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 Ambrish Kochikar on April 21, 2011 at 11:50am: I'm leaning towards the view expressed by some that it's going to be a mixed bag, and necessarily so. There's no silver bullet to finding recruiting success relying upon any single tool or source. Once you start thinking that way, you're lunchmeat.

Isn't it more likely that tweeters will rely upon hashtags and geotags to find the tweets and tweeps to find what they want (i.e.: a job) when they want it (i.e: searching in real time) instead of following a handle that posts nothing but jobs all day?

This doesn't mean that using a twitter handle exclusively for job postings is not a good idea. but relying upon it, rather than upon your creativity in using a variety of methods, to build and nurture a high quality database, probably isn't a wise decision.

Comment by Suzanne Levison on April 21, 2011 at 4:08pm: Jury is still out on this for my industry.

Comment by Suresh on April 24, 2011 at 9:55am: I think after the honeymoon period with social media, most people realize how Time Consuming it is. The simplicity of just placing a classified ad in a newspaper or for that matter on a job board will continue to be one of the most efficient way to source or even pick up the phone and call.

At the end of the day, everyone is trying to get their message across in an extremely crowded, cluttered and busy online world. Recruting profesisonals are now being asked to be highly Media Savvy (be mass communication experts), not sure if everyone is comfortable with that role.

We all see Linkedin, Twitter and Facebook in very unique ways of how its going to help us, but the bottomline could come down to efficiency and value.

Comment by Chris Russell on April 24, 2011 at 10:39pm: 70% of twitter users are not based in the US

Comment by Tim Dineen on April 27, 2011 at 1:51pm: I agree with most of the comments here - and have (proprietary) data that backs up the usefulness of recruiting via social...

However, I disagree with suggestion #1 - You say make the account content solely about jobs... I disagree since real people don't follow a twitter feed of jobs! Some may, sure, but passive jobseekers will not.

Real people follow real social contributors. If seekers want to follow a job feed there are plenty of RSS/XML/Twitter options out there.

Make the content be diverse enough to engage all!