There is certainly no shortage of articles written on how to use Twitter, let alone leveraging it for recruiting.
If you want an ultra-mega-so-huge-you-may-get-lost-in-it Twitter guide check out Mashable’s. If you want something short and concise that will cut right to the heart of how to effectively leverage Twitter for recruiting, read on.
I’ve updated the content of this 2010 post – you can find the new one here.
Article by Megan Hopkins
Let’s get one thing out in the open very quickly. I’m a very stubborn person and I like to learn things on my own…even if it is painfully obvious to others.
My relationship with Twitter started out very slowly and much like my relationship with my ex-husband – I was not a fan. At all. In fact, whenever Twitter was mentioned around me I cringed (much like I do when I hear “Steve Jobs” or “Apple”) and immediately tuned out. You see, not only am I stubborn, I am also all knowing…just ask my parents…and I am NEVER wrong. Ok, so to be fair, “never” is a bit of a stretch… In any event, I associated Twitter with all things stupid that did not catch my fancy (though I’m sure Ashton Kutcher is a very nice person) and I preferred to stick to my tried and true recruiting ways. Experimentation is not my thing. Continue reading
An article posted on the Nielsen Wire blog on April 28, 2009 claimed that more than 60 percent of U.S. Twitter users fail to return the following month. From the number of times I saw people ReTweet and comment about the Nielsen article about Twitter quitters, it seems that many people are intrigued by and concerned about the large number of people who visit and don’t come back to Twitter the next month.
At first, I was a little surprised at the high rate of quitters – a 40% retention rate seems pretty low for something that seems so popular. But then as I started thinking about it, I really don’t care if 60% of the people who visit Twitter in one month don’t come back the next.
Why don’t I care? Continue reading
It appears that many people in the sourcing, recruiting, and staffing industry are all a-twitter about Twitter these days. My professional opinion is that Twitter is best utilized for personal and corporate branding, as well as socializing job opportunities – in other words, PASSIVE sourcing and recruiting techniques.
However, even if you’re a Twitter-hater, you cannot deny the buzz and the traffic that Twitter has been generating (1200% YOY growth). Also – did you know that Twitter just surpassed LinkedIn in terms of unique U.S. visitors in March? As such, it would be foolish for sourcers and recruiters to avoid trying to figure out how to best leverage the 14 million+ Twitter users to identify potential candidates.
If you’ve ever found yourself wondering if you should and how you can leverage Twitter in your ACTIVE talent identification efforts, you’ve come to the right place.
While Twitter is an intrinsically shallow source of human capital data (140 character Tweets and 160 character bios), unlike Facebook – it is quite searchable. In this post I am going to review and compare 6 effective methods of searching Twitter for ACTIVE candidate identification: Twitter’s Advanced Search, Power Twitter, TweetDeck, Twellow, TweetGrid, and X-Ray searching Twitter – including 5 video walk-throughs of how to maximize your searching efforts with each application. Continue reading
Twitter is cool, but Twitter is shallow. A shallow source of human capital data, that is.
As a micro-blogging application, each “Tweet” is capped at a max of 140 characters (hence “micro”), and people fill out their short “bios” to a lesser or greater extent. Don’t go to Twitter expecting to leverage it as a resume database, or even as you would LinkedIn. I don’t recommend Twitter to the sourcer or recruiter who is looking to be able to run complex Boolean search strings, sift through tons of data and have a high degree of control over critical candidate qualification variables.
Although Twitter wasn’t designed for sourcers and recruiters to find people with specific skills and experience, there are a couple of ways to attempt to pull this off. For this post, I will focus specifically on searching Twitter through Twitter’s search interface as well as x-raying Twitter using the site: command. I won’t be covering any of the various 3rd party Twitter search apps (such as Twellow and others) in this post. Continue reading
