This coming Thursday, July 24th at 1PM EST, I will be giving a fast-paced 60 minute webinar presentation for Kennedy Information on “Microblogging: The Hot New Sourcing Tool for Today’s Recruiters“.

In this presentation, I will fully demonstrate Twitter by walking through its search capabilities and will show you and your team how to build a “following” which benefits recruiters as they promote open positions and search for active and passive job seekers. I will also demonstrate backdoor tips and tricks of using other sites including Friendfeed and Pownce and review how recruiters and sourcers can use them to begin building relationships within online communities.

• Learn how to utilize microblogs to recruit and source candidates
• Discover fast-growing social networking communities online
• Find active and passive candidates who “live” online
• Watch a live demonstration of how to recruit on Twitter, an online network of more than 7 million people
• Learn how to grow your microblog networks in seconds
• Uncover hundreds of “leads” through sites such as Twitter, Pownce, Friendfeed and more

If you are interested in learning more or would like to sign up, click here.

SlideShare is “the best place to share PowerPoint presentations” as stated on their site. Individuals and organizations can upload presentations to share publicly, connect with other members of the site, build their company brand, and dig up leads to follow up on.

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.

I discovered a site that recruiters and sourcers will find especially helpful on an everyday basis. It’s called Vumber. Vumber is a virtual phone number that can be linked to your home, work or cell phone and used to make your real number private.

Vumber opens up new possibilities for recruiting and sourcing tactics. For example, say you are trying desperately to reach a candidate, but this particular candidate is hard to reach and you have already tried calling he or she several times. Candidates can simply screen your call if they are unsure who you are or worse if they know who you are and don’t want to pick up. As recruiters, we are simply trying to do our jobs and find out if there is interest in our company and our positions, and are always looking to find out answers from our candidates. Using Vumber, a recruiter or sourcer can simply set-up a new virtual number to call out to certain candidates, and use your real number for other candidates. It essentially allows you to get multiple lines from one phone and allows you to disguise yourself when calling. On the other side, a second example is if a recruiter is in a tough position where they don’t want to give out there work number to a sales person trying to sell a product or service. A recruiter can simply hand out there Vumber, and screen out calls from there. Finally, a good third example for using Vumber is if you are calling a candidate out-of-state, and you want to appear as though you are a local caller. My experience has shown me that having a local number will attract more people to pick up on the first call. Vumber allows you to choose the area code for your virtual phone number.