Why You Must Start Using Google-Plus for Sourcing and Recruiting

If you are waiting to start using Google-Plus for sourcing and recruiting, you will soon find yourself falling behind your competition. Google-plus is still smaller than major social networks but its size doesn’t matter that much. It is also a moving target in terms of its functionality, but that makes it even more interesting!

Here are just a few tips.

Identifying/Cross-Referencing Prospects. If you know someone’s email address, you can quickly identify his/her Google-Plus profile (if it’s there) by adding this person to a circle. You can do this for lists up to ~1,000 people at a time. A Google-Plus profile will have many online references and may contain other email addresses and a phone number.

Communicating. Whether a person is on Google-plus or not, you can communicate with the person by adding him/her to a circle and sharing with the circle. Being added to a circle named, say, “Top Software Engineers” should feel nice to your software engineering prospects, the same as if you add them to a list on Twitter or like their page on Facebook.

Integration with Gmail is becoming tighter as we speak!

Keeping Information on Prospects Up-to-Date.

In your Gmail Contacts you will now see “Connected Profiles” for those who are on Google-plus.
You can add anyone who emails you to a circle right from your Gmail Inbox.
If you ever add somebody to a circle, that person stays in your Gmail’s “Other Contacts” tab, even if you later remove the person from circles.

Branding and Advertising Jobs. Guess what will be getting higher and higher in Google search results as the time goes. It is already happening. So it’s time to create your personal and business Google-plus pages and try to get many +1′s (you will need to provide some good content for that ). You may get way ahead of competition that is still using the old-school Search Engine Optimization (SEO) methods. We all know that so many people start any new project – including their job search – simply using Google search; if you get there fast, they will find your company and your posted opportunities.

’nuff said (for now).

Irina / Brain Gain Recruiting / Boolean Strings on Google-plus

Comment by Scott Burgess on December 14, 2011 at 8:03am: Thanks Irina

Comment by Suresh on December 14, 2011 at 9:29am: Thanks for the reminder. With all these tools, life in Recruitment is getting more complicated (atleast to keep up). Such a moving target..

Comment by Tim Spagnola on December 14, 2011 at 10:18am: Thanks for sharing this with the RBC Irina!

Comment by John Bennewith on December 14, 2011 at 11:28am: Just a quick question on security. Are the circles totally private and can only be seen by me?

I dont want other people connecting with my clients if that makes sense.?

Comment by Jeremy Kersten on December 14, 2011 at 12:26pm: @ John B- Good point.

Comment by Nick Lagos on December 14, 2011 at 12:29pm: Agree with your premise, with guarded enthusiasm. So little time, so many trails to blaze in order to achieve “Recruiting Nirvana”.

Maintaining a presents on all the social networking sites can be a challenge, but adopting Google+ seems a necessity, despite Facebook’s 63% market share, vs. Google+’s 0.33% (yes, under 1%). For perspective, LinkedIn is only 0.63% (also under 1%) yet many recruiters find it invaluable. Took LinkedIn near 10 yrs to get there, Google+ under a year.

If Google with its >100 business to include (YouTube (>$1B), DoubleClick (>$3B), Motorola Mobility (>$12B)) and the list goes on, wants to make a run for the “Social Networking Platform” space, history shows sooner or later they’ll make it happen, especially considering their control over the Internet Search arena. Worse case, they’ll l take over facebook and we’ll have maintained multiple profiles in vein.

Thanks Irene for the push!

See more on Social Media Market Share Here –

Top 10 Social Networking Sites by Market Share of Visits and Google...

Comment by Irina Shamaeva on December 14, 2011 at 2:09pm: To answer the question on security, your circle names can't be viewed until (or unless) you "share" the circle. People who are in your circles but are not on Google+ remain hidden. (By the way someone has pointed to a mistake in my post: when I add a person to a circle, say, "top software engineers", the person is not able to see the name of my circle.)

Of course, people who are in your circles are on Google+ anyway and can be found in other ways, such as keyword search. Anyone can include them in their circles as well.

The point of my post is that you can (and should) start using Google+ for job posts and communications even without learning all about it or creating a huge presence.

Google+ has taken some actions to restrict spam and maintain privacy. It wouldn't allow you to have more than 5K in your circles combined. That includes all pages you create, such as your company page. So you will have to be selective. Also "pages" on Google+, as opposed to people on Google+, can only add people to their circles if those people add those pages first.

You can add and remove people from circles, thus creating "watch points" for them in your Gmail's "Other contacts". However, Google+ will restrict fast manipulations with circles done within a day. It also restricts the total number of contacts in Gmail to 25K. It also restricts the number of contacts to upload to G+ to 4K and the number you can add to a circle at a time to a few hundred.

The point that perhaps the majority of people on Google+ have presence elsewhere (such as LinkedIn, or a professional network, or a blog) doesn't undermine the value of functionality - especially ways to communicate and search capabilities - on Google+.

Google+ also gives a tremendous chance to jump up to the top in Google search results for companies who ever wanted to make that presence but were left behind by the now-"old-school" search engine optimization and much larger competitors.

Irina (Google+ LinkedIn Twitter Blog)

P.S. Try searching for Google-Plus Pages on my custom search engine:

http://bit.ly/pagesplussearch

Comment by Johnny Campbell on December 14, 2011 at 3:29pm: Really glad to see you putting this out there Irina; G+ is as essential tool in the recruiter's toolkit. I estimate that there will be 60 million profiles on Plus by February 2012. What is amazing is that no other network can guarantee that the profile data is less than 6 months old, that's another real beauty of G+. LinkedIn data is often out of date but as Google+ didnt exist 6 months ago, you can guarantee that the profile data is current (or pretty darn close)!

Also, with the introduction of the People search filter, complicated Boolean isn't required and most (or at least many) profiles allow you to email directly from the profile, no expensive InMails or Category 2 Facebook messages. Keep up the excellent posts Irina and happy holidays!