With the competition for talented employees remaining hot and heavy, it’s no surprise that companies don’t want to leave any recruitment avenues unexplored — including those in cyberspace.
Social networking sites like Facebook, while still primarily used for staying in touch with friends, are also attracting the interest of corporations interested in using them as recruitment tools.
UK job recruitment site Jobtonic created a Facebook add-on that allows Facebook members to display job openings from Jobtonic in their personal profiles and to earn £2,200 (U.S.$4,480) for successful referrals, reports vnunet.com.
This seems a good fit for Jobtonic, which appears to position itself as “edgy,” based on a cursory Web search that turns up an employee predilection for blogging, with one blog referencing a bright orange Jobtonic-branded VW Camper van that is cruising the streets this summer. Representation on Facebook isn’t confined to the edgy, though, based on an 8,000-member Ernst & Young group that is used to attract potential hires.
And Facebook isn’t the only virtual venue for recruitment. The Wall Street Journal has reported that some companies now conduct job interviews in Second Life. (The vnunet.com piece mentions that Accenture has opened a virtual “office” there.)
KPMG also notes in a recent report that large corporations are using professional headhunters less and relying on their own Web sites more for recruitment.
In our best Luddite fashion, we feel compelled to point out the hazards in relying too heavily on such approaches. As vnunet.com notes (and offers a real-world example to prove), the automatic filtering tools on Web sites mean that prime candidates can get overlooked if they don’t include the “right” wording on their online resumes.
There’s also the little problem of how easy it can be to deceive folks (including recruiters) on the Internet.
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