Peter Wilkinson | Social Media Consultant | International speaker
One of my colleagues recently blogged about something similar I think. Social media is able to whittle down your target field, in candidate terms, so you’re only shooting at the cream of the crop.
An international social media consultant is a long term advocate of the research power of social networking. Every user of a business social network has a graph associated with him or with her. That graph is an index of every interest he or she has. It’s a map of everywhere he or she goes online. And it’s a complete history of employment, positions and talents.
You need to understand the social media stream before you can accurately interpret this information. That’s what I do, as an international social media marketing consultant: I help businesses to understand how to use the wealth of information at their disposal.
Because that’s what social media is. Under all its interactivity and its facilitation of networking, social media is the single biggest survey, sampling, and data collection tool in the history of mankind.
As an international social media consultant what I do is to interpret that data in ways capable of streamlining candidate lists.
Let’s say someone works in the retail sector. He or she is currently employed in the hospitality segment of that sector. He or she has an excellent understanding of current IT issues because, until recently, he or she worked in the PR department of a major IT company.
If you’re a pub owner looking for someone to raise your profile on new media streams – Apps and portable device-friendly websites, for example – then you need someone who can program and someone with an understanding of both current IT and the hospitality industry.
An international social media marketing consultant can show you how to interrogate the social network to find people just like that. You can look for candidates with all the right key tags in their social graph; or you can identify networks for that kind of person. In either case, you start fishing for the right candidate from a much more targeted pool: meaning you come away with a much greater chance of finding much better people for the job.
The international social media consultant may further enhance your candidate selection – by showing you ways of recruiting that are more “natural”. Rather than immediate advertising, you can use a more long term approach, becoming a member of key groups and interacting routinely and directly with core members of those groups. This is why the social network is so called. By networking properly with industry authorities, you align your HR department with a potentially inexhaustible pool of good recommendations.