Can Social Networks Replace Recruitment Agency’s

With the boom in Social Networks everyone that’s anyone is connected some how or the other. Chances are if you a looking to hire someone you might already know the perfect ( well close enough to perfect person) whether its via a direct relation to someone or via a friend.

Now with the rise of services like twitter , where you do not really need to know a person to actually follow their updates , it becomes alot easier to spread the message around that you are looking for someone to work for you. Chances are that if some one meets the criteria you set you will see a reply really quick.

Once you find a person checking up on them is easy enough if you know them due to the advent of sites like LinkedIn and Facebook. Using these two sites you can pull up pretty detailed information about a person’s previous working experience as any recommendations that he might have from other peers that you know. Based on this information you take take a rough guess whether a person will fit into your organization.

While all this is pretty and nice it does my no means circumvent interviewing the person and doing things like credit checks etc. Remember alot of times its all to easy to fool the system into making you into someone that you are not.

Now this may seem a bit weird to some but a true innovation to other (and just plain hell for others) but recruitment agency’s have also taken to the Social Network space. Idealy for them its a means to reach a vast audience with very little effort thereby increasing their chances of filling positions and different companies.

So what are your thougts , can you use Social Networks to find and fill job opertunities ?

~stalkerh