2. Searching Facebook
As of January of this year Facebook has 1.39 billion monthly active users. The
number of unique monthly visitors to LinkedIn is said to be 187 million. From the
publication “Unicorn: A System for Searching the Social Graph” the authors describe
Unicorn (Facebooks Search Engine) as “an online, in-memory social graph-aware
indexing system designed to search trillions of edges between tens of billions of
users and entities on thousands of commodity servers.” Those numbers, if you are a
recruiter, should get you excited.
Speaking of Facebook’s Graph Search we have to keep in mind that this is not a
recruiter focused tool. It’s for people looking for things such as bars, friends, their
favourite “disco polo” band etc. As recruiters, we should approach our searches in
that way.
FACEBOOK RECRUITING !2
3. Few years back the Unicorn allowed to find people quite easily using the Graph
Search. Currently it’s being dumbed down to match the worlds decreasing
intelligence thus leaving less options for Recruiters. Fortunately there are some
smart people out there, that prepared a script for us to use, that allows us to search
through Facebook like in the old days. Here is the link
to the tool:
http://www.intel-sw.com/blog/facebook-
search/
What after I find the right
person?
The simplest answer would be you can send him a message. The bad part part is
that every message sent form a person that is out of your connections will go to his
“other” messages folder, which most of you probably didn’t know that exists.
There is an option to pay approx. 1 USD for a message to the person you don’t know
that he or she will receive in his/her inbox with the mobile popup, message alerts and
all of that good stuff! Also in some cases when you share a group with a person you
might be able to send a normal inbox message to the person you don’t know.
Knowing that it sounds reasonable to join the biggest IT/Developers groups, you
can always turn off any updates from those groups to your timeline.
If you don’t share a group and don’t want to pay for messages you can use it to
cross reference it with LinkedIn or other tools. You can also use his name and place
of work to try to headhunt them through switchboard.
FACEBOOK RECRUITING !3
4. What should I write?
If you decide to send him/her a msg american experts advise not to overthink the
issue – simply think about what kind of message you would respond to positively, or
at the very least not negatively to. Just to get you thinking along the right path, a
common approach is to first apologize for reaching out to people on Facebook. If
you’re concerned that the person might feel that Facebook is “private,” show some
understanding of and respect for this by recognizing it and apologizing, then letting
them know why you’re trying to contact them, and then ask for the best way to
continue to communicate with them outside of Facebook. Is it really that much
different than striking up a conversation with someone you see in an elevator (or
lobby, restaurant, etc.) that you can tell works at a company you recruit from
(employee badge, etc.)?
FACEBOOK RECRUITING !4
