Why community is king when it comes to candidate sourcing

So much of what a company hopes to achieve when it is recruiting staff, rests on participation in the right communities. With its services encompassing proactive CV database searching, a focussed search and select service and the instant creation and building of talent pools, webrecruit (http://www.webrecruit.co.uk) helps your firm to penetrate these communities.

However, there is so much more to the understanding of the right candidate sourcing communities, especially online. With so many communities to be found on the Internet, the onus is on companies attempting to recruit staff through them to participate wisely.

Communities and portals like LinkedIn and Twitter are unquestionably a steady source of quality candidates for many organisations, with a great number of candidates being intently analysed and filtered before attempts are made to prise them away from their current jobs.

However, what was once a prized ‘little black book’ for niche recruiters has become very much an ‘open book’ for almost every company, and it has brought as many new staff recruitment problems as it has solved. For one thing, it is no longer a ‘little black book’ but an entire library, with even supposedly well-targeted searches on LinkedIn producing many thousands of results.

This naturally begs the question: where should your own company start? Well, firms need to think of not only technology, but also the sociology and psychology that underpin online communities. With so many different types of social networks now prominent, companies involved in online recruitment think more in terms of communities now than they have ever done before.

Successful use of such communities, however, depends not only on asking what the recruiter can gain from one, but also how it can build and retain one of its own. The community of those looking for a job is, after all, in a constant transient state, and even recruiters will routinely dip into such communities rather than being a truly integral part of them.

This is why it’s such a good idea for companies to pay close attention to their permanent online and social media presence, making use of SEO, link building and employer branding to help to ensure a steady source of potential candidates – whether now or in the future – as well as a reputation as an authority in its field.

However, as well as being central to a community, a recruiter should act with decorum and honesty. A growing tendency for less reputable firms to overuse social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter, spamming them, failing to keep a reasonable distance from candidates, being dishonest about their intentions and generally acting like door to door salesmen has only tarnished social media as a candidate source, to the detriment of more ethical rivals.

This simply makes it all the more vital for clients of recruitment firms like webrecruit (http://www.webrecruit.co.uk) to temper their strategies accordingly, using online communities subtly and intelligently. The very success of recruiters, after all, rests greatly on the skills, experiences and attitudes of their people.