small talk 2.0

The answer is simple - through the Social Web. Look what happened two weeks ago: Our Ministry's Legal department published on the official website of the Ministry and on the site of Civil Service Commision an announcement about open tender for recrtuiting lawyers. They had only 2 weeks deadline, and no option for newspaper ad. I suggested to publish the tender through social media, and they Oked. They had no choice... Then it was just a matter of two hours effort. With the help of two of my colleagues who are, like me, fans of Web 2.0, we put the announcement on the forums and groups run by lawyers for lawyers - on Cafe the Marker, Nana 10, Tapuz, groups on facebook and LinkedIn. What took more time, were some groups that required approval for joining. But after the approval that took 3-4 days, the information was placed there as well. In 10 days since we started this "web 2.0 recruitment campaign", we had hundreds of applicants, and were over-flooded with the phone cal...

It is already common knowledge that social media became a tool in recruitment process in the private sector. I would like to bring to oyur attention our experiment with social media (forum in one of the most popular israel's websites TAPUZ ("orange") whan dealing with the candidates to the new cadet course that will start next year. The forum started without our previous knowledge or involvement. We found it accidentally, but immediately started to engage with the candidates sharing information about the diplomatic service in general, about the selection process and encouraging them to contact us directly when the questions were too specific or private. It's not that all the participants respected the rules of civilized dialogue... it is not that we could just give the candidates all the questions and aswers in the written test... But the responces were very positive and encouraging and most of them mentioned that we helped them to understand better the whole process ...