It’s important to note that social technology and social networks are not the same thing. As Molly Wright Steenson, associate professor of connected communities at the Interaction Design Institute in Ivrea, Italy, points out, economic systems and nation-states qualify as social networks, too: they work because of personal relationships. Among the social-networking sites currently operating, there is an immense variety of goals and means.

    There are personal sites (Friendster, MySpace), professional sites (Ryze, LinkedIn), and sites that cover both sides of their users’ lives (Orkut, Tribe). Some business-oriented sites are built for targeted contacts--to get users in touch with specific people via friends of friends. Others are better suited for "crawling": searching for people by way of shared interests, former employers or chains of personal recommendations.

    Many rely on their users to input information directly. A few, like Eliyon and Spoke, harvest data about people wherever they can find it. Clay Shirky, an adjunct professor at New York University’s Interactive Telecommunications Program, notes that "services that had existing social networks and didn’t see it coming--Monster, Yahoo"--have been reintegrating the idea of formal social networking into their operations.

Benefit could diminish
    As widespread as networking sites have become, though, the experts are skeptical about how useful they can be to recruiters in their current form. "The key on the Net is not who you know, but who knows you," says Peter Weddle, editor and publisher of Weddle’s. "Networking is absolutely the hidden secret weapon for effective online recruiting--it’s one of the best ways to reap passive job-seekers. But the yield from social networking is considerably lower than from the chat areas, bulletin boards and so on where like-minded professionals talk to their peers."

    Compared to sites that require users to map their own social networks, Weddle says, Eliyon Technologies’ site "is much more robust--they’ve used their spider to compile dossiers on over 19 million Americans. For free, you can type in the name of a company and see a list of the people they’ve built dossiers on."

    That "free" will be significant in determining the future usefulness of social software, according to Peter M. Zollman, founding principal of the consulting service Classified Intelligence. "Right now, if you want to find people who work for a specific company, you can. But as soon as these sites start charging and people start dropping out, that benefit [for recruiters] is substantially diminished." In other words, the pool of users who’d be willing to pay to use networking sites is likely to be substantially smaller, with a higher ratio of active to passive job-seekers.

Risky introductions
    Steenson argues that what’s needed to make social software more useful to recruiters are better ways of visualizing exactly how individual networks work. "Recruiters naturally try to understand who is a sticky node: who’s going to be the gold mine for the people they don’t already know. Decent visualization tools might make it easier to find out who seems like they’d know the right person. But there aren’t a lot of those tools." Networking sites, in general, don’t permit a view of the network "from above" to see who their best-connected members are--the equivalent of the people at a big cocktail party who know everyone just well enough to introduce you to someone you should meet.

    The sort of targeted networking--in which you name a specific person you want to contact and then find a friends-of-friends path of introductions to get to him or her--available through sites like LinkedIn and ZeroDegrees may actually be counterproductive, Steenson suggests. "Let’s say there’s someone who wants to meet my friend the CEO, and is using LinkedIn to try to pass the message to me. Whether or not I’d want to introduce someone to my important friend is going to depend on what I think of the person, because if I waste someone’s time, I’m going to damage my own relationship with that person"--and a friend-of-a-friend connection makes that sort of introduction much riskier.

    Shirky agrees, and suggests that if too many people use targeting-style sites for unsolicited job offers, it may make those sites less useful by driving away high-ranking people. He also notes that "once you’ve got enough information about a person, you don’t need LinkedIn" to get in touch with them, and that while Monster.com has made it easier to match freelancers with jobs, it’s not clear that, say, recruiters for VP-advertising jobs need the same sorts of Internet-based networking tools.

    Most experts agree that the purely social Web networks aren’t too useful for recruiters, but that hybrid social/business sites may be somewhat more helpful. Shirky says, "If you go to Orkut or Tribe communities and say, ‘We’re looking for this kind of person,’ that’s midway between crawling--searching by interest--and targeting, or being introduced to someone. But it also means that you have to do a lot more filtering of inappropriate candidates."

    In any case, the mini-bubble of networking sites will inevitably shrink. That’s partly because the market can’t support hundreds of them, but also because the more there are, the less useful each one becomes; users don’t like the hassle of dealing with more than a few sites. "You don’t need 8 billion accounts," Steenson notes. "Why would you bother?"

    For now, social-networking sites are a large, unruly experiment with big money flowing in and real usefulness for recruiters yet to come. Says Zollman: "I don’t know how many people have signed up on social-networking sites because they honestly believe this is a way to improve their business, and how many have signed up because they want to see what happens."