Building a community - you get out what you put in - yes it takes time!

The next time a recruiter complains they do not have time to use social media to build a community of great candidates remind them why vegetables are often tasteless these days; a bit much like most of their (candidate) relationships.  You can force nature but you ultimately pay the price!

What is the point of spending all of your time doing indiscriminate job advertising across job boards/channels that don't work and more importantly, not bothering to measure any of it and just doing more.  Farmers rotate their crops for good reason.  But the other issue is that these busy recruiters are too busy dealing with loads of useless CV's that don't help them fill their vacancies so they just keep turning the advertising handle and in come more irrelevant CV's.  And they wonder why!  Who's the vegetable now huh!?

This is where the agencies could really win.  If a niche agency e.g. "retail buyers" started to build an online community they could start to have access to people that are in demand and could make money in a lot of ways.  But it would take time and effort to build the community.  They may even need to invest in a real person to "talk" to the community.  Automation can do a certain amount but will only get you so far and I have tried all of these options and know how it can #fail or not!  A major employer could of course also build a similar community and also make money from it assuming they are not too busy processing CV's.

You get out what you put in from social media.  A simple Twitter account could allow you to build your own little community for no cost but, you would have to invest some time in building relationships.  @BillBoorman has shown how much you can do in a very short time with Twitter and is now probably the most infamous tweecruiter (have to do the "tw" thang...) in the Universe.  Apart from the cost of copious amounts of coffee I'm pretty sure Bill didn't spend a lot on marketing (OK, I know he didn't).

I know it's not rocket science but in not wanting to be a Tw4anker it's best I share the love instead of making it all so hard to understand.  You'll all hate me otherwise and then I'll need to spend a bit more "human" time on Twitter just to build some bridges with the vicious gang of (social media) guru's that one day I aspire to join. 

Until then - what do you think?  Rocket science or common sense?