The numbers are impressive; less than a month in, and still only available on an invite only basis, Google+ has recently breezed past the 20 million user mark. It took Facebook three years and two months to get to the same mark. More than 10 users are joining Google+ every second. It also feels like there have been about that number of blogs and commentaries written about Google's fledgling social vehicle, so you don't need boring with these numbers again; what I would like to try and have a quick look at is how Google+ will effect us as recruiters, and have a look at some of the ways we can look to harness this new potential.
A first observation would be a simple one. Who is using Google+ at the moment? I'd wager if you walked down the street and asked ten people what Google+ was, maybe one would have heard about it; if you walked into the office of any technology related organisation and asked ten people about G+, you could bet your last dollar on all ten being able to tell you what Google+ is, who they have in which Circle, and how they managed to get in a hangout with Michael Dell last week. A very, very high number of these 20 million users are going to be technology guys; for those of us recruiting in areas around the web, technology or media, we have got ourselves a very large pool of guys who may well be more visible here as they get a feel for G+ than they every would be to us on Facebook or LinkedIn, for example.
There is a cool article by Irina Shamaeva which shows us a search string she has come up with for searching G+ for Google employees; check out this search string which brings up a list of Computer Science graduates from Cambridge. Obviously this is searching at the most basic level, so change the string as you see fit, but it's quite effective; it's also interesting to note that at the moment, most profiles have a 'send e-mail' button still active.
Circles. We've heard about circles a lot since G+ came out, and there are two clear ways that Circles are going to be useful to us as recruiters. First of all, get following people; treat it like Twitter. Follow Sergey or follow MySpace founder Tom Anderson; as with Twitter, in Google+ you don't need a reciprocated friendship to be able to see public updates from people who you follow. This is in theory going to allow us to reach more people more simply than we may do with say LinkedIn; here, you need to find a person, send an invite request and wait for the invite to accepted before you can share status updates to someones feed. Conversely with G+, you drop someone in a circle, you can see their updates - simple.
Circles will also be useful in that we're going to be able to separate our contacts in to very specific groups; this will allow us to send very targeted messages to a certain group, while not sending the message to others. We spend a lot of time developing our own personal branding, and I always felt typical recruiter status updates on LinkedIn could go some way to erode that. If Client A sees me as the de-facto expert in finding them C# developers to work on their highly specialised financial software, they may be a little surprised to see me posting a message reaching out to helpdesk support to work for Client B. We will also be able to separate personal stuff from work stuff but keep it all in one place which is cool; at the moment I am like I'd imagine many of us are, keeping LinkedIn professional, Facebook personal and Twitter as kind of a mix. This way we can keep it all in one place much more effectively.
There is so much more to discover about Google+ and it's really interesting to see so many different observations and thoughts already. Check out this blog by Katie Meeker and this by Jeff Moore for some further, far more coherent, ideas.
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