The Ultimate Primer To Start Recruiting On Twitter

Note from Lance: Today’s guest post is brought to you by Thomas Boyle, Product Manager at SilkRoad technology. People have been asking me how to get started from scratch using Twitter for recruiting and not sucking and I haven’t had time to put something together. Thomas covers the bases to get started.

Twitter is everywhere.  Every talk show, blog, and newsletter is covering it for one reason or another, not to mention using it.  ComScore estimates Twitter’s traffic grew from around 2 million unique visitors in December 2008 to more than 17 million uniques in May 2009.

And the more Twitter grows in popularity, the better it becomes as a recruiting tool.

Twitter can be a great medium to push out your employment brand, attract talent, and gain access to candidates who weren’t previously accessible to you.  (Not to mention the fact that it’s another outlet to market your company and products).

The site can be intimidating at first, which may explain why an estimated 55 percent of registered users have never sent a tweet.  So, my advice: just tweet it.  Once you start, the art of short-form digital messaging becomes easier and easier.  When it comes to Twitter, practice makes perfect.

To get started, determine if you want a company profile or a personal profile.  When choosing a handle, it can be helpful to choose a combination of your name and your company name (“@Jill_Amex”) – or perhaps your name and a reference to your industry (“@JillyFinance”).

Keep in mind, the shorter the handle the better.  You only get 140 characters for a tweet and when someone “retweets” you, your handle adds characters to the overall length of the tweet.

Once you choose your handle, begin following colleagues and search for people tweeting in the HR arena.  Some of my favorites are: @SilkRoadTweets, @punkrockHR, @thelance, and @JobAngels.  The people you follow can give you an idea of what people are tweeting about and are (generally) interested in.

Some additional tips to becoming a successful “Twit-cruiter”:

Tweet about interesting things happening at your company.

Did your company just have a fun office party?  Did you just launch a new product?  Are people off-site at a conference?

The more you can tell potential recruits about your work environment, the better sense they’ll get of what it’s like to work for your organization.  Twitter is an excellent place to drive home your company’s unique employment brand, so don’t miss the opportunity to give others an inside look at your organization.

Zappos is an excellent example of a company selling its talent brand through Tweeter.  Check out the CEO’s twitter account (@zappos) and the company recruiter (@electra).  Both portray a fun, casual working environment and give potential hires a good sense of the “vibe” at Zappos.

Share open jobs on Twitter.

Set up your career site to share open jobs on Twitter.  It makes sense to assume people interested in your company will follow you on Twitter, so this is an easy way to engage them.  But, a word of warning – don’t tweet job openings exclusively.  It will make you a boring person to follow.  Twitter is a social place, so don’t just send out self-serving tweets.

This leads to my next tip:

Be a part of the conversation.

As recruiters, keep in mind that all job searches come down to a two-way interview process.  You are in charge of bringing in the interested applicant, but the candidate will be doing their own research on your company.

As this medium grows in popularity, more and more people will be searching for your company’s Twitter page before and after an interview.  If your tweets seem purely self serving and there is no obvious interaction with others on Twitter, you may seem out of the loop and behind the times on the relevance of social media

Be a resource.

Twitter recently changed its question from “What are you doing?” to “What’s happening?” after noticing many people were using it as a news source.

So, think about articles or information that would be helpful to your followers and share.  I find that when I tweet interesting news or information, I am often retweeted, which increases my followers.

Keep people you are most interested in recruiting in the back of your mind when deciding what to tweet.  This can help you gain your target group as followers and connect with them.

Use the search.

You can search Twitter by location, or through bios for keywords to find candidates that fit what you are looking for.  If you are looking for someone living in Minneapolis interested in advertising, you can use Twitter’s advanced search to find candidates that match your search.  Just plug in location and some combination of keywords you are interested in and click search.

WeFollow.com and Twollow.com are also great options for finding people who have certain skills or are tweeting about those skills.  TweepSearch, which is still in Beta, is another great option for searching bios.

Use relevant hash tags.

Hash tags (putting a “#” in front of a word) help with categorizing information.  For example, conferences use hash tags so people can easily find updates coming out of the conference (HR Tech uses #HRTech).

Hash tags help followers find the latest update on a posting easily.  If you are tweeting about a job posting for an account executive in Los Angeles you could tweet “Hiring advertising account executive in Los Angeles #AELA.” Then anyone interested in the job could click on “#AELA” and see the most recent tweet on the position.

Finally, take it offline.

Once you connect with someone you are interested in hearing more about, take the conversation offline.  Send them a direct message (which is only between you and the other person) and see if they are interested in connecting via email or getting on the phone to discuss open positions.

Have you had any luck using Twitter for recruiting?  I would love to hear how it is working for you and if you think the site has helped your organization – or not.