Wesley Madziva aka #WesleySocial is a Social Media maverick. His dynamic speaking style enlivened the room, causing even belly-full recruiters at KR’s Electronic Recruitment Conference to perk up and listen as he shared his unique methods for finding candidates who would otherwise remain hidden through social media. As he speaks, he “retweets” quotes from conference participants and other speakers, mimicking the online interactive style of social media marketers.

Often, LinkedIn account holders intentionally hide their profiles from recruiters by misspelling their job titles. Wesley finds them using misspellings: A search for “acountant” rather than “accountant” yields profiles that recruiters using traditional search methods would miss.
Instead of searching for candidates by job title or skill, he searches exactly what they do [e.g bending schedules and drawings], unearthing candidates who might otherwise stayed buried.

He scours diverse social media platforms for his ideal candidates. He has found candidates who are unaware that they have Google Plus accounts, through their Gmail Accounts. All the candidate needs to have entered is a name, and what it is that they do. [By the way: If you have a gmail account, you have a Google Plus account.] He has found candidates using information they’ve entered into the “hometown” and “professional skills” fields on Facebook. He even finds candidates through photo sharing platform Instagram.

Tools such as Followerwonk, Recruitin.net, Socialtalent.co and Intel-sw.com enable him to search social platforms, but his favourite search tool for doing so remains Google. The functions of this powerful search engine are free to use, and Boolean search strings can be used to make Google searches highly specific.

For example, “site:za.LinkedIn.com” specifies that Google should search LinkedIn only.“Intitle:accountant” specifies that only this title should be searched for within the site. The minus symbol specifies which terms to exclude, e.g. “-Trainee”. He boasts that Google enables him to circumvent the need for paid tools such as LinkedIn Recruiter.

This Article was published by Carin on The HR Pulse Site. Click Here for article

Carin Lightstone | Senior Facilitator at The 2Q Institute