Last week I mentioned that a Social Networking Guru is the first tool you need to build your recruitment campaign in the social networking world. This week I´ll briefly discuss the second thing you need and that is...a database of potential and current social network inventory.

This is probably the most important duty/responsibility of the Social Networking Guru. If you were to interview a candidate for the position of a Social Networking Guru and ask, "What will you do during the first 30-60 days you are employed here?" they should reply  "I´ll be taking inventory of our social network inventory." By doing so they will get a sense as to how rich and how poor your current corporate social networking capital is and what strategies and tactics to deploy during your recruitment campaign.

There are a number of exercises the social networking guru can conduct to help determine the extent or size of your social networking wealth. For capturing potential networking capital consider the application process. If you have employment applications on the web  - be it your site or a third party -  it is mission critical that you begin to gather intelligence on where your candidates are networking and with who they are networking. Recruiters should know in what intellectual circles and professional circles prospective candidates travel. Here are a few questions you might ask your applicants (or a short list of candidates) to answer:

-         What social/professional network sites do you belong to?

-         What professional blogs do you contribute to?

-         Who are your top two closest business associates?

Leadership IQ, in a recent study on why employees fail, reported that poor interpersonal skills dominated the list. Reviewing communications that candidates display on blogs can offer clues as to a candidate´s interpersonal strengths and weaknesses.

As you are striving to uncover what your current social networking inventory is with your employee base the following exercise may prove fruitful.Send an email around to a select group of employees...maybe choose a specific department... and let them know that research shows that employee/social networks are one of the best ways to find quality candidates. Create a document "network tree" that employees can fill out. Award a prize for the best network tree, and create a bulletin board and post network trees in the cafeteria or the area where your select team sits.

The point of these two exercises is that you want to create a visual depiction of what your inventory is...to see what "social network inventory" is on your shelf, so to speak. Once you have this you can begin to formulate a plan for putting your inventory to work for your recruitment initiatives.

Next week: The corporate blog