Recruiting with Twitter

I really do think more recruiters should be using twitter. It is such a powerful tool to find and engage with Candidates.

Recruiters are, in my opinion, far too obsessed with CVs. When are we going to realize that this is not the only way to understand a candidate. In fact how often do you look at a CV and forget that there may actually be a living breathing person behind it, who probably has a whole lot more going on in their lives than the sound byte under hobbies and interests would even begin to suggest.

Perhaps it is because of this Resume obsession that Twitter is such an under utilized recruitment resource. Twitter is perhaps as far away from a CV as it is possible to get. Perhaps it is simply this reason that so many recruiters can't seem to appreciate the joys of using twitter to recruit. It is worth noting that Recruiters use LinkedIn to find Candidates but it is Twitter that candidates will turn to to find a job.

Twitter should not be considered the end goal, rather Twitter is the channel through which Recruiters can find and engage with the talent communities they are interested in. With Twitter Sourcing, it is all about who knows who (Friends/Follows).

In my video I give a simple example of how one twitter profile can lead in all sorts of interesting and profitable directions and find potential candidates who who never be found through conventional CV searching techniques.

If you like this video, please please share it.

Comment by Matt Charney on July 31, 2014 at 10:07am: Thanks for sharing this, Shane. After all, Twitter is where it's @.

Comment by Shane McCusker on July 31, 2014 at 10:20am: Thanks Matt, So many ways to use to for sourcing and recruiting.

Comment by Keith Halperin on July 31, 2014 at 9:03pm: Thanks, Shane. Do you have suggestions as to how we might best use Twitter to fill current jobs QUICKLY? There's a saying "If you have time to develop relationships with candidates, you don't have enough reqs."

Cheers,

keith

Comment by Shane McCusker on August 1, 2014 at 4:40am: Hi Keith,

Yes, I'd recommend finding an influential person on twitter and ask them for help. They may simply RT your message to them or better still give some recommendations.

I hired a developer in this way with less than 6 tweets. I found a conference on the language I was interested in and tweeted each of the speakers.

Hope this helps, let me know how you get on.

Shane

Comment by Keith Halperin on August 1, 2014 at 4:09pm: Thanks, Shane. Much appreciated. You do a presentation on this: COUNT ME IN!

Cheers,

Keith

Comment by Shane McCusker on August 2, 2014 at 6:11am: Not a problem Keith, I'll be working on more sourcing videos very soon so will try to do more on Twitter

Comment by Will Thomson on August 3, 2014 at 12:29am: Shane, I really enjoyed this. Thanks!

Will

Comment by Shane McCusker on August 3, 2014 at 6:31am: You're welcome Will. Thank you

Comment by Keith Halperin on August 4, 2014 at 12:30pm: Thanks, Shane. I DON'T know how to get good people quickly with Twitter, and I'd very much like to.

Cheers,

Keith keithsrj@sbcglobal.net

Comment by Shane McCusker on August 4, 2014 at 12:50pm: Hi Keith,

I'll probably be writing more blogs on this subject soon so I'll happily send you the details of these when I do.

I think there is a perception that recruiting through Twitter involves time engaging in small talk to cultivate a talent pool. Certainly this is one approach that some recruiters follow however, In my video, I'm more interested in quickly identifying people and communities first and then making contact. Wither you make contact through Twitter or some other channel is up to you.

I recently employers a developed with this approach and it took me 2-3 hours to identify key people I wanted to talk to. I reached out to them through twitter. Some of them retweeted my request for help and some replied back with suggestions of who I should contact. Three people contacted me interested in the role and I hired one of those.

I'm certainly not saying it can work like this every time but it does work like this some of the time.

Hope this helps. Perhaps there are other people in this community that have better explanations of how to use Twitter effectively.

Shane