Today’s executive recruiting tip is “Investigate Candidates On The Internet.” A lot of job seeker information exists on the Internet especially on social media sites such as Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. Therefore, you want to dig deep. I instruct all my engineering recruiters, scientific recruiters, R&D recruiters, IT recruiters and technical recruiters to scour social media profiles. This is the case, because, as I shared in my articles “Background Checks Improve Technical Recruiting” and “March Madness Proves The Need For Background Checks!” candidates often: a) lie about actual credentials and b) try to hide past blunders. However, because past behavior is the best predictor of future missteps, if you thoroughly research engineering, scientific, R&D, IT and technical candidate’s profiles on social media, you can often uncover inconsistencies between stated skills on their resumes and actual job abilities! Furthermore, you can also sometimes uncover criminal, obnoxious or unacceptable behavior!
Nevertheless, like a crossword puzzle, this information needs to be carefully pieced together by the management recruiters on your executive recruitment team. This is often tedious, but will pay off in the long run by helping you to reduce the cost of bad hires!
Often times just using search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo will yield major results. Furthermore, most social media also have a search function. For example, on Twitter, using hashtags (#) in front of words offer an online vehicle to expand the depth and breath of your candidate investigation. On the other hand, you need to check Twitter and Facebook to see if and how given keywords are being used. Then tinker with hashtag names that offer the most precise form of investigation for your specific engineering recruitment, scientific recruitment, R&D recruitment, IT recruitment and technical recruitment needs.
With more and more material being posted to social media sites there is exponentially more information that is available to you to judge your potential job candidates. This is a painstaking process, but it will improve the quality of your hiring decisions. Please go to http://www.strategicsearch.com/technical-recruiting-tips/technical-recruiting-tips.php and click on #10 below to remind you to “Investigate Candidates On the Internet.”
What are your thoughts?
