Have you discovered a reason to be social online, such as promoting yourself, engaging customers, finding candidates for open positions, or branding and protecting your business? Social media is all the rage these days. It’s cheap, in most instances free, and can greatly improve your recruiting if used the right way. Social media is literally everywhere today as well, especially with the rapid adoption and use of mobile devices, including smart phones such as the iPhone, and free Wi-Fi enabling laptops and netbooks in major cities worldwide. If you are relatively new to the scene or need a quick social tune-up, here are three ways for recruiters to get started:

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Discover Tools to Listen, Measure and Engage the Web

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Many tools are now available to help navigate the social web. These include search engines, dashboards and social search tools. Lithium, Radian6 and Trackur are among dozens of paid tools. Free options include the likes of Google Alerts. Being a user of many of these tools, we find that you generally “get what you pay for.” Free options and work-around solutions for scouring the web can be good, but don’t always have enough features for ample coverage. Lithium (formerly ScoutLabs) is our social media weapon of choice currently as it offers a dashboard look into mentions of keywords and conversation of my choice happening on blogs, forums, photo sites, video channels and on Twitter. It searches millions of sites and online content to find job seekers, potential leads and like-minded people in recruiting and HR. It essentially puts us right into the conversation, saving hours of search in the process. This provides significant value in the social web for a low fee. Our advice here is to choose a tool that best suits your needs and budget, then dive in. The learning curve for using most is not very steep.

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Want to find the next outlet for recruiting talent? For starters, stay clear of recruiting communities, HR sites and your recruiting industry peers. Step “outside of the box” and your comfort zone with those in recruiting and HR, and get a completely new perspective. We were early adopters of popular recruiting destinations today including LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter. Currently we’re working with newly emerging location-based recruiting technologies for mobile recruiters using Foursquare and Loopt. We credit our early adoption and findings to three main areas: social sites, blogs and news destinations, and content channels. If used properly, you too can stay ahead of the curve in the ever changing recruiting landscape. Here’s some additional insight and tips into these areas.

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Camp Out on Social Sites

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Keying in on social sites should be a top priority for recruiters. With these sites, it’s one thing to follow conversation from other recruiters and your peers, but it’s another thing altogether to get an outsiders opinion. Friend, follow and listen to the wisdom of the crowds on Twitter and Facebook in particular. There are a variety of tools to help you get started with these social sites. Try TweetDeck and work to customize your columns with prominent people in the technology space, as well as people in marketing, sales and other areas that have some relevancy and crossover into recruiting. Pay attention to how people in these fields are being successful at their jobs and what tools, sites and strategies they are implementing to stay ahead of the pack. Check Tweetmeme to see what is popular on any given day. Look at popular Twitter lists on Listorious, as well as directories on WeFollow and Twitr to discover new people. I highly recommend Robert Scoble and his lists to get your feet wet here. Also in Twitter, watch the “trending” topics from your home page which will give you an indicator on what’s most actively talked about. Regarding other networks, make sure to pay attention to conversations in technology and marketing related groups on Facebook and LinkedIn. Don’t forget about Ning communities, Yahoo Groups and even MySpace. Active on your mobile? Check out MocoSpace, a mobile-based social network.

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Have you noticed most recruiting strategies today are technical, revolving around social networks, the blogosphere or search engines? Forget Google. Drop Twitter. Leave LinkedIn. Disconnect from everything that’s technical and has you glued to your computer or mobile device to recruit talent. There are plenty of other effective ways to reach job seekers without being dependent on machines. Packed inside this article are 50+ no-tech (no technology required) ideas to help recruiters build awareness for their careers offline and get a potential edge searching for candidates. Most are designed to get you out of your chair and hit the streets in one way, shape or form.

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Events

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Join the speaking circuit and offer to speak at local events. Find your local SHRM chapter or technology council. Attend Toastmasters, Dale Carnegie speaking courses or other networking events. Connect with The Chamber of Commerce on professional groups. Set-up a booth at a trade show or job fair. Contact local schools, churches and associations about classes, seminars and lectures you can speak or teach at. Offer demonstrations of your services or products in person at local stores or businesses. Pick a target audience and create a contest focused towards them, but make sure to offer a substantial prize that will raise eyebrows and get good word-of-mouth and traffic. Sponsor a local business event or even a sporting team in a little league. Don’t overlook recruiting specific events from the likes of ERE, SourceCon and Onrec as well.

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Let’s talk sourcing. What does your playbook look like? How are you developing leads, traffic to your job listings, traffic to your career site, and traffic to your email inbox and phone? Are you primarily relying on paid methods such as job boards like Monster and Careerbuilder, and paid search listings on Google, or maybe even paid services such as Jobs2Web to produce desired job seeker traffic? These are paid strategies and can be very expensive. Also, guess what? Your competition is doing the exact same thing! But you already knew that didn’t you? It’s time to think in terms of organic for your sourcing strategies moving forward, as in ramping up organic traffic vs. paid traffic. It’s a lot cheaper than paid strategies. In fact, it’s free! Let’s explore this concept of organic sourcing further.

We’ve been tinkering with using different sites and communities online to generate organic traffic, as well as trying new things with this site right here. Specifically, we’ve been playing with metadata, metatags and watching and using specific key words carefully in each place I post something, say a job posting for instance. Our ROI has been pretty good. We’ve been measuring with Google Analytics and a few other tools to get a clear picture of where our traffic is coming from, and see what’s been working and what hasn’t.

Here are a few things we’ve noticed that most recruiters will find helpful. First, Google works fast! We’re talking 24 hours fast. We put the keywords “location-based recruiting” in a recent post on this site (in several key areas of the post and in the metadata), and within a day, we were the #1 result on Google for that term: location-based recruiting. Getting into every specific detail on how to arrange your key words and other SEO tricks could fill a book, but we’ll give you a few things to explore on your own. Take a look at The New Community Rules: Marketing on the Social Web and also Search Engine Optimization for Dummies. No joke, these two books helped give us a new perspective on how to improve our sourcing skills, specifically in pulling more traffic and leads organically.

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Are you using location-based services yet? Chances are you’ve received a "use your current location" pop-up message on your mobile phone by now. That message is being directed from a site you’re visiting on the mobile web or from an application you’ve downloaded to your phone. These services want to use your current location to update you on local events, news, weather and even special offers and coupons from businesses nearby to you. The use of location-based services is an emerging trend being adopted today on mobile devices, smartphones in particular. 

What does this mean for recruiting? Simply put, it’s the closest thing to "real-time" recruiting we’ve seen yet. It allows several ways to not only discover new talent, but pinpoint exactly where they are at a given moment. This is a big-time game changer for the entire recruiting industry.

Here are the top reasons why recruiters need to pay attention to the location-based trend today:

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Will the iPad turn recruiting on its head, much like the iPhone and mobile recruiting are right now? We’re going to find out real soon! We picked up an iPad it’s first day on the market and have been locked in our offices since trying to find answers to that question. Here is what I’ve come up with so far:

Over the past few years, we have recognized that the mobile space is the next frontier, the next evolution for recruiting. We have since developed our own mobile recruiting strategies and opinions, and had the opportunity to share them at ERE in San Diego last year in Geoff Peterson’s mobile recruiting workshop, our Managing Principal here at General Lead.

The iPad is a gorgeous piece of technology that will bring out the “geek” in just about anyone, especially recruiters. Tablet PC’s have been around for awhile, but nothing out there compares to what Apple has unleashed. It has 200,000+ applications currently and 1000′s that are iPad specific. It’s blazing fast, humming between anything you touch, search or command it to do. It’s portable, being small enough and light enough to take with you on the go. It’s not as small and convenient as a smartphone, but you’ll want to make room in your work bag for this trust us. It’s got enough under the hood to technically be a laptop minus the physical keyboard and extra bulk. However, once you start using it, it’s clear the iPad is creating a category separate from smartphones and PC’s.

How will recruiters use the iPad:

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Last year, Geoff Peterson, Managing Principal of General Lead, had the privilege of presenting on the topic of mobile recruiting at the ERE Expo in San Diego, California, and at First Interview in New Orleans, Louisiana. Our company has a strong passion for mobile recruiting, as is evident in Our Mobile Recruiting Starter Guide, a previous post on mobile technologies

The following is an abbreviated version of Geoff’s three hour ERE workshop and his one and a half hour talk at First Interview on mobile recruiting titled, The Mobile Recruiting Experience. This slideshow gives an overview of mobile technologies and the mobile recruiting landscape. The reason for not including the original presentation is that it is loaded to the gills with hundreds of slides that require a personal guided tour. The full presentation will be made available upon request.

While some in recruiting at AT&T, Hewitt, KFC and CollegeRecruiter.com are making successful strides into mobile recruiting, we have found that mobile is a virtually untapped market. Most in recruiting haven’t realized that mobile represents a smart and cost-effective means for finding, sourcing, recruiting and hiring talent today.

Interested in getting started in mobile recruiting or just want to explore the mobile space further? We can help you jump start your mobile recruiting campaigns immediately. We offer free mobile consultations, including a copy of the original, uncut presentation. Drop a comment below or use the contact page for more information.

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For those asking in the recruiting world asking themselves “how do I get started with mobile?” we wanted to share several tips to kickoff your efforts in the mobile space, as well as give you plenty of resources to work with. From our experiences, below are five detailed tips for getting into mobile recruiting.