[INFOGRAPHIC] How social media changed the search for jobs & talent

The internet and social media have completely changed the way people find jobs and recruiters find talent.

Pre-social media, and even pre-technology, the word "search" had an entirely different meaning. For job hunters, searching for your dream job was a difficult, time-consuming, and often times luck-dependent process. Those who found their dream job just happened to be in the right place, at the right time. For recruiters, searching for qualified talent depended entirely on personal relationships. If you didn't know the person, or know someone who knew someone, you couldn't shake their hand.

Then Google (and Yahoo) changed everything -- and searching was instantly easier. Technology redefined "the search."

Today, technology has made it easier than ever to find what you're looking for. And with social media, you often find things you're not looking for. With everything your friends and follows are sharing you can't avoid it. Every time you check into your feeds and timelines your presented with new opinions, research, and opportunities. And if you're online, you can be found.

Today, everyone is a passively-seeking candidate, whether they know it or not. 

The internet and social media have completely changed the way people find jobs and recruiters find talent. The following infographic from TalentBin shows how these emerging technologies have contributed to improvements in the passive and active search for both the recruiters and the candidates:

[INFOGRAPHIC] Recruiting has always been social

Recruiting has always been social -- technology just changed how we define "social".

From the beginning, recruiting was always about the handshake. You met someone, got their resume, and shook their hand. Some time later, you introduced that person to another person, they shook hands, and the job was done.

Today, those handshakes still occur, just on a digital level. Instead of shaking hands in-person you connect on LinkedIn, follow on Twitter, circle on Google+, and like on Facebook.

Below is an infographic from JobVite on the social history of recruiting technology. The timeline clearly shows how technological innovations have created a new era of recruiting -- that's oddly similar to where it all began.

[INFOGRAPHIC] Recruiters go mobile

Today, MBA recruiters use a mixture of traditional on-campus, in-person recruitment methods, and new digital recruitment tools to aid them in this complex process. This infographic from MBA Focus, "Digital MBA Recruitment: Top 10 recruiting tasks done by device," gives you a glimpse into how companies are recruiting top MBA talent using their computer, mobile device, and good ole-fashioned pen & paper. It clearly shows that recruiters have not only gone mobile, but also social, as more than 45% of recruiters use social media apps on their smartphone as part of the recruitment process.

QR eye for the straight guy

Do you know what a QR code is? Do you know what to do with one? Data suggests not.

According to this infographic, just 52% of you have even heard of or seen a QR code, and only 26% have actually scanned one. I'll admit, I was part of that 74% until just last weekend.

Last weekend I was the first of my friends to arrive at Happy Hour at a local Irish pub, Brazenhead, and while waiting for my friends and my Black & Tan I noticed the Heinz ketchup bottle had a QR code on it. I was bored, not yet drunk, yet slightly curious, so I decided to give it a try. If you didn't know, I am quite the technophile, and a marketer, but even I wasn't sure if I needed an app or if my phone's camera could somehow automagically take a picture of this "code" and actually tell me something. I quickly realized that couldn't be, but figured, most likely, that...

There's an app for that.


So I pulled out my iPhone, downloaded an app, and scanned this strange black-and-white square code-y thing.

Despite the narrative this whole process took mere seconds, but just as quickly, I was disappointed. The "offer" had expired, the website 404'd, and the entire experience was ruined. Fortunately, my beer arrived soon thereafter, and I hadn't even thought about it again until now. Or QR codes for that matter. But it's a lesson to any marketer considering a QR code campaign. If even I, a technophilic marketing millennial, don't use these things unless extremely bored, sober, lonely, and it's literally right in front of my face:

What's going to entice some random person scan one?