How many of you routinely use Twitter as part of your overall recruiting platform? How many candidates do you get from Twitter? Is this something you’d like to do more of? Let’s take a look at some tips for recruiters hoping to get the most out of this social media platform.
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Why Should Recruiters Use Twitter?
Let’s start with the basics: Why would you consider using Twitter for recruiting in the first place? Here are some of the main reasons Twitter can be a useful recruiting tool:
- Twitter is easy and free to use, even for businesses. Job postings can be linked on Twitter, and the cost to reach this audience is minimal.
- For greater exposure, Twitter has business tools such as advertising and “Promoted Tweets.” These are not part of the free service, but they can be ways for businesses to get more exposure.
- It has the potential to reach a large audience, thus increasing the potential candidate pool. According to Twitter’s stats as of March 2016, they have around 320M monthly active users. If done well, recruiting on this platform can quickly reach thousands of individuals.
- People on Twitter are generally more open to cold contact. This is critical in an age where privacy concerns are rising. If you want to be able to reach out to potential candidates before they’ve contacted you, sending a message via Twitter is a nonintrusive way to do so and can open a conversation. This is especially important for organizations looking to reach out to passive candidates.
- Job candidates are often using Twitter to better understand a company and to review job openings. This means even having a profile there can get you exposure.
- Recruiters can also use Twitter to learn more about job applicants or to find potential job applicants before they are even looking for a job.
Tips for Recruiters Using Twitter
Are you convinced? Looking for how to get started? Here are some tips:
- Give yourself time to build an audience. Reaching thousands of people doesn’t happen overnight (unless you’re willing to pay for that exposure). Using Twitter for recruitment is an ongoing process—not just one that you use for the weeks you have an open position to fill. There are a lot of ways to build up a strong network of followers so that a lot of people have the opportunity to see what you post on the site. Start by following anyone who might lead you to candidates, such as Twitter feeds for industry events, or other recruiters. If you’re not already familiar with how Twitter works, take the time to learn it so you can best utilize it and gain a following.
- Be responsive. Twitter is a fast-paced platform. Tweets are being sent all day/every day, and organizations should expect that people will use the platform to contact them. It’s crucial to be responsive—and quick—whenever someone uses this platform to reach out. It’s not a “set it and forget it” platform—it requires interaction to be most useful. This may mean that dedicated team members need to be assigned to follow up on communications that come in via Twitter to ensure nothing gets ignored and responses are not delayed. After all, potential applicants may contact you with questions, and it will look professional to have quick follow-up.
- Remember that Twitter posts (tweets) have size limits. When posting on this social media site, you’ll need to be concise. For anyone who has not used Twitter in the past, it may be surprising and frustrating to get used to the fact that Tweets are limited to only 140 characters. This means that any job post will need to be linked—and even that linked URL counts toward the character limit (though Twitter will automatically shorten any long URLs).
These three tips are just the beginning. In part two, we’ll take a look at four more tips for recruiters using Twitter.
