Live blogging from ERE Social Summit

I am attending today’s ERE Social Recruiting Summit at Google Headquarters and will be posting updates on interesting discussions.

9:35 am
Reid Hoffman, CEO of  LinkedIn
new member joins LinkedIn every second
40+m current members
86% companies  plan on using social and professional networks more to recruit
60% of recruiters say they find better employees when hiring passive candidates (may 26, 2009 survey, 548 responses)

Three beliefs that guide LinkedIn

1. every individual is an entrepreneur

• job tenure on the decline
• greater global competition / availability of labor
• online profile = business listing

2. every person will have an ionline professional identity

• accuracy of profile (post 10 connections) is higher than resumes (people don’t lie in public)
• the public profile will be professional

3. your network = your success

• connect wiht people you know or willing to help and will support and inform you

LinkedIn Enterprise Solutions

Identify and engage hard to find talent
build your employment brand with precise targeting
let the network distribute your jobs

Search challenge
demo of linkedIn recruiter
showed how filtering can narrow results of potential candidates

questions

1. Twitter is on fire, can you use via LinkedIn?
have app for company buzz, show twitter stream on linkedIn
tweet your profiles
tweet  content that potential candidates would find interesting to build a following

2. where is social media going?
every professional will have prof and social profiles
more productivity tools on social networks
new ways to communicate every 1-2 years

3. as more people use LinkedIn recruit tool, how do you keep it fresh?
will provide indivduals tools to turn down requests
need to make sure people are not spammed

4. use plaxo, use to sync w/ linkedIn, is it going to do it again?
plaxo hacked apis on the system, so it broke with changes in api
maybe

5. will linkedIn be good to find grad school type talent?
yes it should, vision is to even have college students with interships, not quite there yet

6. how do you deal w/ spam from recruiters?
monitor acceptance rates and other monitoring, if abuse will cancel account
have analytics group that monitors

7. are there tools to help expand network on linkedin more virally?
best way is to upload address book, working more on groups to help bring people together

8. how many college undergrad and grad are on linkedIn?
college is millions

9. what other tools to manage constant stream of info?
LI is trying to provide lens to the professional streams, there will be a lot of tools

10. what does LI do for minority recruiting?
put effort to be OFCP compliant

11. can company have a profile on LI?
yes companies can now manage their profiles, eventually will be more of a CRM

12. company profile, more workforce planning?
not highest priority right now, follow this company will be coming on the roadmap

13. hard to convince students to sign up and way to monitor adoption?
nothing now, will look into

14. are company profiles indexable by search engines?
not yet but coming in a couple of weeks
sttarting to get more validation from a company admin so they can edit the company profile

11:30am
Unconference Session - what is social recruiting and what methods actually work?

Panel: Josh (entice labs), Dion (simplyhired), Ryan (EnticeLabs), Doug (founder Jobs2Web)

Need to have a corporate view of social network (fan pages, groups, etc.). if left up to a recruiter on staff and they build up their network, if they leave then company looses all the contacts.

social media is both public and permanent; having someone focused and committed to it

big job boards are “watering holes  for the desperate”

will wait longer for core team vs. non core on time to hire

each social tool must have a purpose such as find talent, keep in touch talent, etc.

90% of visitors to corporate career site don’t apply

one idea is to put up videos with in house recruiters taking about the job positions and posting on you tube, puts a face on the company and job opportunities

too early to tell ROI on socail recruting given how early it is

MSFT measures time from open req to submit of candidates, if building social pipeline the time should be quicker (i.e. 7 days) and high quality

recommend talking to CRM and ATS vendors and make sure they have social recruiting features and ways to track the entire process

CRMs will be huge in ATS in the future

even if candidates don’t have resume (becoming more common), you should spend the time to research them on social networks

12:30pm Lunch