Stop the Recruiting Insanity: Start Sourcing on Facebook with Graph Search

By Stéphane Le Viet, CEO Work4

Share on: 

Let’s be honest: headhunting is a headache. Despite the fact that there are 11.8 million Americans out of work, filling the 3 million remaining open jobs (including many of yours) is not an easy task.


Think about how many hours per week you spend sourcing for key roles. One study puts the number at about 10 extra hours per week for key positions like those in Engineering, IT, and Sales. And that’s probably a low estimate.


Moreover, you’re probably spending a lot of that time sourcing from the same talent pool as everyone else and hitting the same talent acquisition roadblocks--over and over again. Wasn’t it Einstein who said that doing the same thing over and over while expecting a different outcome was the definition of insanity?

Well, it’s time to stop the insanity.


Facebook recently released its much anticipated Graph Search function to all users, and now access to your greatest number of potential candidates for your key roles and hiring initiatives is just a quick search away.


For those of you unfamiliar with the Graph Search function, simply log into your Facebook account and take a look at the search bar at the top of the screen. This search bar is different from any you may have encountered in the past: unlike a Google search, the results you see are not culled from webpages around the internet; instead, your search results are tailor-made, based on people, places, and things within your own Facebook network.

In other words, if you do a Google search for “Engineers who have worked in New York City,” you’ll see websites advertising engineering jobs and some professional organizations related to engineering, but you won’t necessarily be able to do anything with that information.


If you type the same query into Facebook, however, you’ll see all of the engineers who have worked in NYC in your own network (denoted by the number of mutual friends you have) or who have made their work information public.
 

How is this different from other methods of sourcing, such as LinkedIn? Consider the following:

- Unlike the case with other tapped out talent pools, you have access to the world’s largest social network (which also includes 8 million tradespeople, 2 million sales and service professionals, 3.2 million health care professionals, 9.8 million clerical staff, 5.6 million managers and administrators and many, many more workers who use Facebook for both personal and professional networking).*

- More than 1.1 billion people log onto Facebook every month, whereas many other networks have fewer monthly active users, so you have a better chance of making a connection with your talent.

- Your search results not only show you members in your network and how you’re connected, but also reveal profiles of others whose public profiles fit the bill.


The sky is the limit when you can search using natural language. This means you can narrow the search by more than work, location, and education history. Facebook lets you search for people who “like” your company, people who might be connected to people who work for your company (so you can facilitate referrals), and people who even have interests or skills related to the position you’re hiring for.
 
I have always been a firm believer in the power and value of Facebook as a sourcing and recruiting tool, and now, even Facebook is backing up that belief by providing the resources to make finding talent easier than ever before. Even Mark Zuckerberg himself admits that recruiting is one of his favorite types of search queries for Graph Search, which, coming from the CEO of Facebook, seems like a pretty significant endorsement.

Now that Graph Search is available to all users, I urge you to give it a try. With whom will you connect when you start sourcing on Facebook?
 

About the Author

Stéphane Le Viet is the CEO and co-founder of Work4, which powers social recruiting by making everyone a recruiter and everyone a candidate. Work4 recently announced the first recruitment solution built for Facebook’s Graph Search.

 

* Estimated Reach of professionals with the indicated job role given by Acxiom in the Partner Category Section of the Facebook Ad Platform

 

The kind of stuff that Social Hire do...

At Social Hire, we don't just do social.

Isn't it time to stop making difficult personnel choices that don't work well for your online marketing?

We create and implement original social media marketing plans that help our customers accomplish their organisational objectives and build up their online footprint.

Our team are a company that assists our customers further their digital footprint by giving digital marketing on a regular basis.

You might like these blog posts 5 Lessons Every Business Can Learn From Amazon, How to Use Twitter to Promote Your Business, Top 5 Highest Paying Social Media Jobs, and 6 Action Items to Include on your Social Selling Agenda.

  Back to Recruitment blogs