First thing I do on SlideShare is run a search on “recruiting.” The search pulls up over 1,600 slide presentations with recruiting in the subject or description. See below:

This opens up the possibility for any recruiter or sourcer to peer into presentations being shared by others in the recruiting community. Some of the PowerPoints listed out on the site were given from past conferences such as ERE (Electronic Recruiters Exchange) when they held one of their annual ERE Expos. This is a solid way for a recruiter or sourcer to learn and stay up to speed on the latest discussions, technologies and trends in the recruiting landscape. The site offers a “Most Viewed” slideshows area to show what is popular on the site. There is a diverse amount of presentations out here including many business and technical related.

Believe it or not, you can get some recruiting and sourcing done out on SlideShare too. There is a section called “My Slidespace” where users can put up a profile with key words (tags), upload presentations, connect with other members of the SlideShare community and send messages right inside the site. If you are sourcing for say technical people, simply run a search across the tags. I ran a search on “Java” tags. See below:

The search pulls up hundreds of presentations with Java tagged. From there, you can see who has posted these presentations out on the site. If they are doing full-fledged PowerPoints on Java technologies, wouldn’t these people be worthy of reaching out to? I would guess they are highly coveted in their field regardless of location.

Finally, SlideShare represents a great community for floating presentations and information about your company to build buzz, whether it be a small PowerPoint outlining positions and benefits, or a presentation interviewing internal managers on why a candidate should be excited to work for you, or even a promotion of a new product or service to drive traffic to your site. SlideShare syncs audio to presentations as well allowing for more possibilities.

Using there search features, I did a quick generic search for “resume” and discovered 870 search results. See below:

With that in mind, this opens the possibility to search by key words, locations and more. Another tip would be to search technical documents or “subject matter” documents on any given topic, then Google the authors name and search for them directly.