Social Networking and Recruiting

We run a mid-size IT recruitment agency in Montreal / Toronto (Eastern Canada) and have recently launched www.MontrealTech.net / www.TorontoTech.net, a social networking tool, in Eastern Canada to get our candidates to be more involved and to brand our company better.

However the problem so far - it is very hard to get people involved to participate. We have enabled forums, blogs, job posting, etc. But yet very few dedicated contributors.

Any ideas / Suggestions? Anyone tried? Thanks.

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Permalink Reply by Boris Stefanovic on November 10, 2010 at 3:24pm

I think there's a certain amount of saturation in this approach. The idea is great in that it very clearly follows the Web2.0 concept that has been successful elsewhere and I had a quick look at your site... I think it looks great. Ultimately it will come down to how much time people have to devote to reading blogs from a disparate variety of sources or how many social networking sites they have time to belong to. I have found myself ambivalent about starting a blog for this very reason... the web's inherent gift of publishing has allowed such a tremendous volume of personal outpouring that the seemingly anachronistic concept of an editor may be coming back into vogue. At the end of the day, would I be satisfied with writing for my own fulfillment if no one ever reads it? If I join a social networking site how much time will I have to spend maintaining my account or the contacts that I've made there, and what kind of contacts do I stand to make?

For a long time my mantra regarding the web has been, "The best thing about the web is that everything's on there. The worst thing about the web is that everything's on there."

This may now also be applied to blogs and Web2.0 "communities". The question may well be, what makes you believe that candidates want to be more "involved" than finding a job and moving on? No matter what kind of relationship I can establish online, it's the candidates with which I've made a personal connection either over the phone or face to face who still call me with referrals or just to chat even 15 years later.

Internet relationships are as ethereal as the web itself.