Google+ is the new social networking site from Google, who despite various failed attempts in the past, have taken another stab at creating a social platform to rival the likes of Facebook.
Currently only invitation-only, Google+ is basically an amalgamation of several services we already use but with the aiming of making them better! For example;
Like Facebook, Google+ will allow people to send messages and chat to friends, share links and pictures and discuss status updates. The big difference is that with Google+, you can choose exactly who you want to share these things with whereas posting a link on Facebook will show up on your profile for all of your friends to see!
Google+ has lots of interesting features (that may even confuse beginners) so we’ve summarised some of the more exciting features below:
- Circles – Users can organise their contacts into different groups of people or ‘circles’ e.g. friends, colleagues, family etc. You can then engage and share different content with different groups (or circles) of people.
- Hangouts – The hangout feature is like a virtual room where you can essentially have a group video chat with your ‘circles’ (or up to 10 people). It also allows several people to see a Youtube video together.
- Sparks – Sparks works like a search engine but automatically brings you new content (e.g. blogs, videos etc) based on your interests. You can then share this content to specific people who may also be interested.
As you can see from the quick summary above, Google+ has the potential to further revolutionise the way we engage with people so there are also some obvious recruitment benefits with using Google+. For example;
- Google+ will allows recruiters to segment top candidates into their own social networks/niches or ‘circles’ and then send them a real-time blast (ala Twitter) with latest jobs, events, news etc – all whilst maintaining privacy with the rest of your contacts!
- Hangouts will allow recruiters to have a real-time group video conversation with other hiring managers to discuss a candidate (or interview schedules). Or how about a video interview with an overseas candidate instead of Skype or a phone interview?
- A Google+ Business Edition is also scheduled later in the year which will allow recruiters to have a company pages (like Facebook and LinkedIn) to promote their organisation and new jobs
As more and more people start using Google+, its benefits as a recruitment tool will hopefully become more apparent.
In the meantime, for more information on Google+ check out the following links, which I found to be the most helpful in answering any questions I had about the tool.
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