It is indeed obvious that social media is an unstoppable force. Commenting on your words ‘Are recruitment agencies ready to build themselves a brand and communicate daily with their associates?’

I’m not sure that it’s about your brand rather your added value. I mean up until now the recruitment business model is based on:
- finding & placing candidates
- get paid for that single action

But with social media this value cannot be kept, at least not on the long term. Recruiters have many more capabilities through social media to find suitable candidates. I think the recruitment industry has to change their business model into something more enduring and valuable:
- recruitment agencies should become carreer managers, helping their candidates to grow over a longer period of their carreer
- reward should be paid over the whole period, but a lot less

It’s like a manager of a popstar, the goal is to get a long carreer for the star. And with the aging society, talents will be like stars and they’ll jobhop more often as they will want to do projects that are challenging and go to another project.

In doing so recruiters should partner up with training / education centers to offer candidates better development possibilities.

On the tooling side, recruiters can use information from social media to better match the vacancies, the manager, the people, the organization to the development profile their candidate wants to have.

Eventually, ask yourself as a professional – what would you like from a career manager for you to stick with him/her for a longer period.

Good luck in letting social media work for your agency If you’re more interested about the tooling side of things, feel free to read my company blog about the meaning of social media marketing: ‘be found before you’re searched for’ – http://blog.componence.com/2009/07/15/the-future-of-social-media-social-business-in-social-comfort-zones/

I’m in London quite often, if you’re more interested follow me on Twitter @SimplyH or let’s have a coffee and exchange ideas.

Cheers,

Ha