EMC virtulization subsidiary VMware is taking a new approach to recruiting new workers via social media. Instead of using LinkedIn alone, the business-oriented social network that recently had a very successful IPO, the company is going after a relatively untapped, bigger pool of professionals: Facebook and YouTube.

Here’s why:

“For VMware’s Will Staney, the company’s talent acquisition web strategy manager, Facebook is a “relatively untapped” source of talent mining.

Staney acknowledges that LinkedIn is useful, but he thinks there’s tremendous competition on the site.

“Pretty much every Fortune 500 company is sourcing that database,” he said. “If you find a really good applicant on LinkedIn, at least three other recruiters have too.”

Staney’s plan actually makes sense, and  several other recruiters do the same too considering that Facebook has about 7 times more users than LinkedIn’s 100 million. His statrtagey is based on exiasting employees, whom he encourages existing workers to inform relevant people they are somehow connected to via Facebook about the current job openings.

In addition to Facebook, VMware is also trying to tap YouTube to further boost its efforts to expand its workforce. The company uploaded a few promotional videos of employees saying good things about their work experience at the company.

VMware seems to have put an emphasis on expanding recently, and not just in terms of increasing its staff either. Last week it announced that it teamed up with Canonical, Dell, EnStratus, and Opscode to further flesh out its Cloud Foundry open-source PaaS. Foundry tools will be built in the next version of Ubuntu Linux, while developers are also given access Dell’s bare-metal installer and Opscode’s automation scripts. A day after this major news broke,  IdentityLogix added vCenteral support to its data intelligence software.