As the information age marches forward so many elements of how we used to live our lives are falling by the wayside. Interruption marketing went, although it is still very much a huge industry. paper information like newspapers and magazines are in terminal decline.
Even SAP style architecture is dying off in favor of piecemeal SaaS packages. (Okay, that one is a little slower in arriving of course)
One of the more recent areas to fall away seems to be job boards. (Believe it or not)
A few years ago I used to swear by a site called Seek.com.au. This used to be the site for any contract or permanent employment that you would want to find in Australia.
But I haven't used it, or anything like it now for many years. In fact, very few people do. What they do is listen to their peers, talk to network contacts, and look in trusted places.
Most people these days who use Job Boards are disaffected, desperate due to changes in their employment status, or they are just taking the shotgun approach to finding their next step. (And lets be honest, many of the companies that post job ads don't get back to you anyway)
Most companies who say they have no problem sourcing candidates generally have databases filled with these disaffected candidates...imagine that.
Today I learn about opportunities through a number of different ways. So if you are interested in finding good talent, then there are far better ways to do it. Ways that nobody seems to be investigating as yet.
1. LinkedIn. I am currently discussing a role in the USA with a company who found me through a job posting in one of my groups there.
The power of this medium is just unreal these days. You get to search for and contact people who aren't looking for a change. Thats a pretty powerful opportunity to get someone who is positive, not just somebody else with a hard luck story.
Also you get to interact with groups, ask questions, and even use the LinkedIn job board. The difference between Monster.com (say) and the jobs on LinkedIn is that they are listed on your profile. Matched to your talents and skills.
2. Blogs. Not just a place for you to post job ads, but a place for you to create a discussion related to industry sectors, facts, research, as well as job ads for hard to locate resources.
This works even better if it is for a thin slither of the job market. A specific audience who will hang on every post, rather than trying to go for a mass media approach who will ignore most posts until they finally unsubscribe.
In fact, run a separate blog for each of the sectors that you recruit for.
3. Twitter. Get a group of you out there. Search for people who work or talk about areas that you are looking at. Set up a blog and tie it together with Twitter Feed. get all of your colleagues to do the same, using the same blog with their own Twitter Feed accounts.
Then once you post the role on your blog, and not in the standard job ad format but in a conversational format, then it will hit twitter from your account, and from every other account that you have using the feed.
Heck, you can also recruit others to put the blog in their own twitter feed. Imagine an engaging blog post, fed into Twitter by a team of people, to an audience of (who knows....) in the thousands.
All of whom are interested in what you are doing and what you have to say.
4. Blogs (pt. 2) Get a crew of bloggers together. A team of bloggers who run blogs that draw a crowd. people who can reach a lot of the unreachable candidates out there in the marketplace.
Imagine a two paragraph engaging post being syndicated through (say) 12 bloggers who each reach 500 - 1000 people in your chosen marketplace or sector. All of whom want to hear the message...
Once you have a blog also, you get to post them into news Groups of LinkedIn and other networking sites. One of the newer and really untapped sources of "interested eyeballs"
The world has changed, and almost every activity that we used to take for granted has changed also. These tips are good for how to use social media right now, but I'm sure they will be outdated within three years.
