I posted something about this in Animal's social recruiting thread/discussion the day it was launched. Now the results are in;

HCL Technologies Limited is a global IT services company based in India. They had a need for a marketing consultant, and did what any good recruiter would do (enter own sarcasm) and turned to Twitter. Now while the merits of social media for recruiting are debated endlessly here on the RBC, HCL did have some interesting results;

Via Businessweek:

Krishnan Chatterjee, who runs global marketing for the India-based IT company, says more than 88,000 people responded to its campaign on Twitter, and a comparable number reached out via other social media sites. HCL boosted its follower count by more than 25 percent, to about 202,000, ahead of such rivals asWipro (WPRO:IN) and Infosys (INFY). “For five days, we trended ahead of the two prime ministerial candidates,” says Chatterjee, adding the “cost of this whole campaign is less than it takes to recruit one person.”

Chatterjee now wants to hold face-to-face interviews with the campaign’s five finalists, whose names are being released today. It’s easy to see why. Although they demonstrated an ability to communicate clearly and market themselves in 140 or fewer characters, some have little more than a few tweets to their name prior to an HCL interview.

Not sure how on a tweet alone a recruiter can judge qualifications of a suitable candidate, but still an interesting way to leverage social media disguised as an recruitment effort. I just would not want to be the one to dig out from under this pile and screen all these candidates. I wonder where HCL will rank in next year's Candidate Experience awards, surely none of these 88,000 will fall into the candidate abyss.