Employee Hunting in the Deep End

The world is changing, whether it’s the seasons or the winning streak of the Chicago Blackhawks. The world fluctuates, people fluctuate, and the ways people communicate fluctuate. As a human resources professional it is your job to stay on top of these things so you can keep your company changing for the better. One of the things most affected by change in the last few years is the way in which candidates are applying for jobs and putting themselves out on the internet, forever changing the hiring process. Being the spunky fisher that you are, you need to make sure you’re using the correct net in the correct pond to find the professionally delicious fish.

These ponds are no longer just job boards or your inbox; now you need to look through the streams of Twitter, the tributaries of Facebook (thank you fourth grade river studies), and the tide pools of LinkedIn during the hiring process. Granted, LinkedIn is a professional social network, but the others are becoming increasingly popular for young potential employees to use to get their names out there. And with that influx of hip and fresh comes the creation of several semi-vomitous phrases like Twesume.

But misguided mish-mash of words aside, the Twesume is a perfect example of the catalyst for change. Twesumes are essentially super streamlined minimalist resumes that tell you whether a candidate is a fish worth baiting. It makes things faster, more efficient. That is the catalyst of change: speed. The faster you can do something the more you can do of it, that’s assembly line logic. But it’s kept the industrialized world afloat for 100 years so it can’t be the worst thing in the world, maybe it’s worth looking into.

However, if you’re hoping to have any success with these new resource pools then you need to know how to sift through them. For example, on Twitter you need to know how to do hashtag sort fields (that’s ‘#’) because Twesumes are usually attached with those. Facebook has a very good keyword search bar so just punch in some industry titles and you’ll be good to go.

But the yellow brick road doesn’t end there; it branches off into tons of different roads. You can look through industry specific forums to see if there are any highly active users who display any sort of expertise that could be of use to you (this is easily checked by sorting users by number of posts). It’s no longer enough to look at just the applicants in your inbox during the hiring process; the search field for hiring candidates has spread like wildfire so you need to search every corner, every Twesume, for the golden eggs.

Have you adapted to the changing landscape as far as sourcing candidates? What “ponds” are you currently fishing in? Tell us below!

IMAGE: Courtesy of Flickr by Bibi’s Culinary Journey