If you are waiting to start using Google-Plus for sourcing and recruiting, you will soon find yourself falling behind your competition. Google-plus is still smaller than major social networks but its size doesn’t matter that much. It is also a moving target in terms of its functionality, but that makes it even more interesting!
Here are just a few tips.
Identifying/Cross-Referencing Prospects. If you know someone’s email address, you can quickly identify his/her Google-Plus profile (if it’s there) by adding this person to a circle. You can do this for lists up to ~1,000 people at a time. A Google-Plus profile will have many online references and may contain other email addresses and a phone number.
Communicating. Whether a person is on Google-plus or not, you can communicate with the person by adding him/her to a circle and sharing with the circle. Being added to a circle named, say, “Top Software Engineers” should feel nice to your software engineering prospects, the same as if you add them to a list on Twitter or like their page on Facebook. [Correction: Someone pointed out that at this time people do not see the name of your circle when they are added .]
Integration with Gmail is becoming tighter as we speak!
Keeping Information on Prospects Up-to-Date.
- In your Gmail Contacts you will now see “Connected Profiles” for those who are on Google-plus.
- You can add anyone who emails you to a circle right from your Gmail Inbox.
- If you ever add somebody to a circle, that person stays in your Gmail’s “Other Contacts” tab, even if you later remove the person from circles.
Branding and Advertising Jobs. Guess what will be getting higher and higher in Google search results as the time goes. It is already happening. So it’s time to create your personal and business Google-plus pages and try to get many +1’s (you will need to provide some good content for that 🙂 ). You may get way ahead of competition that is still using the old-school Search Engine Optimization (SEO) methods. We all know that so many people start any new project – including their job search – simply using Google search; if you get there fast, they will find your company and your posted opportunities.
’nuff said (for now).
Irina / Brain Gain Recruiting / Boolean Strings on Google-plus
Comments 1
(This is a copy of my comment on Recruiting Blogs, with additional info):
The point of the post is that you can (and should) start using Google+ for job posts and communications even without learning all about it or creating a huge presence.
Google+ has taken some actions to restrict spam and maintain privacy. It wouldn’t allow you to have more than 5K in your circles combined. That includes all pages you create, such as your company page. So you will have to be selective. Also “pages” on Google+, as opposed to people on Google+, can only add people to their circles if those people add those pages first.
You can add and remove people from circles, thus creating “watch points” for them in your Gmail’s “Other contacts”. However, Google+ will restrict fast manipulations with circles done within a day. It also restricts the total number of contacts in Gmail to 25K. It also restricts the number of contacts to upload to G+ to 4K and the number you can add to a circle at a time to a few hundred.
The point that perhaps the majority of people on Google+ have presence elsewhere (such as LinkedIn, or a professional network, or a blog) doesn’t undermine the value of functionality – especially ways to communicate and search capabilities – on Google+.
Google+ also gives a tremendous chance to jump up to the top in Google search results for companies who ever wanted to make that presence but were left behind by the now-“old-school” search engine optimization and much larger competitors.