Twitter as a Recruiting Tool

I’m a big advocate of staffing technology (of course!), but I also promote using social media in recruiting and staffing. After all, recruiters and staffing professionals need to go where candidates are, and candidates are on the web, checking their email, Facebook accounts, LinkedIn connections, and Twitter feeds.

In this post, I’ll focus exclusively on Twitter and 6 ways it can be used by staffing professionals to recruit candidates:

1. Make the Account Solely About Open Jobs. Think of a recruiting Twitter account as one of your “brands.” There’s nothing wrong with having other Twitter accounts, but your audience will be confused if one day they get a tweet about the latest staffing software and then a tweet about a job opening the next day.

2. Build Your Following. Some internet gurus advocate waiting until you have established yourself in the Twitter universe before posting jobs. I disagree. Start right away with clear, succinct tweets about available jobs. If you keep doing that regularly, and if you promote the service on your website and other places, the crowd that follows your feed will grow naturally.

3. Tweet Regularly (but don’t overdo it). No one likes receiving tweets every three seconds from the same source. If you have that many job openings to broadcast, you should open a second Twitter account and split the postings based on the job type – that is, one for tech positions and one for clerical jobs, or something like that.

4. Maintain a Strong Website. Virtually no one will apply for a job on the basis of a tweet, which is why your website needs to be your main avenue for auto-posted job information. It’s also a good place to list “related jobs” next to the jobs that are the focus of tweets.

5. Don’t Abandon Other Recruiting Avenues. Again, I’m a big advocate of using social media like Twitter to enhance recruiting and staffing software, but I know well enough that social media has not replaced – and may never replace – job boards like Monster or Careerbuilder, classified ads in newspapers and Craigslist, or even plain old word-of-mouth.

6. Measure and Revise. The digital revolution has made it easier than ever to track and measure communications. Ideally, you should set up measurements before you start posting, but it’s never too late to start. If you’re not getting the results you want, make changes.

Twitter is just one new tool in the recruiting and staffing arsenal. Follow this blog to learn about others and to keep up on the latest in staffing software that integrates with Twitter.

Comment by Jerry Albright on April 19, 2011 at 1:32pm: For the most part (or entirely I guess) Twitter is absolutely worthless for recruiting in the vast majority of recruiting fields. If you recruit within the HR and/or Social Media world then it's a great place to be. For the rest of us it is one HUGE time suck.

Respectfully,

@Jerry_Albright

Comment by Aaron Lintz on April 19, 2011 at 1:49pm: It is a marketing channel that may expose you to a new audience. I am sure we all have experience hiring someone from an unexpected source. Maybe an oddball website, a referral from a 2 year old voicemail etc. The point is you never know.

Jerry said it best about it being a huge time suck. So how do you reach a new audience without wasting a large amount of time and energy on 1 potential market?

If you are already using your website or blog to market your openings, then you should use find the best way to automate job distribution to twitter and every other reasonable method in an effort to bring people to your website. There they will learn about you and your opportunities. Figure out how to convert passive viewers into an actual audience.

Comment by Jerry Albright on April 19, 2011 at 1:53pm: We've all seen one-off examples of recruiting someone/somehow through all these tools. I've placed people I've met at church, in a bait store, referred by my mother, people have called me totally out of the blue - you name it - it's happened.

But when you actually review the time spent vs. presentations made there are very few new tools that offer a reasonable return.

Comment by Suresh on April 20, 2011 at 8:46am: Tim, some good points.

-Especially about maintaining a good website, because that is the destination from Twitter or Facebook or Linkedin. Social media ultimately is about driving traffic to your website.

-Don't forget niche job boards in your strategy, your message will stand out on niche boards much more than the larger job boards.

- Keeping the tweets to a particular theme..that makes sense

Comment by Simon Woolf on April 20, 2011 at 11:18am: I would have to disagree with Jerry. We have clients who are getting a significant number of responses to their ads on twitter. We find it works well for jobs generally in the technology sector, as twitter tends to attract a fairly tech-savvy, it literate audience.

Simon Woolf - @koneticrecruit

Comment by Sarah Calverley on April 20, 2011 at 7:25pm: Excellent tips, although I would add that twitter followers become bored if they only see job ad after job ad. You could still add in valuable info that ties in with your job openings. @Jerry I totally disagree that it would be anything other than a good long term investment of your time. It's about building your brand, and talent communities. And Tim as you have stated measure and revise to maximise your ROI

Comment by Ineke Read on April 20, 2011 at 7:46pm: I think this would work provided you were recruiting in a particular space - if you were a generalist it would be harder to make it work.

Comment by Daniel Jolly on April 20, 2011 at 11:44pm: Using Twitter and show our twitter feed on our site (Transparencyit.com), but so far have very little to show for it. Does it take a while to get traction? And have people had to do much to promote their twitter feed? We specialise in IT candidates and to my way of thinking, its a little strange that we are finding it so slow to get traction with Twitter.

Comment by Recruiting Animal on April 21, 2011 at 11:17am: Danny, I agree with Jerry. It would be nice if you told us

1. How many people you recruited from Twitter in 2010

2. What type of people they were (eg titles) and

3. How many were good placeable candidates

Your article was well-written and covered the bases

for a job listing twitter account but it's certainly fair

to ask: Where's the beef.

There is also a different approach to recruiting on Twitter.

You don't merely post jobs, you build a candidate pool or

pipeline by entering into ongoing exchanges with potential recruits.

But that's time consuming.