One of the problems of being immersed within an industry is you can quite often see things, the talk/blog about them a long time before real business actually takes these things on board.
Yesterday Stephen Collins shot me a note with a link to a post by Shel Israel on the Red Couch about Hiring 2.0. My first reaction was, “So What? We’ve been talking about this for soooo long now” but then I realised that this is an example of the future of recruiting in practice, further Shel provides some good insight into the recruitment process.
At a basic level Shel states that the recruitment process needs to be transparent on both sides of the fence so that a better match is found. A great summary is in these 2 paragraphs:-
On the recruiting side of the table, people act as if this were the one company existing in harmonic bliss. There is no discussion of politics layoffs ridiculous customer or management demands. No one warns you that your co-worker has certain hygienic deficiencies The perspective employer is of one mind and voice and everyone working there seems delighted with the choreographed employee dance steps.
Both sides make decisions based on subtitles of what is not said in the recruitment ad or on the resume of what is not shown during the company tour.
A final thought from Shel:-
Ultimately, social media can not only restore the humanity to human resources. It can make the entire recruiting-hiring process a more accurate matchup at lower cost. Why would any company not move in this direction?
I fully support the use of social media to restore the human side of HR I would temper this in that Recruiters/Managers need to remember that they are seeing the human side of a candidate. This means you are now seeing the personal lives of the candidate in a way that has never been possible. This means you will likely see and read things about their personal lives that you might or might not agree with. The trick is to understand which of those items will influence their ability to do the job?
Michael Specht 
Correct. Which is why I flicked this to you and Alli. This is not yet the norm for recruiting. Far from it. The artificiality of the interview based on selection criteria remains the usual approach for many – do you have this skill, tell me about this problem, etc. – rather than seeking candidates that have engagement, enthusiasm and drive and come close on the skills.
Stephen, thanks for the link & you are so right with the engagement & enthusiasm, starts to cross over into the while Jason C let’s fire non-workaholics discussion :-).