them?
These are excellent resources that allow you to touch base with passive candidates galore. And because many of these sites allow you to repost your blog postings or your Tweets or what have you, your industry-related writings become quite visible indeed.
(Now do you see why I’m always so gung-ho about having a recruiters website that doubles as an industry authority niche site as well? Whenever anyone gets intrigued from your social networking profile, they can visit your site to learn more….and the first thing they’ll see is you know the playing field like the back of your hand).
Idea 3.) Set up Social Networking Aggregators
Once you have created a number of social networking profiles, it would be quite spiffy indeed if you had one or 17 sites that would pull everything you do in for you!
MyBlogLog is one such community; FriendFeed is another. This resources make it easy to refer potential clients and candidates to see how you’re a force within the industry.
The above three ideas touch just the tip on effective cloud recruiting; done right, it can really boost your candidate and client network and increase your future recruiter billings as the effect snowballs down the road. But remember - social networking sites and Cloud Recruiting concepts are TOOLS! They’re NOT the silver bullet, they WILL take time to implement effectively….but the financial bottom line results can make it quite worthwhile indeed.
Enjoy,
Barbara Ling
ps - Cloud recruiting benefits greatly from an inherent understanding of recruiter marketing. Do YOU know how simple that is? Click HERE to see my nifty eseminar on recruiter marketing!
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[...] Original btl [...]
Cloud recruiting is just another fancy way of recruiting the way it should be done - and has been done by the best recruiters whether they used the Internet or not (and lots of us were doing it before Al Gore made his invention