David Meerman Scott (www.twitter.com/dmscott) prefers to call social media “Real Time Marketing”, which in that respect I think its a definite plus for recruitment, no matter the size. You just have to integrate it into your daily recruiting activities:  you put together marketing slicks, you put job ads up online, and you create a presence online to attract candidates and clients at the right time. Its not going to work 99% of the time, but its a matter of being ready when the stars line up.  

And its worked for us. We hired one of our own HealthcareIT recruiters based on her response to a blog post we wrote and most recently, we’ve had candidates come to us specifically because of tweets we put out announcing one of our local volunteer activities (she happen to follow volunteer threads).  

We recently invited David Martin (www.twitter.com/dmresearch) with Nielsen Media (www.twitter.com/nielsenwire) to speak at our headquarters regarding recruiting and social media trends. Its just as useful for the job seeker as it is a recruiter. The video has not gone up yet, but the slide deck is available in case people want to see it – it gives a great idea of where people are spending their time and gives some good insight into not only where people are going, but even when you should post. The problem with real time marketing is its a lot like fishing – you can be in a great spot, but if you throw the line out while the fish aren’t biting, you aren’t going to have any returns!  

The slide deck is here: http://www.parkerservices.com/media/65974/speed_series_deck_02082011.pdf

Once the video goes up, we’re going to cut the slides into the vid, so you’ll have the audio to go along with it, but still, some good relevant data.