Are social networks really redundant? Can we really market ourselves to find employment? Lots of us think that it is just hype. First of all, not many of us have got a clue about what social media and social networking is about. Also, social networking puts us out there, makes us transparent to the world out there. So, those who still hold qualms about  social networking—might be the people who  “fear” social networking to some extent.

First of all social networking is not only about pushing candidates/jobs in channels like Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn. Just pushing things out there and not participating actively is as good as personal networking, where, personal preferences over-rule the “social” aspects. When it comes to social networking for recruiting, one has to have a strategy to achieve some set-goal in mind. We have to got out there, engage in meaningful conversations, let people know about us and attract talent as well as business.

There are numerous stories of people who have managed to find a job using social networking. Last week, Tim Paine, a Dallas Blogger, was contacted by a local company for a blogging project. How? One of the company’s employees found him while tweeting. “It does seem impossible before it happens to you, but I guess I am not the first to be benefited from networking”, said Tim—more reasons for believing that it is not “hyped” at all.

The best part is that we don’t really have to break a sweat to network. Building up a network is a natural process. If you are a recruiter, and you have friends from similar niche, then instead of directly asking people “Hey, I want such and such guy”, you simply search for the guy in the friends list, friends-of-friends list…. from the small network which you have already got.  Targeting the right people and right areas is the key.

It is one thing to say that we can use social networks to “find” candidates, but there are few tricks that one has to know to really dig deeper and use the tools out there to know how to get what one wants. In the next post we will  look at a specific example on  how to target candidates using popular social networks like LinkedIn, Bebo, MySpace etc.

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