Find Employment Candidates through Viral Marketing

Viral marketing is a strategy that leverages people and encourages them to spread a marketing message to others. This is a particularly powerful (and cheap) generation x’er recruitment tool, as young people are savvy producers and consumers of this type of information.
In fact, according to an article on WetFeet, viral marketing has become one of the most potent and influential forms of marketing in a college recruiting environment.

Viral marketing is not just for the big companies like Yahoo and Google with unlimited recruiting budgets. The cool thing about implementing viral marketing strategies is that most of them cost very little.

What Constitutes Viral Marketing?

Chances are, your organization has already implemented some form of viral marketing without even knowing it. Viral marketing includes:

RSS feeds
Articles
Whitepapers
Send to a friend
Press Releases
YouTube
Flickr
Podcasting
Email
Forum Participation
Blogs

The tools are already in your toolset, the challenge is figuring out how to make them work for you. Do you have some great pictures of a holiday party or a company event, how about some cool office space you’d like to show off? Why not upload those pictures to Flickr or your company blog?

How about dusting off your video camera and interviewing your current employees? Lee Odden of TopRank Online Marketing did a great job of this.

While some companies have already taken advantage of this marketing medium, I’m wondering why others are lagging behind. Is it a time/resource issue or is it a matter of not seeing the value?