I’m not one of those people to jump all over any new platform or technology and try to blog about how it can work in recruitment, while trying to shoehorn it in.  Far from it.  But the launch of Airtime yesterday did hit me as a no brainer for recruiters.  Here’s how it works:

After a quick play around this morning here’s how I could see this working for recruiters and employers.

-  You are randomly matched to people by Geography and Interests.  By interests, they mean the pages you’ve “Liked” predominantly.

-  You can edit what you your interests are in Airtime and it doesn’t effect your Facebook interests.

-  So, in theory, and this is only in theory as I’m not a recruiter or employer and have not tried this out, if I was to delete all my personal interests from pick interests from a certain industry, I should be able to target potential candidates, right?

Example:  If I wanted to hire a Marketing Director, I would add:

http://www.facebook.com/onlymarketingjobs

http://www.facebook.com/BrandRepublicUK

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Marketing/113336252010022

http://www.facebook.com/Mediaweek

You can also add in Work Position, so I could go ahead and put in Director.

And there’s a whole host of other Likes you can play around with.  The only draw back I can see so far is at the moment, you can’t change Geography without changing your FB page.

From there I hit the Talk to Someone button, and up pops a video chat with, in theory, a Director from the Marketing industry for me to talk to. In theory.

The obvious objection would be “Most people will not be on Airtime to find a job.”  Well good!  If you want the people that are looking for a job, put an ad on a job board, it’s much easier than doing this.  However, like in most social recruiting exercises, the aim here is to reach the passive candidate market, so would I use this to connect with someone via video and say “Hi, are you looking for a job?”  Hell no, the same way you wouldn’t if I was trying to recruit someone through LinkedIn.  Same rules apply.  I’d start off by engaging with them and go from there.

You can share video from YouTube right now, which could be cool for painting a clearer picture of your company culture.  Slideshare would be a welcomed integration, but with LinkedIn buying it recently, I doubt we’ll see that anytime soon.

You can then choose to share your details with that person and visa versa and make them a “airtime friend”.  Once connected you can send video messages, which is a nice feature and could make for a really creative way to make a job offer (I’m thinking the whole company standing round a web cam with party hats and balloons with a banner at the back saying “We hope you join us”. OK, a little over the top?)

You then click Next and you’re on to the next person.

What could go wrong?  A whole host of things, starting with this thing never reaching critical mass, which is key to any recruitment tool or the algorithm could be shite and result in you talking to completely unrelated people.  Knowing who this is coming from and the resources they have, I doubt either of those have any chance of happening.

So this is all theory, but I would be really interested to find out if any employers or recruiters check it out and let us know how they get on.

Then again, it could just become the next Chat Roulette! Err.