You've spent lots of time and effort cultivating a fanbase of thousands--on Twitter, Facebook, even on your own applications. Yet, when you need new employees, how much of your efforts are directed towards people across the web that don't know you or who aren't nearly as passionate as your existing employees are. You might even need to pay a recruiter to help make your salespitch.
Meanwhile, among your biggest fans and most passionate users are developers, marketers, accountants, public relations professionals--people from every industry imaginable who would probably jump at the chance to come work for you. The only thing is, you don't know who these people are, short of their tiny little Twitter profiles which you can't search at scale anyway.
You could try tweeting all youropenings, but not all of them are going to be relevent to your whole audience, which will degrad the quality of your livestream.
Christa Foley from Zappos agrees, “It wouldn’t fit within our culture to be salesy/pushy... we’re not blasting on Twitter every job opening... To me, that feels like spamming, which I think goes against what Twitter was meant to be used for.”
Just publishing your openings in social networks is a very 1.0 broadcast way of approaching a very 2.0 environment. The problem is that all of the recruiting tools and social spaces are silos. You can't search the resumes of your Twitter followers, and you can't search LinkedIn and filter by who follows who on Twitter.
Having people put links to their resume in their Twitter account might be a start, but that wouldn't be easily searchable by structured search--plus it might look a little odd to their bosses.
Coming at it from the other way, from Reid Hoffman's keynote at the Social Recruiting Summit, it seems pretty certain that LinkedIn is more worried about keeping the "noise" from other networks out than the free flow of data. He didn't seem too pleased about Plaxo's attempts at syncing and he's always referred to behavior on Facebook with some disdain--associating it with zombie bites and electronic hamburgers. This misses the opportunity to capture a lot of useful data on candidates, like their interests, affinities, and what companies they follow.
Path 101 is working on this problem now, and in about a month or so, will give you the tap for the keg of human capital that use your social media fanbase.
If you're interested in recruiting your followers, comment below or reach me at charlie@path101.com.