The Kult of Influence on Recruiters: Klout, Kred and PeerIndex

This post originally appeared here on SocialTalent.co

Taken from our Webinar yesterday, here's the written explanation of Influence on Social Media, and why you need it.

Old-school recruiters will back me up on this, when you're known as an influential and excellent recruiter by everyone around (clients and candidates alike), you'll get more briefs to fill and more CV's to choose from. As an influencer, and the most popular recruiter in town, you make things happen. You earn a tonne of money in commission, and can live happy in the knowledge that you successfully match jobs with people all day long.

Now, let's put that in to the context of the 21st century, an age of living online and being ruled by social media. That influence is being translated online by services like Klout, PeerIndex and Kred which measure your level of influence on the social networks you use (mainly measuring Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Google Plus, with a few others). Your online influence has never become more important than in the last 12 months, and will continue to do so over 2012. Virtually every single recruiter advertises their vacancies online, and about 60-70% of all recruiters will post a job-spec as a status update on either their LinkedIn profile, their brand's Facebook page, or out over Twitter (and sometimes all three). If you're seen as an influential person online, clients and candidates will flock to you in much the same way as old-school recruiters would reminisce about.

What is Klout?

Klout is an index, on a scale of 1-100 that measures your social influence from a range of social networks, including Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google Plus, FourSquare, YouTube, Instagram, Tumblr, Blogger, Wordpress, Last.fm and Flickr. If you're online one one or many of these social networks somewhere, then you have a Klout score!

How do you measure your Klout Score?

Visit Klout.com, and sign in with your Facebook or Twitter account. Add whatever social network accounts you have, and let Klout work it out. There are 3 components to your Klout score - True Reach, Amplification and Network Impact.

True Reach is the number of people you influence, both within your immediate network and across their extended networks. In other words, it's about who acts on your content in the form of Retweets, Mentions, Comments, Shares, Likes etc - all this is measured by Klout. If you have 100 followers, and 10 of them retweet or mention you and your content to their 100 each followers, then your true reach multiplies to 1100 people.

Secondly, Amplification is about how many people you influence across the social web. So when you make a move on Twitter or Facebook is the world waiting with bated breath or does anybody care?

Finally, Network Impact - if your audience has no influence, no matter how many followers or friends you have, then your network strength isn't very strong. It's a combination of the two previous factors, True Reach and Amplification. How the first two are decided upon influences the third metric.

Nice bit about Klout? Klout also analyses your Style, whether you're a specialist, a networker, a dabbler, a socialiser, a conversationalist etc. Ideally as a recruiter, you're looking to fit in to the specialist and/or networker segments. Your day-job is much the same.

How will learning your behaviour online influence YOUto adjust your actions? Well if you don't know you can't change, so if Klout's analysis of your online behaviour shows up weaknesses (like that you talk about absolutely everything and anything, don't converse with other people, just listen rather than participate, don't share anything, don't thought-lead or if no one listens to you), then you can focus your strategy online to represent yourself and your reputation better so as to become the most influential recruiter about town.

Tip: there's a Klout plug-in for FireFox and Google Chrome browsers, so that when you're looking at Twitter, you instantly see everyone's Klout score and can quickly ascertain which influential people you should be networking with.

PeerIndex - What's the difference?

PeerIndex is another version of social influence ranking like Klout, claiming that they accurately measure your "web authority" as you participate in meaningful exchanges of information online, and similarly ranking your social web authority from 1 to 100. So realistically, if people on Twitter just retweet you, or fans on Facebook just Like you, it's not that meaningful. What will boost your score is when followers and fans respond to you, debate with you, read your content and comment upon it.

Let's take an example of you as a recruiter who focuses on writing a blog specifically for job seekers. If you write a weekly blog with tips to help job-seekers with their own online resumes or CV's, interview preparation tips or job research strategies, for example, this kind of content resonates with your readers. They'll share this amongst their friends and others out on the web who are looking for a job and your content will be seen as an important resource.

PeerIndex measures your influence (or web authority, if you will) using your Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn accounts. They actively encourage you to engage in conversations with others online, talk about topics you know about and write good content about those topics too.

PeerIndex also encourages you to scrub your followers or people you follow who are spam accounts or dormant users, since this will lower your score. This is good practice anyway, because if a spam account mentions you and links to a virus which then spreads to all of your followers, you instantaneously piss off everyone. Not a good way to keep up your reputation as the best recruiter around town.

PeerIndex is now integrated with Twitter platform SocialBro, and is available as a plug-in for Chrome and Firefox.

Kred - Kred is yet another social influencer ranking service, but it ranks you out of 1000 rather than 100, and measures not what you do, but what others do because of you. Kred influence is normalized for the Twitter universe and within communities, which means that someone in every community has a score of 1000. In other words, if you're going to aim to be the best recruiter on social media, you should be aiming to be the top influencer in the community about Recruitment.

What do you think? Does having a strong online presence help you in your daily role as a recruiter? Does it bring in more business to you? +K's (little votes of confidence from Klout!) will be awarded to all of you who dare to put your Klout, PeerIndex and Kred scores in the comments!

Comment by Amy Ala Miller on January 12, 2012 at 1:57pm: Well sure it's human nature to want to be liked, accepted, admired, etc. I can see how Klout and the like can be some measure of that... but if I'm only influential within my own circle of fellow recruiters what good does it really do? Until supply chain managers start caring about my score (a modest 44, by the way) and using that as a reason to either reach out to me for a job OR take my call when I source them I still feel like this is just a lot of noise.

Comment by Paul Alfred on January 12, 2012 at 2:00pm: Actually Jerry ... I earn my revenue on delivery of hard to find candidates just like you do. But if you "also exist" and work online and have a particular interest in Recruiting and you feel your experience can help others and you have a really great way of communicating that amongst followers (Blog, xSM channel) - that is Influence if they like what it is you have to say and want to know more or want to do business or want to be represented by you to a client. "Online World" right now. That is the reality. If you want to talk about offline recruiting let me know ( Sorry, I also fall in the Killer Recruiter Category ...)

Comment by Jerry Albright on January 12, 2012 at 2:06pm

Comment by Sandra McCartt on January 12, 2012 at 4:34pm: So hot shot, what is the Klout, Kred score of your 26 phony profiles? I guess that would depend on if you set up a phony Klout and Kred account for each of them and how much you use each phony one of them, n'est pas?

Here's my take on all this social influence KRAP. There are several recruiters who were on the top 25 influencers online list for several years in a row. Websites, tweets, blogs and comments all over the place. They disappeared along with all their high blown bullshit. Ya know why, in the midst of all their social media influence they didn't make a placement because they were so busy blogging, tweeting and commenting. Obviously they should have been peddling webinars on influence while somebody thought they had any. Or maybe they were just phony profiles and like the wizard of oz they didn't really exist but they sure had a lot of Kloutarooney.

It's already been proven that an account set up in somebody's dog's name ran up a klout score that would make a webinar peddler swoon.

Comment by Johnny Campbell on January 12, 2012 at 4:39pm: Bitter, bitter woman.

Comment by Sandra McCartt on January 12, 2012 at 4:46pm: phony, phony, non gendered avatar.

Comment by Valentino Martinez on January 12, 2012 at 10:08pm: In rejecting the Beatles in 1962, the Decca Recording Company said, "We don't like their sound, and guitar music is on the way out."

In 1974, Margaret Thatcher was quoted as saying, "It will be years -- not in my time -- before a woman will become Prime Minister."

And in 1932, Albert Einstein said, "There is not the slightest indication that nuclear energy will ever be obtainable. It would mean that the atom would have to be shattered at will."

Klout is basically a vanity plate today, worth it's weight in tin, pero mañana quién sabe? (but tomorrow who knows?) Face Book was designed to amp up the dating scene at Harvard. It has grown into something else. Klout will evolve in the same way or will die trying.

Comment by Johnny Campbell on January 13, 2012 at 5:41am: Great Slideshare Valentino, you have made me smile on a Friday morning!

Comment by Jerry Albright on January 13, 2012 at 9:04am: Tino - this is quite a stretch, don't ya think? Citing people being enormously wrong in the past doesn't make anything we say about the future accurate.

Examples like this are used when people run out of rationale.

Comment by Paul Alfred on January 13, 2012 at 9:19am: Is this the same rational used with folks on this blog site stated Social Media is a Fad. It seems some things will never Change- if we can't learn from history we're in trouble.

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