Blogging with Candidates

Obviously we've all blogged before as anyone reading this is a member of recruiting blogs. Blogging has been great for me so far for sharing insight between recruiters or posing questions to other experts. What about blogging with your candidates? I've tried to back door it where I go onto an ASCE blogging site, but they're usually not open to recruitment topics there and instead are talking about the safety hazards of the Aurora bridge, etc. ( I recruit civil engineers).

Recently, I've create a Google Groups account. We have it advertised on our employment page at http://www.wsdot.wa.gov/Employment, and it's open to anyone that wants to visit. In my work emails, I have been putting the link at the bottom with a somewhat catchy phrase to try to entice people to visit the page, but I am still not getting very many visitors. I'm wondering if any of you have been successful with hosting a blog site for potential employees and if so, what kind of techniques did you use? Some of the challenges that I am currently facing are the age demographics (most of our engineers are in their late 30s or 40s), google guidelines ( you have to be a member to comment on a post), Public Sector guidelines on "appropriate content", etc.

If any of you have been successful in this venue, I would greatly appreciate your input.

Michaela

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Comment by Jim Durbin on August 25, 2008 at 8:17pm: Most bloggers are in their 30's or 40's, so it's not generational, and you hit on the answer. Your civil engineers want to talk about safety hazards and getting better at their work. They don't want to talk about recruiting. To be effective, you need to write about the things they are interested in, showing them you're interested in their industry, and not just a phone dialer who will use and discard them.

People look to recruiters when they are looking for work. You need to be interesting to them when they aren't looking, and they will find you and refer you to others.

And yes, this works.

Comment by Sally Raade on August 26, 2008 at 4:39am: Perhaps give them industry news or industry resources...I agree with Jim...
I would think that most of them would be interested in any assocation links that's related to their industry.....