Recently there has been a lot of press about Quora and its potential use as a place for Job Seekers to showcase their knowledge and for Recruiters to find talent. For Recruiters a major advantage of Quora is that users’ responses to an individual’s answers and questions can provide a good indication of a candidate’s reputation and authority within a particular subject area.
Quora’s user base is currently small (but growing rapidly). Therefore, I think that the key question is; how will the site deal with growth? – Both in terms of user numbers and topics covered. Quora’s main attractions are 1) it currently has answers to some very interesting questions and 2) the credibility of the people who have been providing answers. This has given the site a significant amount of authority within some circles – particularly within the tech and start-up scene.
Growth and increased topic coverage could make the site more useful to the average user. However, the downside is that there is likely to be a reduction in the quality of the answers provided (and probably in the quality of questions asked). Therefore, depending on how Quora grows, two potential paths are for the site to become a widely used information source like Wikipedia or a magnet for spam and self-promotion like many LinkedIn discussion groups. Given the large amount of funding the site has already received – $11m at last count – it’s going to be interesting to watch which path Quora goes down and, depending how it works out, Recruiters just might have another potential source of candidate information.
Post written by Errol Forbes who works for the Contractor Talent Bank Software Company, Resourcing Circle.
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