Using Twitter for Recruitment
Imagine you are a recruiter and you need to find 3 candidates for various roles in your company within the next 20 days. What strategy would you apply to meet this deadline and target? Recruitment via social media networking websites is the first thing that would cross my mind hoping that the company has already set up an account on various social media websites and has some followers, fans and connections to be proud of. More and more companies realise how effective and quick it can be to find great hires.
In this blog post I would like to focus just on Twitter as a recruitment tool. It can help you to attract two types of candidates: the proactive jobhunters and the passive candidates who actually already have a job and are not desperately in need of one. Getting them to sign up and apply for the jobs offered will help you to increase your database of great talent.
TWITTER is the social media microblogging networking website that allows you to post content using only 140 characters each time. In order to get wide exposure it is important to have lots of followers. You can achieve that by creating high quality content on your website on a consistent basis, for example in form of a corporate blog, or by following lots of interesting people who in return might also follow you back.
In 2011 Jobvite conducted a Social Job Seeker Survey and it showed that 23 % of all job seekers (71 % of those with a profile) have leveraged Twitter in their job hunt. 8 % of them have updated Twitter with professional information, 6 % received a job referral through Twitter and 8 million Americans credit Twitter as a source that led to their current job. Companies who use Twitter also for hiring purposes are: Google (@googlejobs), UPS (@upsjobs), Disney, AON, Bank of America, PepsiCo and many other small and middle-sized companies worldwide.
There are different ways how you can benefit from Twitter as a recruitment tool. Let’s have a closer look:
1) You can advertise your job vacancies with a catchy line and add a short link to your website in which a candidate can find out more information regarding the job profile, person specification etc. You can formulate your job post like this “Looking for a Social Media Manager in Boston, competitive salary, apply now at: .....” (include a shortened url, you may consider the services of tinyurl.com) or “An outstanding opportunity for someone to fill an image consultant role, more at: .....”
2) If you use two accounts on Twitter, your corporate and your personal account it would help you to get double the exposure of your job vacancies. You can be sure that it would be read also by different types of people.
3) Using hashtags is another way of being found by potential candidates easily and instantly. With regard to the previous example you could mention it like this: #socialmediajob, #socialmedia, #jobsinsocialmedia, etc. So it would look like this: “Looking for Social Media Manager, Boston, attractive salary, don’t miss it! #socialmediajob, more at ....”
4) You can also make use of other job targeted websites that allow you to spread the word in the online community, such as: www.twitjobsearch.com, www.TweetMyJobs.com, www.hashjobs.com, www.twitterjobcast.com, www.Jobvite.com and many more.
5) If you come across people who have specific knowledge and an unusual expertise it would be advisable to follow them and keep their details on a special file in case once you are looking exactly for that kind of profile.
6) You can send a DM (direct message) to a person you think would be a good candidate for a particular job role. You can meet up and find out in person whether it would be a good fit or not without telling the person straight away that you are actually headhunting.
7) You can actively ask your followers to retweet your job posts to increase the attention.
8) Tweeting about certain perks offered by your company will also add value to building the brand of your company even further. For example, “Today all our employees are volunteering for a good cause to raise money for the xxxx charity.”
9) If you are going to a career or job fair you can announce and promote this particular event, for example “Stop by at our career booth # A123 at the Career Job Fair, London 25 May.”
10) There is no harm in tweeting your job vacancies and any other interesting content more than once. Remember that people look at your tweets at different times in a day or week due to time differences on a global scale. It can happen that they would have missed it the first time but most probably not the second time you post it.
11) You can follow career-related discussions and forums and share them online or announce your upcoming speaking engagements. For example “Speaking at the xxxxx on how to find a job via social media”. This will position you as an expert which might again help you to attract new relevant candidates.
Apart from promoting your job opportunities and your business on twitter, it also allows hiring managers to research on their candidates - before even meeting them - in a way as never seen before. It gives a recruiter quite a good idea whether a jobseeker might fit into the corporate culture of a particular company or not.
Now it’s your turn to try out what works best for you and your company. In order to show that your company has a consistent online presence it is important to tweet on a regular basis and to engage thoroughly and passionately with your followers. This will make you more popular, will help you to increase the number of your followers even further and help you to fill your job positions quicker, more effectively with better candidates.
Karin Schroeck-Singh
Karin Schroeck-Singh is a passionate Public Speaker, eBook Author, and a freelancing Online Content Producer. She has an MBA from the University of Leicester (UK) and gained 18 years of international work experience in Italy, the UK and India.