CHICAGO, IL -- Gavin Heaton at MarketingProf's has an excellent post called "Who Owns You?" today regarding the Facebook situation, and I felt like my response to John Whiteside's thoughtful question needed to appear here as well ...
JOHN: What's interesting about this is that headhunters are, to some degree, the bane of social networks. not that they are bad people - but they make their money connecting people. I have a policy about of not linking to headhunters on LinkedIn because you find yourself with links to lots of people that are hard to use, because the headhunter wants to collect a fee for making a connection. That's fine; that's a headhunter's business, after all. But it's not the point of a social network.
HARRY: Point well taken, but the reality is that I pay LinkedIn north of $5K per year for the ability to send an InMail to ANYONE in their database without having to go through a string of intermediaries. My feedback rating after several hundred InMails is >4.5 stars. Therefore, I do not become a burden on the intermediaries between me and the desired candidate.
It's also much more discreet to "go direct" because the target candidate may not want his referring friends to know he's being contacted by a headhunter. It's safe to say that I have forwarded many more InMails for other people than the other way around.
I give much more than I get.
And here's an odd statistic: In 2006, candidates had a better chance of getting hired by A&E Television Interactive through me than if they applied directly through the HR department. There are other instances where clients have given me all of their direct candidates in a search so that I could hold all of the candidates to the same high standards of interviews. Etc.
So why do my clients they do this?
Simple: Many of the corporate recruiters who have become my friends routinely manage 20-30 open "job recs" at once. That's about 3½ times the normal search load of a third-party recruiter. And corporate recruiters have no specialty either: A corporate recruiter could be managing a search for a logistics supervisor, a retail store manager, a director of online marketing, a paralegal, and two dozen other unrelated positions all at the same time.
And that's why third-party recruiters exist. We get paid to know who’s got game in our field of specialty (mine's ecommerce) – and we get paid to bring the best and brightest of that subset to the interview table. In a sense, we’re like sports agents.
Back to Facebook: My understanding from Robert Scoble was that "Facebook = Rolodex."
Additionally, one of the biggest ways to monetize a social network is by enabling it serve as a massive passive candidate pool. It's a reality of people like Jobster and Facebook doing business in a way that facilitates the formation of passive, "value-confluent" candidate communities around companies who will pay for that privilege. Recruiters would certainly pay for that right. Clearly, my blog has a ton of readers who would love to share greater intimacy with each other. From my point of view, Ning.com looks pretty attractive right about now.
Although I didn't quite understand Facebook's platform at the time, I felt I needed to get ahead of the curve in my industry by being there and learn the platform as I went along.
Here's why: Social networks aren't just fun and games to the major venture capitalists. There is a MAJOR load of pain being carried by the world's HR departments, and the extent to which social networking can cure that pain, somebody is going to make MAJOR bucks.
However, your data WILL be MINED and targeted access to you will be SOLD to a bunch of companies.
And Facebook, I have learned, can make you disappear completely, without warning, at the slightest whiff of atypical behavior. Then they will send you a form email saying "This decision is final." >poof< So be careful, or you could end up in the Facebook "witness protection program" -- and so could your data, I suppose. It can happen innocently enough.
Note to Facebook: Wall Street is watching how you manage recruiters and recruiting researchers. We are happy to keep our business on LinkedIn, who seems perfectly delighted to cash my checks each year. A social network is a market, and I say this as a former beef trader: If Facebook is going to make a market, then they need to make the market friendly to intermediaries and market-makers.
-Harry
PS - If you haven't read the tale of how I got summarily banned from Facebook, click here. A warning or some other instruction from the system would have been nice.
As LinkedIn and ZoomInfo know, I always play by the rules when the rules are POSTED.
