The days of posting-and-praying are quickly coming to an end.  Much of the best talent has never submitted a resume, never looked on a job board, and has never been unemployed.  They rely heavily on recruiters finding them, or job referrals from within their networks.   These people aren’t hunting work...you have to hunt them.

Social media is rapidly changing the recruiting game.  LinkedIn has long been the standard for social recruiting, but we see an opportunity to leverage Twitter as the next “big thing” in the recruiting space. We are developing the search engine for Recruitment 2.0 and we have big plans for our product roadmap.  

Here are some of the features we’ve already implemented for our beta product:

• 140 Character Resumes: People’s bios on Twitter tend to represent the most condensed version of their resume and career goals that you can find.  Throw away all the fluff on LinkedIn profiles and in resumes (much of which may not even be real) and you find that people tend to describe their strongest skills, attributes, and career goals, and personalities within 140 characters on their Twitter bio.  Tactics HR leverages this and lets you hunt based on keyword searches of these bios.

• Hunt by Interests:  Beyond their bios, who and what people connect with on Twitter tends to define what kind of individual they are.  For instance, many tech developers follow brands on Twitter such as @StackOverflow, @Github and blogs like @Mashable and @Techcrunch.  In addition to what they follow, they are often involved in technical  discussions on Twitter.  Being able to search based on interests and hobbies allows you to identify potential candidates and their cultural fit in an organization, even if they have nothing in their bio!  This is a key feature to Tactics HR that is attracting a lot of attention from our early adopters.

• Quiet Targeting:  As recruiters and headhunters, sometimes it isn’t strategic to simply “follow” target candidates, as many candidates see this similar to spam, or connection requests on LinkedIn.  Conversely, Tactics HR allows you to easily set up custom lists inside our platform and quickly aggregate all of these “target” candidates from Twitter.  In this way, you can track candidates without them knowing that you are following them.

These features are currently under development, but provides some insights into our product roadmap:

• Birds of a Feather:  At Tactics HR, we believe that “birds of a feather flock together”, i.e. outstanding developers follow other outstanding developers, great marketers follow other great marketers, great sales people follow other great sales people, etc.  For example, you find the perfect candidate to fit a specific need within your organization, but they’re not available for hire.  Our technology will let you “seed” a search with one or more “perfect” candidates to automatically find more people on Twitter who are in the same networks, or “flocks”, who all share similar interests, skills, and profiles.  Try doing that on LinkedIn!
  
• Connection Path: Once you’ve identified the person you want to recruit, how can you contact them?  With our technology, you’ll be able to quickly identify if you are connected to the target candidate through your Twitter network, and if so, how many degrees away this individual is from you.  This feature will look very much like LinkedIn’s network map and will enable you to privately (via DM) ask people who follow you for an introduction to your target candidate.  For organizations using Tactics HR, we will identify the “shortest” path to your candidate leveraging all the Twitter networks of others in your organization who are running Tactics HR, thereby increasing your chances of getting a quick, easy way to contact the talent you want to reach.
  
• Push Notifications:  Once you’ve established a target list, we provide you with the ability to track, identify and alert you of key events from any users on this list.  For example, you can have a push notification sent to you whenever someone on one of your target lists makes a change to their bio, changes their location, or mentions certain words like “job”, “new opportunity” or a life-changing event like “baby” or “marriage” in a tweet.  This gives you the advantage to reach out to this candidate immediately and seize opportunities that other recruiters may not have even noticed.

We hope our vision for Recruiting 2.0 is as exciting for you as it is for us!  

Give our beta a try and and start leveraging our technology to find your next great candidate.