As our opening contribution to this inaugural issue of Recruiting Trends we thought it might be useful to take a look at “hiring fads.” Geoffrey Moore’s landmark work, Crossing the Chasm, points out that the dividing line between fads and trends in the adoption of new technologies can be understood through the buying behaviors of “visionary customers” and “pragmatic adopters.”

One way of understanding a fad is that it is a momentary departure from established consensus. For a hiring fad to become a recruiting trend, the ideas underlying the fad have to be championed by opinion leaders, thought leaders and analysts until they are understood by the market at large. In short, hiring fads turn into recruiting trends when people profit through their adoption. Hype, buzz and the echo chamber of the blogosphere are great places to start when you want to catch the wave of the latest hiring fads.

Successful business leaders know that fads come and go and are often the result of a skillful public relations campaign or marketing program. Fads may consist of nothing more than a novel idea or technology that gets people’s attention because they are “new” or different. A fad gathers momentum because it is current. It appears important because it is timely. The fad seems to matter because it is recent. One way to define an unproven fad is this: a fad is an answer in search of a question. Put another way, a mere fad is a solution in search of a problem.

A fad is an idea whose time has not yet come but may be coming soon. There is a rush to get in before it is too late. Fads are the engine behind the arms race mentality in the war for talent. If you don’t get in on time you may miss out and end up at a disadvantage. Benjamin Franklin understood fads. In Poor Richards Almanac he wrote, “Fools make banquets that are eaten by the wise.”

Take the developments in social networking over the last few years as a case in point. Many companies have profited from the power of the web to connect people with one another. Companies like LinkedIn, friendster, myspace, facebook, et al, differentiate their offerings through demographic focus on business communities, age groups, ethnicities, or interests. Even the U.S. military has tried to catch the wave by establishing a recruiting presence through these channels.

Another illustration is the effort Jobster made to become the clearing house for recruitment through social networks. The idea was to claim the whole of the social networking landscape in the recruiting sector. Enterprise customers adopted the brand and bought into the buzz but the recruiters didn’t use the tools. While Jobster may yet prevail it might be useful to contrast their approach with those taken by two competitors.

Indeed and Simply Hired focus on shipping product rather than generating buzz. The recent deployment of JobCoin and Jobomatic and the astonishing adoption rate of these tools demonstrate that focus on content delivery and market expansion can sometimes place an enterprise at the center of an emerging market more effectively than a media blitz.

Many have suggested that blogging is an essential part of the 21st century recruiter’s toolkit. Some recruiters now use blogging in hopes of attracting candidates. A growing number of hiring managers are using blogs as a way of engaging candidates. Regardless of how successful recruitment blogging may be for early adopters, it is hard to say whether or not blogging for candidates is here to stay. The sustained commitment that blogging requires may prove to be too much for pure recruiting blogs to become commonplace hiring mechanisms for major corporations.

What we can say with certainty is that cyber-savvy recruiters look at blog posts as the happy hunting-ground and are using blogs for recruiting in more ways than some bloggers and pundits might imagine. The narrower the focus of a particular blog’s audience the greater is the likelihood that a skilled recruiter can use the people who post there to develop a great sourcing network.

This is an example of how hiring fads turn into recruiting trends. The technology and social processes underlying blogging are exciting for some people. The practical and pragmatic application for opportunistic recruiters is that blogs provide a target rich environment that can make it easy to identify subject matter experts in narrowly defined communities.

Harvesting names and email addresses is relatively easy for skilled cyber-sleuths. The value of a tightly focused list of names that enables you to jump-start your referral and search process is self-evident. Recruiting blogs may or may not be a hiring fad but using the web to harvest names that you can turn into a sourcing network or talent pool is a proven recruiting trend with over a decade of history.

We recognize that not all hiring fads have their roots in technology and we’ll return to the topic of hiring fads in future pieces. Next month we’ll examine recruiting trends and how to spot them.

As a founding partner of Arbita, Don Ramer has helped define web recruiting for many of the world’s premier employers through partnerships and knowledge management.