This is part of a series of blog posts written for UK Recruiter by the team at BlueSky PR. If you didn’t make the event (or this particular session) it’s a nice summary of Katharine’s key points.
At the UK recruiter conference was a stimulating presentation by Katharine Robinson on ‘the future of sourcing’. The audience was given a breakdown of advances in social media technology that could potentially benefit recruiters. First up was Twitter.
The main change outlined was the use of the ‘lists’ function. Previously Twitter users could have up to 20 lists; this has now been increased to 1,000 per user with each list featuring as many as 5,000 accounts. This change has meant that storing and grouping potential candidates has never been easier. Katharine also outlined how tweeted photos are now much more predominant on timelines meaning you now see a larger previewed photo. While it’s been (cynically) suggested that this is simply a ploy by Twitter to increase their advertising earnings, it was proposed that this feature could open the door to recruiters posting more detailed info-graphic job ads on the site.
LinkedIn has also made a number of significant changes recently. Unfortunately this has meant some key features of the site have disappeared including the skills, calendar and contacts sections. The last of these three has however been updated and now moves anyone you’ve been previously directly interacted with on the site into your contacts. The feature can also bring together all address books, emails and calendars to sync your contacts into one place.
For Facebook the most interesting change has been the introduction of graph search. This is a semantic search engine that was introduced in March 2013 and allows users the chance to search for queries in natural language terms. For example, a recruiter could now search for ‘engineers who live in London and speak Spanish’. This would then bring up any answers for London based, Spanish speaking engineers from any sector. You may have already used this feature but for recruiters the possibilities are enormous and should be taken advantage of.
Katharine also outlined a series of ‘people aggregators’, online tools that could help the recruitment community by effectively grouping people together based on custom searches. A list of these has been included below.
More info on twitter lists – http://uksourcers.co.uk/2013/supercharge-your-twitter-use-with-lists
LinkedIn contacts feature – http://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/new-linkedin-contacts
Blog on introduction of Google keyword planner – http://www.rba.co.uk/wordpress
People aggregators –
