How Some Recruiters Could Benefit From A Social Network Aggregator

Posted by Jim Stroud

March 15, 2008

Special thanks to Richard Becker of CopyWrite, Ink for submitting this post! Good stuff. Enjoy…

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As more recruiters attempt to integrate social networking into their daily activity, some are asking how much is too much. After all, there are hundreds of social networks out there and each one requires some basic profile maintenance to be effective.

For most recruiters, beyond leading professional networks like LinkedIn, the answer is simply to invest time into social networks that consider the audience you want interact with — whether they are clients or candidates. For recruiters with blogs, there is another option as well.

BlogCatalog, the fastest-growing social network for bloggers on the Internet, launched a widget that aggregates activity on twenty social networks, including BlogCatalog, Delicious, Digg, Facebook, Flickr, MySpace, StumbleUpon, Twitter, and YouTube.

By embedding the widget on your blog or any other site, you can post a comment or link on one social network and broadcast it to anywhere you have embedded the widget. The widget also include a RSS subscription so readers can subscribe to it.

“People can track your activities if they subscribe to the feed,” says Antony Berkman, president of BlogCatalog, which developed the widget. “It will help your contacts and blog readers Digg the same articles, locate the same industry stories, or connect to you on multiple social networks.”

Three ways recruiters to use the BlogCatalog social network widget:

Capture actions on one network and seed them
Highlight relevant articles to augment your blog
Use it to increase your social network connections

The social network widget also opens up doors for candidate sources. By subscribing to the widget of a potential candidate, you can learn more about their psychographics — which articles they read, how they interact online, and which networks they participant.

The social network widget also represents an industry shift from closed social networks to open networks that allow members to have more data portability. It allows members to share the information they want wherever they want to share it.