How will #hashtags on Facebook impact staffing and recruiting professionals?

#Hashtags are here to stay. The organizational tool that gained popularity on Twitter is now officially on Facebook. The social media network announced that it began to support the categorizational tool on June 12, reported Wired. This is all well and good for marketers, but what does this mean for staffing and recruiting professionals?

The new hashtag system can improve the efficiency of tech-savvy staffing professionals using social media for candidate sourcing and targeted recruiting. Recruiter reported that the hashtags will allow a staffing professional to search for an individual phrase or see what a group is talking about in real time.

Recruiting professional Peter Linas told the news source that the inclusion of hashtags on Facebook will allow recruiters to quickly identify trends and tailor job ads to attract the right type of candidates.

“Recruiters will now be able to quickly identify trends and tailor their vacancy placements appropriately. The potential is exciting,” he told Recruiter. “Imagine if a marketing recruiter was dealing with a series of advertising job orders; they could use the momentum generated by a popular related television show – like Mad Men, for example – to push their vacancies in front of an already engaged audience. But the introduction of hashtags doesn’t change the fact that recruiters need to be careful not to clutter potential candidates’ newsfeeds with excess job vacancies.”

CNN reported that the hashtag, as we know of it today, was created by Chris Messina. Twitter adopted the organizational system to allow users to search, organize or promote certain ideas or phrases. The increasing use of the tool has sometimes gone beyond an organizational purpose. Some Facebook users have been using the hashtag in their posts before it was even a functional element of the social media site. According to the news source, several other social sites already use hashtags, including: Flickr, Tumblr, Google and Instagram, which is owned by Facebook.

Hashtags will ease the search process for trends and potential hires – especially among passive candidates. Staffing professionals will now be able to more directly see how one term or another is gaining popularity. Now, implementing that information into staffing software will make everything more searchable.