Tweet your way to recruiting success
27 October 2015
27 NOVEMBER 2015
FROM NOVEMBER 2015’s RECRUITER MAGAZINE
Follow the birdie to gain competitive edge
27 NOVEMBER 2015
“There hasn’t been a lot of training or best practice,” says David Lahey, vice president, international, at recruitment technology platform Jobvite.
Debbie Smith, head of client services at social media specialist Carve Consulting, urges recruiters to unlock Twitter’s potential to gain competitive edge: “It’s not wrong to post a job on Twitter, but it is certainly not the best way to use what is a hugely useful platform.”
(1) Show your personality
Recruitment is a people business and Twitter gives individual recruiters the opportunity to show their personality and directly relate to candidates.
As Lahey points out, a candidate can go on Glassdoor and find out about the employment brand but, as a hiring manager, you can provide some insight into what it might be like to work with you: “For instance, people can look at my Tweets and see I post about subjects such as leadership and music.”
Smith says that recruiters should “be themselves” and share what they find interesting but adds they need to find their “purpose and personality on social platforms”. “Many people don’t think enough about their personal versus professional footprint,” she says. “If many of your followers are candidates, do they want to hear your angry rants about your football team?”
(2) Build awareness and trust
As a recruiter, you want potential candidates, business contacts and peers to follow you, so give them plenty of reasons to do so.
Building trust and awareness are key to this, says Mike Wedge, director of web design and digital marketing specialist, Fifteen Ten. “The more times you appear, the more your target candidates see your name or recognise your logo. Jump into relevant discussions and show up in searches by using the right hashtags,” he says. “You can also attract candidates by showcasing your knowledge; the more insight and advice you can offer, the more they will trust and like you.”
(3) Broadcasting jobs
With #jobs being one of the leading hashtags on Twitter, it is a “big mistake” not to use the channel to broadcast your jobs, says Lahey. “Recruiters see themselves as sales people but often overlook that they are also in marketing.”
He acknowledges though that this can add to the pressure a recruiter works under. Find out what functionality is available in your recruitment platform to publish jobs to social media channels as this may make it easier.
Your job posting activity will be far more meaningful though if a relevant talent pool is seeing these jobs. Smith warns against “shouting out” jobs, likening it to walking into a room “and just shouting out facts”. She explains: “Social platforms are around community and adding value to your followers and connections.”
(4) Keep up with developments
Be aware of how candidates are using Twitter and keep up with developments on the platform itself. As Wedge explains, Twitter has evolved from a text-heavy micro-blogging tool to a highly visual news platform, “where many users consume their daily headlines and opinion”.
“Twitter has a much larger focus on image and video content now, and tweets that contain images are 35% more likely to be retweeted*,” he says. Recruiters should also tailor their Twitter feeds so that they are a regular and efficient source of news, information and business intelligence for them. “It’s a hugely effective way of keeping up-to-date with hiring trends, client and competitor news, industry insights and business opportunities,” says Smith.
* Source: Sprout Social
(5) Keep up the activity
One of the reasons people love social media is because it is both responsive and spontaneous. It can be hard to be reactive throughout the working day, so build in time for your Twitter activity and be prepared to respond to an event if necessary.
Smith reckons that a lot is possible on Twitter in just five minutes, including checking your @mentions and new followers, clicking on relevant articles and feeding in your own thought leadership, following someone new and replying to a tweet from a potential candidate or prospect to start a conversation.
“And remember the [visible] lifespan of a Tweet is just two to six minutes,” she says. “So you need to keep up the frequency of sharing, retweeting, favouriting, mentioning and hashtagging to make sure you are visible.”
FROM NOVEMBER 2015’s RECRUITER MAGAZINE
Follow the birdie to gain competitive edge
DEFINED: Twitter is a micro-blogging platform that celebrates its 10th anniversary next year. Users build up a network of followers and can send out 140-character tweets to share information, thoughts, opinions or whatever else. Users are identified by the @ (at) symbol before their name while a # (hashtag) is used before keywords in tweets and helps to categorise them. Twitter currently has 316m active users every month and 500m tweets are sent every day. According to research carried out by recruitment technology platform Jobvite, more than half (57%) of UK recruiters who use social media for candidate identification turn to Twitter for help.
Twitter landed in the middle of the social media maelstrom of the mid-noughties when recruiters were already trying to get to grips with the likes of LinkedIn and Facebook. For many, its use has never developed beyond being a vehicle for broadcasting jobs.“There hasn’t been a lot of training or best practice,” says David Lahey, vice president, international, at recruitment technology platform Jobvite.
Debbie Smith, head of client services at social media specialist Carve Consulting, urges recruiters to unlock Twitter’s potential to gain competitive edge: “It’s not wrong to post a job on Twitter, but it is certainly not the best way to use what is a hugely useful platform.”
(1) Show your personality
Recruitment is a people business and Twitter gives individual recruiters the opportunity to show their personality and directly relate to candidates.
As Lahey points out, a candidate can go on Glassdoor and find out about the employment brand but, as a hiring manager, you can provide some insight into what it might be like to work with you: “For instance, people can look at my Tweets and see I post about subjects such as leadership and music.”
Smith says that recruiters should “be themselves” and share what they find interesting but adds they need to find their “purpose and personality on social platforms”. “Many people don’t think enough about their personal versus professional footprint,” she says. “If many of your followers are candidates, do they want to hear your angry rants about your football team?”
(2) Build awareness and trust
As a recruiter, you want potential candidates, business contacts and peers to follow you, so give them plenty of reasons to do so.
Building trust and awareness are key to this, says Mike Wedge, director of web design and digital marketing specialist, Fifteen Ten. “The more times you appear, the more your target candidates see your name or recognise your logo. Jump into relevant discussions and show up in searches by using the right hashtags,” he says. “You can also attract candidates by showcasing your knowledge; the more insight and advice you can offer, the more they will trust and like you.”
(3) Broadcasting jobs
With #jobs being one of the leading hashtags on Twitter, it is a “big mistake” not to use the channel to broadcast your jobs, says Lahey. “Recruiters see themselves as sales people but often overlook that they are also in marketing.”
He acknowledges though that this can add to the pressure a recruiter works under. Find out what functionality is available in your recruitment platform to publish jobs to social media channels as this may make it easier.
Your job posting activity will be far more meaningful though if a relevant talent pool is seeing these jobs. Smith warns against “shouting out” jobs, likening it to walking into a room “and just shouting out facts”. She explains: “Social platforms are around community and adding value to your followers and connections.”
(4) Keep up with developments
Be aware of how candidates are using Twitter and keep up with developments on the platform itself. As Wedge explains, Twitter has evolved from a text-heavy micro-blogging tool to a highly visual news platform, “where many users consume their daily headlines and opinion”.
“Twitter has a much larger focus on image and video content now, and tweets that contain images are 35% more likely to be retweeted*,” he says. Recruiters should also tailor their Twitter feeds so that they are a regular and efficient source of news, information and business intelligence for them. “It’s a hugely effective way of keeping up-to-date with hiring trends, client and competitor news, industry insights and business opportunities,” says Smith.
* Source: Sprout Social
(5) Keep up the activity
One of the reasons people love social media is because it is both responsive and spontaneous. It can be hard to be reactive throughout the working day, so build in time for your Twitter activity and be prepared to respond to an event if necessary.
Smith reckons that a lot is possible on Twitter in just five minutes, including checking your @mentions and new followers, clicking on relevant articles and feeding in your own thought leadership, following someone new and replying to a tweet from a potential candidate or prospect to start a conversation.
“And remember the [visible] lifespan of a Tweet is just two to six minutes,” she says. “So you need to keep up the frequency of sharing, retweeting, favouriting, mentioning and hashtagging to make sure you are visible.”
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