JobVite's new thing: sourcing passive candidates

I recently wrote about JobVite and how it permits employers to tap into the social networks of its employees to find quality recruits. JobVite permits employers to create eVites that employees, colleagues, etc. can pass around via email or publish to social networks like Facebook. It must be working as one of my old clients just sent me an eVite looking for a new Controller for their software firm.

JobVite announced yesterday a new capability called JobVite Source that goes the other direction. This software lets a recruiter crawl the Internet’s social networks looking for their needed talent. As someone who’s worked countless search strings on search engines, I know how much junk a web spider or search string can return. JobVite’s put some real smarts on this tool to pare down the inappropriate, worthless or irrelevant data that can get returned to a recruiter.

That filtering is key as recruiters are awash in resumes, particularly in this economy. Sourcing needs to be an exercise in delivering a few outstanding candidates and not in volumes and volumes of poor quality candidates. Quality bests quantity in recruiting.

Sadly, too few experienced workers know that they need to have an online resume. They need to embed the right keywords into these resumes if they want to be found. But, they need to avoid keyword stuffing as more technologies (like JobVite’s) kick out gamers from their search results.

JobVite’s Sourcing has more than the filtering and crawling. It also integrates the sourcing results into its other applications. But better still, it also provides one-click access to the candidate’s various social network home pages and other websites with the candidate’s online presence. So, if you still have that questionable photo out there on your Facebook page, you might think about doing something about it now….

I'll have a lot of posts in the HR arena next week as I cover the HR Tech show in Chicago.