Twitter is surprisingly good tool for the recruitment. You can track the conversations and when used in conjunction with LinkedIN or any other tool it shows the real time live activity of the person. As does Facebook. Monster or any other CV database will never tell you that. An application from a job site or your web site will never tell you what a person is really about. Twitter does. It also tells you what other people think the person is about. And that is unique in the recruitment industry.
Do not try to recruit by using Twitter alone. But you can use Twitter to find the conversation about topics. You can use the job skill as the topic, or even better a conference or something that has a time factor. You can find people that are talking about the certain themes – related to the job or a position you are trying to fill. Find who is talking about it, what do they talk about it and who do they talk about it to. There is your talent pool, with reference check, and a real time data about their recent activity.
Or you can put it all upside down. You talk about what you do. People who use Twitter well will know how to find you. Actually they will find what you have to offer, and that is your jobs. Talk, tweet, comment others, follow, you will get the lingo quickly. Find people that you know and respect, follow, monitor their followers. Just be active, as you would be on any networking event. Twitter is actually just one constant networking event. It is happening with or without you. It will not wait for you. You need to be in to meet the people you want to meet.
6 replies on “How to use Twitter for Recruitment?”
Agree with your points, it’s very effective and I’ve used it myself to highlight/link to projects on our site. I find the more you network, the more people with RT your tweets so the reach is exponential. However, some recruitment companies just use it to RSS job feeds and that’s a sure way of losing followers and shooting yourself in the foot. As the saying goes, you reap what you sow so be prepared to give something back, it’s all about interaction.
Hi Joy,
The reason for sending a feed of jobs to Twitter is because those jobs can be found on a search and it is free to post on Twitter. You are partly correct about keeping/loosing followers. It depends on the number of jobs posted though and how industry specific those jobs are.
We recommend a separate Twitter account dedicated to posting jobs to twitter. In that way job seekers can follow/block at will when looking for a job and every job can be found in a twitter search.
Normal Twitter networking can take place on the other account where you can link to useful content/advice on your own site and generally use twitter as it was intended.
I think that posting jobs to twitter is possibly an abuse of the system but since it is allowed and Twitter is probably the fastest growing social network in the world at the moment. . . . . . .Why would anybody not post their jobs and risk missing out on potential business not to mention marketing. Users are searching jobs on twitter and other agencies are coming up in those searches. While it may be regrettable in some senses that Jobs are posted on Twitter, it is necessary in terms of keeping up with competition.
Thanks for the insightful comments!
We’re in the staffing industry in Toronto, Canada and have literally just started to use Twitter as a means of improving our efficiencies in filling urgent & last minute temp job requests.
Social Media has its committed audience and we’ve observed that our candidate groups most interested in “following” are the university/college seasonal temps and recent grads.
Any thoughts about how to attract new followers to Twitter?
Susan Strickland – http://www.theselectiongroup.com
Sorry Susan, I missed your reply. The answer to your question is simple: content. Lots of it. The more you use Twitter the more you will attract followers. Don’t just tweet on your own profile either. That would hardly be social. Interact. Reply to other peoples tweets, retweet good tweets and don’t forget to live in the real world too.
I am not in the least surprised by your demographics. Your followers are the Bebo generation. They have grown up with social networking and are very at home on the medium. Those of us who remember black and white TV’s have a much harder time understanding why we should be motivated to use Twitter et al.
My current view of twitter is that it is a great international branding tool that may pay off with a few good contacts or even placements for recruitment agencies.
Nice tricks to start playing on paid tweet program. But i prefer to looking for natural followers
@Sabra Your site seems to be selling twitter folowers? How is that going for you?