In last week’s blog post I made the case for the decline of LinkedIn’s effectiveness. Now that the selling of LinkedIn’s premium services has led to an over-saturation of InMails, recruiters must be more strategic. Here are some suggestions.

STRATEGY

A Recruitment 2.0 strategy requires that companies build and maintain talent communities. A talent community is a network of people engaged in a many-to-many dialogue based on trust and collaboration.  Most often, they are centered on social networking sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube and Twitter.  Some examples of tools which can help build talent communities include:

• TalentReef is a tool that helps you compete better for top talent by promoting your employment brand and delivering a better candidate experience using social networks, video, and other rich media. TalentReef has an interesting social recruiter test. Visit TalentReef and take the assessment.
• Find.ly’s “Talent Hive” allows users to follow the careers of people interested in working for their company. The tool helps employers maximize their recruitment investment and dramatically improve their sourcing efficiency. By harnessing all the touch-points employers generate with potential candidates: on their career websites, in job postings on job boards, on Facebook and in other social media and recruitment technology platforms, Find.ly makes candidate interaction and targeting simpler and easier. Learn more about the find.ly Talent Hive.
• Avature is an enterprise CRM built for recruiting. The tool has a highly flexible system that lets users design a multitude of unique programs to enhance their Talent Strategies. Dashboards and Interactive Portals help you to redefine hiring manager relationships and upgrade the candidate experience. Avature harnesses the social web by taking advantage of the explosion of public information. Users can source, connect, and stay connected to the right people. The system features, web 2.0 tools, such as Tags, Journals, Chat, and multiple portals and landing pages, to enhance the user experience.
• Jobs2Web offers a single solution to managing recruiting channels including search engines, social networks, employee referrals, past applicants and recruiter networks. Their Recruitment Marketing Platform strengthens the possibilities from these channels while simplifying the complexity.  With additional Targeted Recruiting Solutions, Jobs2Web helps clients leverage the Platform to meet their unique strategic goals.
• Jobvite is a recruiting platform that delivers real-time recruiting intelligence with web 2.0 technology. Their recruiting software solutions combine traditional hiring methods with the extended reach of today's social networks. 
• WildFire:  integrates with any ATS solution, providing a comprehensive recruitment marketing platform that will help you launch, measure and improve your job web- based job campaigns.

These solutions are effective in sourcing and maintaining a talent community, but they have some weaknesses.  The main issue is that it takes time to build a talent community with the critical mass needed to fill your jobs.  You should not expect to see real returns for several months, at least.   Also, the tools listed above are not free and some are quite expensive.

This leads to the obvious question, what do I do if I have to fill a critical job NOW?   The fastest and most effective results will come from posting your job on professional association web sites.  These are ready made talent communities, so take full advantage of them.

FREE

The best part about these sites is that they are usually free.  If the national organization site charges a fee, try the local chapter.  Here are some examples:

• If you want to find a Project Manager, there is no better place to look than the Project Management Institute.  The national web site charges $395 for a single posting, but it’s free at your local chapter.  For examples, see the San Francisco or New York City chapter.
• If you need to hire a User Interface Designer, there are several good associations to choose from.  Usability Professionals’ Association (UPA) charges $100 per posting, but the Austin UPA chapter lets you post for free.  The Interaction Design Association (IxDA) charges $265 per posting, but it is free at the San Francisco and Austin chapters. 
• If you need to hire a Business Continuity Professional, there are a couple of good sites.  Both are free and have a national reach:  The Disaster Recovery Institute and Disaster Recovery Journal.

Just ask a hiring manager what associations candidates are likely to belong to. With a little research, you will be surprised how many free options are available. You can also post job descriptions for free on most LinkedIn Groups, but you will need to be a member of the group first.

We are interested to hear what Association or other niche web sites our readers use to post jobs.  Please let us know in the Comments section and we’ll publish the results at a future date.