Google+ from the perspective of an in-house recruiter in Google

Steven Grant from Google has joined us at the IrishRecruiters Tuesday Club to discuss Google+.  He is an experienced recruiter (8 years in the business) who recruits across Europe for Technical roles on behalf of Google.  He explains that Google+ is trying to bring together all of the Google products out there and personalise your experience based on your habits and behaviors across all the Google products (read: Google wants to know everything about you so that it can sell that data to advertisers who want to target you on-line).

Steven is showing us this great video to summarise what it’s all about:

Steven was at a stag at the weekend and confides that he absolutely does not want his work colleagues to see the photos he took yet he would like to share them with his mates.  Unlike Facebook, Google Plus allows you to segment and group different people in different circles.  With Google+ you can segment who sees what.  In Facebook, from a recruitment perspective, everyone is either your “friend” or they’re not.  What if you could segment them out by talent pools who are hot “books of talent” in different technical areas or locations etc.  Your updates can be customised or tailored to each segmented audience. You can post out a very targeted communication which in turn should be much more interesting to the audience who receives it.  Steven is showing us his personal Plus account; he has “Close Friends”, “Linux Geeks”, “Google Colleagues” ,  “Family”, “Linux Chix” etc.  If, for example, Steven comes across a really cool Linux Chick, he can communicate with his recruitment circle in Google and let them know that he has come across someone that may interest them.

Steven mentions Mike Elgan who has given up all blogging and Facebook for the “Google Plus diet” and quotes him as saying that addressing a post to “public” is like a blogging, whereas addressing a post to a circle is more like a tweet (I’m not sure I get this analogy, sorry!).

So, here’s Steven’s summary of each component of Google+ and how recruiters can use them:

Hang Outs: Useful for planned or unplanned group meetings.  You can address this to a particular circle and start a video conference with the people in your circle who are on Google Plus.  Immediate uses: interview candidates, hold meetings with individuals in multiple locations.  Google are going to start creating “Open Hours” where Google Recruiters will be available on line for anyone who wants to hang out and talk to them (Neat!).  They’re also going to get Engineers to go on and create live chats about technical topics to attract prospective hires.  Once an external person joins a Hang Out, the recruitment team are going to capture their data to follow up with them later (great idea, similar to what we do with webinars).

Sparks: “Remember when your Grandpa used to cut articles out of the paper and send them out to you?  That was nice.  That’s kind of what Sparks does: look for videos and articles it thinks you’ll like, so when you’re free, there’s always something to watch, read and share.  Grandpa would approve”

Some Cool Chrome Extensions:

• G+Me allows you to collapse posts, more like Twitter.  Has a notification bar and links to Twitter and Facebook.
• StartGooglePlus will put your Facebook and Twitter Streams inside Google+ (cool)

For a great tutorial, check out http://tinyurl.com/googlestarterguide

I ask the guys when Google+ will be available for Corporate Google Apps users; no answer, probably when Google Pages for Businesses are available, towards the end of this year.

Another question from the audience regarding privacy: Steven explains that you are totally in control of who sees what information and what is indexed by search engines.  For public information, you can x-ray search public profiles using the site:plus.google.com x-ray search.

Thank you Google!