By Ian Alexander

We’re all drinking from the fire hose of hype surrounding Twitter, so imagine my surprise at a recent user conference when a presenter asked how many SonicRecruit clients are using Twitter as part of their recruiting efforts. Less than 10% of the hands in the room went up.

At Cytiva, we have released a number of tools to aid recruiters in using social networking to source candidates. SonicRecruit users can directly post jobs to Facebook, LinkedIn and, of course, they can direct-tweet their requisition easier than they can post them to other sources like job boards. They can also track these tweets and posts just as they would any other source.

So I did some investigating and there are actually many SonicRecruit clients that are using Twitter in their recruiting mix and a few are doing some great stuff. Nobody is pretending to know exactly how Twitter fits into the mix, though. Make no mistake, this stuff is new. But I found some examples of good execution that might be helpful to other organizations as they dip their toes into the water of “Tweecruiting.”

Nickelodeon Family Suites Resort Puts It All Together

Nickelodeon Family Suites Resort or Nick Hotel as they casually refer to themselves is all about their brand. And their brand is fun. Nick Hotel uses all the social tools at its disposal to sell that brand to potential candidates. Nick Hotel’s Director of Human Resources, Chuck Simikian, SPHR calls Twitter “a key part of our recruiting strategy.”

Chuck is quick to point out that they are in the infant stage of their strategy, but Nick Hotel sees Twitter, Facebook and Flickr as pieces of an integrated plan. Simikian likes Twitter because it allows them to constantly share “snippets of our culture.”

One look at Nick Hotel Jobs and it’s easy to see that Tweecruiting is more than... openings on Twitter. Nick Hotel Tweets about benefits of working there and does a great job of sending traffic to their Facebook page where they have more in depth content like videos, photos, etc.

PSA Healthcare Creates Community

PSA Healthcare also uses the SonicRecruit applicant tracking system and Twitter for recruiting. PSA Healthcare is interesting because they use their Twitter page t... with their primary target: Nurses. Twitter is a great vehicle for PSA because their target audience is highly skilled, educated and technologically savvy. PSA started actively following nursing students and encouraging them as they face their NCHA exams as a way to build up their number of followers. Lesson number one in Tweecruiting is that you need to build a large network of followers, otherwise your efforts will have little effect.

They quickly found that this network they were building began to take on a life of its own with nursing students connecting with each other and building a self-sustaining community. PSA found that tweeting their jobs was not as effective in this environment because the jobs would disappear quickly from their page with all the chat from the community. So they began posting their jobs to their Facebook page (where they had a longer lifespan) and pointing nurses to their Facebook page to check out all their jobs.

Currently, PSA Healthcare monitors their Twitter chatter and encourages their nursing students to check out PSA Healthcare once they pass their licensing exam. PSA always needs nurses and if you read their Twitter page, you can’t help but feel a warm, positive culture. Their Tweets are about recruiting, but they are just as much about connecting.

Netflix Goes Big


They also aggressively cross post their jobs to their Twitter job page and to Tweet My Jobs, another posting resource for posting jobs on Twitter. It’s easy and free to get your jobs in front of a broader audience by adding the tag #jobs at the end of your post. Doing this automatically makes your posts more visible to candidates searching Twitter for jobs. You can even narrowcast your jobs to niches by adding hashtags (# is a hashtag that delineates search terms) to pinpoint job seekers. For example, adding #restaurant and #manager to #jobs will make your jobs more visible to that specific industry and type of candidate as they search.

Further, you can add an application to your Facebook page called Selective Tweets that allows you to automatically post your job tweets to your Facebook page by adding the tag #fb at the end. One post goes to both pages, saving you a bunch of time and ensuring both your Facebook page and your Twitter page are active. Hashtags are fun and you can learn more about them by searching Twitter help.

Omnicell Mixes Recruiting and Corporate

Finally, I point you to OmniCell, a Cytiva client that provides automation systems for many facets of healthcare delivery. Omnicell does a great job of combining their corporate Twitter page.... The result is that potential applicants get a good sense of Omnicell and as an employer in a single page. Sprinkled in with announcements about new products, awards, conferences and industry based content, you see the many jobs that Omnicell has available. Of course, because Omnicell direct-tweets their jobs from within SonicRecruit, the URLS are automatically shortened to work with Twitter and they can easily tailor each tweet.

The other thing Omnicell has done is create a Twitter page that is visually compelling. On the face of it, most people assume that you don’t have a lot of flexibility to add a lot of flair to your Twitter page, but you can create graphic backgrounds that completely tailor the page to your brand and simply upload them the way you would upload a mere logo. Take a look at Cytiva applicant tracking, onboarding and performance management software client, Startek for another example of a visually strong Twitter page.

These are just a few examples of how SonicRecruit applicant tracking software clients are using Twitter to recruit. Hopefully they are helpful benchmarks as you refine your own Twitter recruiting strategy. The great part is that there are no hard and fast rules for success. But here are some concepts we’ve learned from our recruiting software clients:

• Integrate your other social networking assets and cross promote. Use Facebook, YouTube, Flickr and other social networking assets and have your tweets point to them and tell a more rounded and compelling story about your company and your opportunities.
• Use Twitter to start a conversation with your prospective employees. Create a dialogue that promotes your culture and keeps potential candidates engaged. Blasting jobs is a small part of Tweecruiting success. Actively follow the kinds of people you target and give them information of value, or in PSA Healthcare’s case, encouragement. Learn what they are interested in and start talking and sharing information. It builds your brand, and over time builds your number of followers through retweets and exposure to other networks that your followers are part of.
• Go broad. Posting jobs to your Twitter page is free, so do it! With applicant tracking systems like SonicRecruit, it only takes a click... and we track the source and automatically shorten the cumbersome URL for the 140 character limit. Your open positions are valuable content and valuable content gets retweeted and this is how communities are built. Don’t forget your #jobs and other hashtags to get exposure beyond your followers.
• Make it slick. Don’t settle for a simple logo on your Twitter page. Get someone to create a background for you and make your company look as hot as it is!