Recruiting via Facebook

While last year reports of potential employers pre-screening candidates via online searches and networking sites such as Facebook, Friendster, and MySpace, this year the Wall Street Journal reports that employers are taking a different approach with these same websites - to recruit future employees.

The WSJ reports that among one of the first in the corporate world to try this is Ernst and Young, which needs more than 5,000 recent college graduates for the fall. By creating a facebook page they are reaching out to students in new ways. The page is monitored and updated by recruiters.

For college students and young alumni searching for jobs, the prospect of a company coming to us has both advantages and disadvantages. The recruiters are seeing it as a positive for now:

"'It's a very good thing for communicating with potential job seekers," says Mark Mehler, a co-founder of CareerXroads, a consulting firm that advises companies on staffing strategies. "You're reaching the student in their lair.'"

The WSJ article profiles one student who used the facebook group in helping him to decide to join the firm in the fall. Now that we have gone a step beyond just being aware that employeers are evaluating us through these online networking sites, what will this mean for the future of recruiting?