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 Suresh on January 13, 2012 at 9:20am: I get the part of Measuring Influence online as a tool..what bugs people is the Phony or Show part of it without much substance.

You can hire a bunch of people to game the system and apparently that is being preached by some Social Media gurus.

There is no question, a ton of changes will occur in the recruiting world, but to ask all recruiters to be a Showman or Woman or Rockstar..I don' think customers are looking for that.

Comment by Johnny Campbell on January 13, 2012 at 9:36am: I agree Suresh. Several social media consultants and "experts" have told me that I need to strategically follow people on Twitter so as that they will follow me back and I will get more reach and I get (part of) their argument but it just doesn't sit comfortably with me. I follow people because they interest me and I unfollow them because they don't, it's simple. If my Klout goes down, so be it, I get more value from being choosy about who I listen to then gaming my Klout. As Jerry pointed out several times, a high Klout does not pay the rent. Indirectly it may (and I am being loose with the "may" here) be an indicator of success that actually is relevant, but its early days for any of these tools.

Comment by Tim Spagnola on January 13, 2012 at 9:48am: @Paul - fair point. Recruiting is all about adapting. Sure the basic fundamentals (ie: the phone) remain, but how many of us are doing the same tasks we were doing 10 years ago? 5 years ago?

I wonder if this debate would change if we replace the word 'influence' with marketing. Social Media Marketing from a simplistic view appears to make sense in that these tools can offer one exposure to stand out from the competitive landscape. Now does that always translate into more placements? No- but if it allows for exposure and the chance to gain more opportunity I think it would be foolish to completely dismiss.

Trust me when I say I clearly see the points made from both sides of this conversation, but in the end it comes down to the individual and how it works for them. However I would caution that time for recruiters is our biggest commodity and many can lose countless hours getting sucked into this vortex and that would certainly have a negative impact on one's desk.

Comment by Paul Alfred on January 13, 2012 at 9:56am: Johnny ... Your blog was written to enlighten the masses about what Klout/Influence is ... No where in your blog do I read If I have a Great Klout score or bigger influence, or I communicate (peer index) more with my followers it will equate to increased Recruitment revenue ... You don't need to defend it - what we need to learn from is that if you are online and trying to establish presence and it's "Important to you" Klout can go along way in defining how credible you are with respect to your interest. There is a reason why Brands are heavily looking at and working with influence monitoring sites like Klout, Empire Avenue PeerIndex etc etc ... ( I have my own beef with Klout but that's for another blog)

Comment by Jeremy Haskell on January 13, 2012 at 10:34am: A Molson reference? That's awesome.

Comment by Valentino Martinez on January 13, 2012 at 12:12pm: Jerry - If you are unable to stretch you don’t land on the moon. What are you thinking when you stop thinking about thinking forward?

You’re right—the future is unpredictable, but isn’t that what makes it exciting and challenging? The examples I’ve shared are all about paradigm shifts made in the face of what was considered rational thinking at the time by respected authorities.

Klout is so raw at this stage it is easy to dismiss it. Yet it’s intriguing because it is embracing one of the most powerful aspect of human nature—our EGO. And that’s why it has relevance even at this stage in its evolution.

Comment by Johnny Campbell on January 13, 2012 at 12:36pm: Paul, you took the words right out of my mouth (to reference another musical act in this post!)

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