Especially in light of the current economic climate, I’m happy to say that there’s a lot going on at Flightpath these days.  To keep up with this growth, we’ve added a number of great new members to our team over the past few months.

Back in the day, we used to have great success finding smart digital marketing, design and production folks via Craig’s List.  We still use this tool regularly but we’re definitely not seeing the quality or volume of candidates that we used to. 

We’ve also had decent success recruiting copywriters on Media Bistro or hiring technical developers via sites like Monster.com.   Word of mouth or employee referrals don’t hurt either. 

But when it came time to hire a Social Media Manager – a very key position where we wanted to see a good number of candidates – we opted to try a new approach and posted the job opening on LinkedIn.

I’m happy to report that this was an incredibly successful endeavor and we’ve landed what we hope will turn out to be an exceptionally strong candidate.  My only regret is that we were unable to offer positions to the many other qualified, knowledgeable candidates that we had the privilege to meet and talk to.

While the pool of candidates on LinkedIn was very strong, I’m sorry to report that use of its tools to virally distribute the job opening via my LinkedIn network didn’t yield great results.   Though I bet this will improve in future.

Maybe it seems like a no-brainer to use a social network like LinkedIn to recruit for a “Social Media Manager.”  Perhaps if we were looking for other types of recruits we wouldn’t have experienced the same results.  (We’ll be experimenting in the months to come so watch this space for details.)   But in an interesting way, I think this is a very strong illustration of the power of social networks to address business challenges.  A lesson that our new Social Media Manager will surely point to as a case study during her tenure at Flightpath.