LinkedIn recently published a white paper on “2013 Global Recruiting Trends” with these five findings and action items:

1) Recruiters are relying much more these days on social media to engage top talent

2) Take the opportunity to engage your employees and candidates on your employer brand and how you are different from the competition

3) Use data to drive your decisions in talent branding and measure your brand over time versus your competitors

4) Take advantage of internal recruiting within your organization and make employees aware and encourage to vie for internal opportunities

5) Expand your talent pool by immersing into mobile recruiting strategies and become more visible to passive candidates with this strategy

This is an excellent study but one area that is not mentioned is how social networking is not a great engagement tool in the area of high level executive search. For example, many Chief level executives are not utilizing social media nor are they even on LinkedIn. Executive search firms still play a pivotal role in sourcing top talent in the highest executive levels due to their long standing relationships that firms have with these executives.

My view is that a winning strategy for today’s talent acquisition process is to do BOTH social media networking and engage successfully with a few, high quality executive search firms. This will allow your company to recruit the best and brightest in the on-going and always changing talent war.