The Power of Weak Ties in Recruitment

HR professionals and recruiters believe that employee referral is the most effective method of recruiting. Most HR professionals rank employee referral as the best way to find highly skilled candidates. There is nothing wrong with the way many organizations manage referral programs, but some new approaches may make those programs easier, less expensive and more productive.

Today, there has been so much buzz around Internet, social network has becoming a tool for recruiter to source job candidates, and this channel makes less work for recruiter and organization. Tools like LinkedIn, Spoke and others earned our attention a few years ago because they brought the concept of "six degrees of separation" into a medium that truly could exploit the weak ties that connect all of us. Today, as many of these companies add recruiting to their features, there is a great deal of speculation as to what advantage early adopters might gain by using them. Book The Tipping Point, which is written by Malcolm Gladwell, he pointed to the "connectors" and "mavens" among us whose networking is as viral as a flu pandemic. Some of today's new recruiting methods and tools aim to tap into this kind of power -- the power of weak ties -- for sourcing top candidates.

No wonder then that recruiters are keenly interested in anything that can reduce unqualified applicants and help source good ones. Third-party recruiters can make this promise, because they source candidates through internet database and social networking. "This is an evolution, social networking can be an effective tool which helps us to contact the potential candidate in the first place." Said by a recruiter from Talent Spot.

Part of the beauty of social networking is that there is a rarity to it. If it were easy for any of us to connect with anyone else, we would remove the scarcity and erode the value of networks. We don't want to go overboard; we want to help employers find great people through trusted referrals. Our goal isn't to bring strangers together.

For job seekers, social networking may be a tool for making it less work and get to more job information. But as a recruiter, you can think a social networking as tool to nurturing your source channel and candidates nurturance.