Why Twitter Is A Recruiter's Secret Weapon (And How To Use It)

Recruiting has evolved. In order to help our organizations attract and retain the best talent, recruiters need to evolve to keep pace with the industry. The phone is still our best tool, but our options continue to expand at an increasing rate. How do we determine what tools will give us a competitive advantage?

LinkedIn is an obvious choice for most recruiters, and for good reason. Its reach and streamlined connection capabilities are unrivaled. Recruiters know this, and the volume of inmails great prospects get illustrates that. LinkedIn will always be the top tool for most recruiters, but it's more and more important that we diversify and use a variety of channels to engage candidates.

This post will focus on using Twitter as a recruiting tool - sourcing, branding, engaging, marketing. Twitter is a tremendous tool for all of these recruiting needs, yet it's one many recruiters have been slow to embrace.

Establishing Your Brand Presence

Building an engaged network on Twitter can be a difference-maker in your recruiting efforts. These are some of the steps I recommend you take when launching a social recruiting effort on Twitter.

This isn’t designed to be an exact blueprint, as every company and culture is different, so you should personalize these suggestions for your organization and needs.

Localize Best Practices

To that point, understand from the outset that you should tweak all advice that you get on the topic of social recruiting. Every company is different; internal politics, power centers, appetite for risk, target hires, etc.

All of these characteristics impact how you should shape your social recruiting strategy. Scour your networks, resources, contacts, conferences, the Googles and wherever else you can for ideas; then figure out how you can tweak and mold them to work for your organization.

Getting Started

Have a purpose: Why are you creating this account? Hopefully the answer includes none of the following: ‘my boss told me to,’ ‘I heard it’s big these days,’ ‘because it’s time to evolve from Friendster.’

Whether you’re building this account to reach active or passive job seekers, build your employment brand, evangelize your organization, or build community – it’s crucial to think through what you want this platform to help you achieve.

Have a general understanding of Twitter works: if you’ve never used Twitter, you might want to setup a personal account first. Follow your friends, some celebrities, sports teams, and some companies – particularly those with brands and recruiting accounts.

Observe other handles to get a sense of how post and interact. There are are lots of good examples of corporate accounts out there, here are a few: @NPRjobs, @JoinTheFlock, @SpaceXJobs, @WBCareers, @PepsiCoJobs, @MicrosoftJobs, @ViacomCareers, @InsideZappos.

You can subscribe to this Twitter list for a collection of over 230 brand recruiting handles on Twitter to get a sense of what your peers (or competitors) are up to.

Sourcing Candidates

Twitter is a good platform for recruiters and organizations to identify, interact and engage with prospects before they even apply to your jobs. You can easily find function or skill-specific hashtags on Google. Include some of these hashtags when posting jobs (note: tread very lightly here unless it’s a job-specific hashtag, lest you be banished as a spammer).

Twitter is also an effective sourcing platform. Are you recruiting Drupal developers? Keep an eye on the hashtags: #Drupal, #DrupalCon, #Drupal8, etc to see what these communities are talking about and identify influential developers. Recruiting Marketing Managers? Check out #marketing, #digitalmarketing, #marketingresearch, #mktg, etc and do the same.

There are many tools out there to help you identify influencers within various hashtag communities. Here are a few: SocialBro, WeFollow, Hashtags.org, What The Trend. Sourcing local talent? You can also search people talking about X technologies/skills/hashtags within a Y mile radius of your company.

Content & Engagement

Twitter is not an extension of your job board: The examples above are successful corporate recruiting twitter accounts that do a good job building communities with engaged members. There are many others that don’t. Why? Because they treat their Twitter accounts as an extension of their job boards. That’s purely a broadcast, one-way channel.

Is it better than not being on Twitter at all? Probably, but it won’t build a loyal group of followers – and it certainly won’t build community.

Engage your followers: Rule #1 of creating an engaged community on social media – provide value. This applies to organizations as well as individuals. You want to be generous and provide something interesting and/or useful to your followers.

There are lots of ways to do this. Share ‘behind the scenes’ photos or video to help prospects get a sense of what it’s like to work for your company. Share articles and resources about your industry. Join Twitter chats and share your insights and expertise. Interact with your followers.

Try to respond to every @mention and question. Engagement and interaction is vital if you want to build community.

Engage your employees: To really harness the power of social recruiting on Twitter, you need great content and you need volume. Unless you work for one of the few organizations that have dedicated teams working solely on social media recruiting campaigns, chances are you’ll have more success if you can get your employees involved.

Great talent within specific roles generally knows similar talent. Consider developing internal programs where your employees can share jobs on their social networks to help them get more visibility, particularly in the communities where you recruit. There are tools out there like RolePoint that allow you to automate social job shares, and even add a gamification layer to these efforts.

Employee involvement in employment branding is key. While you may share supremely clever and compelling content on Twitter, you’re still an HR guy/gal. You have an agenda to bring talent into your organization, so of course your posts are biased.

Prospects want to hear from your employees. That Product Manager you’ve been wooing wants to see tweets from your Product team that will help them get a feel for the work, team atmosphere, culture, etc.

When you effectively engage your employees in employer branding, you magnify your reach tremendously.

Measure

Many say social media is difficult because you can’t measure ROI. Those people are wrong. There are many tools out there that measure the reach, re-tweets, impressions, etc of your tweeting activity. You should also be measuring applications and hires coming from Twitter through your ATS.

Use these tools to adjust your campaigns regularly. You will be tempted to obsess over your followers. Don’t let that be your primary indicator as to whether your account is successful. If you focus on providing valuable content and engaging your community, followers will come. Focus on this and you’ll have something better than followers – you’ll have brand advocates.

Time Management

Isn’t this social media thing going to eat up all my time? If you let it, yes. If you’re smart and disciplined, no. There are lots of great tools like Buffer that can schedule your tweets and automate some of your postings. You can also use tools like Crowdbooster that tell you what times of day your tweets will reach the most followers.

That being said, while these tools help, you should be prepared to dedicate a certain portion of your week, including some time every day, to monitor and manage your account/s. Many large organizations split that duty between several members of the recruiting or HR team. Some manage it with one person. It takes some time to effectively manage a corporate recruiting Twitter account so plan accordingly.

Using some of the suggestions above will help you launch, develop and manage a social recruiting account on Twitter. What suggestions do you have for organizations interested in building a social recruiting account on Twitter?

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Lars Schmidt is the Founder of Amplify Talent, an employer branding and recruiting consultancy based in Washington DC. Prior to launching Amplify Talent, Lars was the Senior Director of Talent Acquisition & Innovation at NPR where he was responsible for providing leadership and advocacy for talent acquisition strategies that aligned with NPR’s strategic mission and core values. Lars held various HR and recruiting leadership roles with companies including Ticketmaster, Magento, Pencom Systems and several startups in Los Angeles. He was named a “Top 100 Influencer” by HR Examiner and "Top 100 Most Social HR Leaders on Twitter" by The Huffington Post. You can follow him on: Twitter at @ThisIsLars, Facebook, and LinkedIn.