In a wildly dangerous post entitled 22 Tutorials and Insight Posts on #Recruiting with #Linkedin sourcing specialist Ryan Leary highlights the problem. He links to a potpourri of posts that may have been useful at the time of their publication but are, as they age, a depreciating asset and thus, a waste of any self-respecting researchers’ time. Worse, for the untutored recruiter they pose a serious threat. The assumption is, validated by the expert’s pen and more that 25 tweets for endorsement, this stuff must be good for consumption — wrong!

Now, before anyone gets their loincloth in a twist, I admit it: I’ve compiled a list or two where inevitably the links did rot and the content may have putrefied a bit. And no, I don’t always update them before sharing them even now but I have never knowingly lead a would-be hack up the garden path with things like Threat 7001: “If the Swami said it, you can take it to the bank.” No, Baba, not me.

In fairness to Ryan he does clearly indicate the broken links in his post by striking them through.  I have to question why they would be included in the first place. Is this an historical record or what? Perhaps it has something to do with bloat, I don’t know. However, their presence would suggest that the other links are all good but they’re not — they pose hidden  threats!

Oh, Swami, what are you doing?

Ryan points to a Shally Steckerl classic,  Becoming A Promiscuous Linker on LinkedIn, [Oops, my bad!...Daggit!]. Hypothetical questions like “Yeah OK Shally, BIG DEAL… why should I care?” aside, the underlying premise of the post has long-passed its expiration date. It seems to me the time and effort required to sleep with every recruiter in Seattle serves very little purpose today [as if it ever did] given search results are no longer proportionate to the size of your member, network that is. Things change, including the Swami.

Contrasting the hopelessly out-of-date stuff we have other threats lurking within the contemporaneous posts. Among them a Glen Cathey piece, LinkedIn X-Ray Search Results Change: Update Your Strings.

Not that I would question Guru Glenn’s syntax but the extent to which advanced operators are so liberally used [for example: site:linkedin.com (inurl:pub OR inurl:in) -intitle:directory "Charlotte, North Carolina Area" "current * controller"] it won’t be long, with repeated use, that Google sees you as threat and slams on the brakes with a CAPTCHA page [or two]. Threat 4487: “The Internet changes faster than you can update your technique/posts, refresh your links or catch your breath” comes to mind, doesn’t it?

So, somewhere between the dynamic nature of the internet and its ever-complex web of links, and Threat 2092: “Online, one things leads to another but it’s rarely a real lead” notwithstanding, there are potential hazards that every digital traveler should be aware of.

I hope Ryan will take the time to revise his list and reorder the entries by threat level. That would be a useful. For me, I will look forward to hearing how these issues are resolved at decidedly chaste gatherings like SourceCon, continuing my own search online.

On the same day Jim Stroud posted his interview with Sumser, Shally Steckerl posted his reflections on his year doing the conference thing, linking to one of the posts I wrote on the subject: From the Frontlines to the Home Front: A Different Kind of Conference!

The lessons learned form all this? Well, altogether too many for a quick missive but the most important lesson was maybe this:

Those of “us” who are bound by the niceties of political association, cliquey affiliation, fat-cat business, product to push, thought-bleedership, social status, blogebrity or whatever — those of us who collectively make up the industry’s self-appointed infrastructure — need to get out more. There is nothing quite like seeing 98% of a Roadshow audience — representative of the local recruiting community — bemused by talk of the social networks, blogging and search engine stuff to put things in perspective. Video resumes? Give me a break! Skype? Isn’t that a skin disease?

In a hard, hard world where people still run help-wanted classifieds and equate sourcing with Monster page views some of us could do a lot worse than get to know the people who we are supposed to be serving, then actually serve them — why not?

Lesson learned? Hit the road, Jack — or whatever your name is!

Amitai offers a different take, predicting that early adopters of social media for recruiting will remain in the minority. Too few frontline recruiters will risk the perils of transparency in corporate environments that need to mitigate risk and innovation and apply bottom-line metrics instead. As the economics of recruiting come under closer scrutiny with a softening economy and an inability to quantify the ROI on social media, there will be a slowdown in the rate of adoption by recruiters.

As the competition in the Web 2.0 market intensifies Ami foresees a proliferation of new applications, platforms, widgets and whiz-bang technology along with increasing usability issues in existing social networks. What was once fun will turn into drudgery with multiple logins and communities of “friends” to manage — detracting from core recruiting activities.

Against this backdrop, Ami predicts a general backlash among the industry’s early adopters. They will increasingly default to using proven resources like online sourcing, direct recruiting and building their personal networks.

For the rest, the gap between those who “get it” and those who “don’t even know” will widen. The real opportunity that Ami sees for established vendors and service providers lies in helping close the gap as the front runners start to slow down and the early majority catches up.

And to be included with such luminaries as Gerry Crispin, Lou Adler, Jason Davis and Shally Steckerl! Mother would be pleased.

On Thursday, June 7 at 1:30 Eastern Daylight Time you will have a chance to learn exactly how the best retained search specialists find candidates that the rest of us may never know ever existed. Starting on Friday, June 8 you can begin recruiting them.

As you can see…

• Recruiting for Healthcare: An Unconventional Approach

• Nurse Recruiting from Nurses Week to Memorial Day and Beyond, It’s Mind-numbing

…work has kept me focused on healthcare recently.