Tag Archives: Twitter Recruiting

Twitter Sourcing Tool Tactics Cloud Shuts Down

 

Tactics Cloud NoticeI hope my blog post wasn’t somehow the kiss of death for Tactics Cloud, but in only a matter of weeks after writing about how awesome I thought their Twitter search solution was, they will no longer be offering Tactics Cloud as they have decided to focus our efforts on new opportunities.”

Although Derek Zeller discovered that you could still access and search Twitter with Tactics Cloud via this link, the Tactics Cloud crew said they will be shutting that down shortly. At the time of this post, that link was still working, although I am sure that won’t last long.

Enjoy it while you can, before your only real option for searching Twitter bios is Followerwonk and good ol’ fashioned X-Ray searching. Continue reading

14 Tips on How to Use Twitter for Social Recruiting

 

My tweet about seeing a recruiter with 3 followers tweet about a job opeingTwitter’s been around for nearly 8 years and has always been popular in recruiting circles, but there are still plenty of recruiters  who don’t use Twitter to its full potential or are simply new to using Twitter for recruiting.

For example, just the other day I noticed in one of my Hootsuite streams a recruiter with 3 followers tweet about a job. I found this interesting so I decided to tell the world what I had seen via Twitter and LinkedIn to see what kind of a response it would generate.

I got a surprising number of responses in defense of the unnamed recruiter, even though there was no attack to defend against, which I found very interesting.

Many of the responses were “Hey, you gotta start somewhere,” which of course is true. However, I would argue posting jobs without a decent number of followers from your target talent pool is like buying a lottery ticket – it is a hope based action/strategy.

Seeing a  senior recruiter with 3 followers tweet about a job and seeing the small flood of comments I received on my observation, I decided it’s time to create a guide detailing the recipe for successfully using Twitter for recruiting. Continue reading

How to Find People to Recruit on Twitter with Google & Bing

 

With over 200 million active Twitter users, you cannot and should not ignore Twitter for sourcing and recruiting talent. Here's how to find the people you need on Twitter using good old fashioned X-Ray search via Google and BingThere are over 500 million Twitter accounts with over 200 million represent active users globally. I’d say that qualifies it as a solid source for finding and engaging talent for recruitment.

Of course, you can’t engage someone you haven’t found in the first place, and it’s been far too long since I’ve posted an update to how to search Twitter to find people – can you believe it’s been 4 years?!?

It was just the other day that I was hacking around on Google and Bing trying to find people on Twitter based on the text in their bio’s (yes, I am familiar with Follwerwonk – you’ll see why I prefer Google/Bing in a moment) and while I was getting some results, I wasn’t getting as many as I thought I should, nor were the results as “clean” as I would like.

That led me to a few minutes of tinkering with Bing and Google and I made a few discoveries with some simple pattern recognition that I would like to share that will help you quickly find your target talent pool on Twitter.

I use two main examples – mechanical engineers in South Africa and software engineers in Chicago – you can of course fork my Boolean strings to suit your specific sourcing needs replacing my titles and locations with yours.

How to X-Ray Search Twitter with Bing

While I do search for what people tweet about, I prefer to search for information contained in Twitter bio’s/profile summaries where people often identify themselves by what they do for a living (e.g., software engineering, accounting, etc.).

Twitter bio example

Furthermore, I prefer to search for bio data using Google and Bing, as there is no service/app I am aware of that indexes as many Twitter profiles as the 2 search engine titans. When I was using Bing to search for Twitter profiles the other day, I was looking for patterns in the results that were consistent across my desired results (actual Twitter profiles) and not my undesired results (Tweets and jobs/job posting-only accounts),

I noticed that Twitter profiles all mentioned “followers,” “tweets” and “following.”

Twitter Bing 2 

I simply added “tweets” to a basic X-Ray search of Twitter and a little bit of magic happened. For example: site:twitter.com tweets “south africa” “mechanical engineer” 

Twitter Bing 7

Here is an example of a positive hit in the search results:

Twitter bio example South Africa Mechanical Engineer

Getting back to the Bing search results – you probably noticed the top 3 results were for “jobs” accounts.

I did too.

I tried adding a simple -jobs to the string and for some reason it kills the search and returns 0 results.

Then I noticed that many of the job posting accounts have “jobs” in the title lines, so I simply added -intitle:jobs to the string.

site:twitter.com tweets “south africa” “mechanical engineer” -intitle:jobs

As you can see below, only 1 job posting account was able to sneak in – the rest are profiles of people.

Twitter Bing X-Ray Search mehanical engineers in South Africa

Simply overlooking the job spewing Twitter profiles is easy – I often advise people that an acceptable percentage of false positives is fine with any search. Trying to “over cleanse” results can have undesired consequences, such as eliminating valid results.

Always remember – every search you run both includes AND excludes qualified people/desired results.  Think before you tweak!

So how many results would Follerwonk return in a Twitter bio search for mechanical engineers in South Africa? 51 vs 88 for Bing.

FollowerWonk search mechanical engineer south africa 

While there are no doubt a few false positives in the Bing search, I didn’t have much trouble quickly finding people in the Bing search results that Followerwonk did NOT find.

This confirms my concern with any search app/service like Followerwonk – they simply don’t index as many Twitter profiles as the major search engines such as Bing or Google.

Feeling pretty good about what I had found using Bing to find mechanical engineers in South Africa, I tried searching for software engineers in a large U.S. city.

site:twitter.com tweets “software engineer” “Chicago” -intitle:jobs

As you can see, 6 out of 12 of the first page results are people, and most of the other Twitter accounts are for actual companies, not just job spamming accounts.

Twitter Bing X-Ray Search software engineers Chicago 1

Twitter Bing X-Ray Search software engineers Chicago 2

Moving to page 2 of the results, 100% of the results are individual profiles of software engineers. Sweet!

Twitter Bing X-Ray Search software engineers Chicago 3

Twitter Bing X-Ray Search software engineers Chicago 4 

How to X-Ray Search Twitter with Google

When I switched over to Google, I tried the same search I used on Bing:

site:twitter.com tweets “south africa” “mechanical engineer” -intitle:jobs

As you can see from just the first page of results, Google turns up more job posting accounts than Bing, which returned only 1 job posting account with the exact same search. Google only returned 4 real people in the results.

I find it interesting to see the differences between Google and Bing, especially when it comes to such a simple search!

Google X-Ray Search of Twitter for Mechanical Engineers in South Africa 1

I’ve been trying to tell people for years that Bing is a bit “cleaner” than Google with regard to searching sites like LinkedIn and Twitter. The results above offer further evidence to support my claim.

Anyhow, I looked at the results and noticed a pattern in the false positives (job spewing/non-people Twitter accounts) – most mentioned “status” or “statuses,” so I decided to exclude those terms from the URL’s.

site:twitter.com tweets “south africa” “mechanical engineer” -intitle:jobs -inurl:(status|statuses)

Much better, yes?

Moving on to the search for software engineers in Chicago, I went a little crazier and added a number of additional exclusions, as is often necessary with Google: site:twitter.com tweets “Chicago” “software engineer” -inurl:(search|favorites|status|statuses|jobs) -intitle:(job|jobs) -recruiter -HR -careers -job Only 1 sneaky job posting account was able to slip past this search:

Google X-Ray search of Twitter for Software engineers in Chicago

Final Thoughts

As you can see, Twitter search services like Followerwonk do a good job of making it easy to search for and find people on Twitter, but they don’t index as many Twitter profiles as the major search engines such as Google or Bing.

As such, if you’re only using Followerwonk or similar sites to find people on Twitter, you’re only finding some people – and certainly not all of the people that are actually on Twitter.

Also, when it comes to any information retrieval exercise, a little bit of pattern recognition goes a long way.

Hopefully I’ve provided you with at least a couple of new ways to search Twitter via Google and Bing to find people with specific skills/titles in your target locations while reducing false positive results. Grab these bits of Boolean and add your location and title/skills:

Bing

site:twitter.com tweets -intitle:jobs -recruiter [location] [keywords]

Google

site:twitter.com tweets -inurl:(search|favorites|status|statuses|jobs) -intitle:(job|jobs) -recruiter -HR -careers -job [location] [keywords]

Of course, you should always be careful when searching social media/networking sites – especially Twitter. People can and do use non-standard terms to describe themselves and their locations. For example, here’s a project manager in “Chitown” that you can’t find by searching for “Chicago:”

 

Twitter Chitown nonstandard language location

Also, we’re lucky that this person took the time to explain what a “code sensei” is – if they didn’t make mention of “software engineer,” no one could find this person by searching for that title:

Example of non standard Twitter title software engineer cose sensei 

Imagine how many people describe themselves and their locations with non-standard terminology and you have a glimpse into the hidden talent pool waiting for you to explore on Twitter, Google Plus and other social networking sites.

Happy hunting!

 

How to Effectively Source Talent via Social Media & Networks

Sourcing talent via social media requires an entirely different mindset than sourcing with other forms of human capital data, such as resumes/CV’s, employee directories, conference attendee lists, etc.

Back in early 2009, one of only 2 guest posts ever co-written on my site was published on the topic of non-standard descriptors and the role they play in social media. Valerie Scarsellato was a Sr. Sourcer at Intel Corporation at the time when she put together the framework for the original article on sourcing via social media, and she has now moved into a Segment Marketing Specialist role at Intel and is loving it. For those of you who feel that employer marketing/branding/communications is a logical extension of sourcing, Valerie would wholeheartedly agree with you – check out this video in which she discussed her award winning _codehearted; work for Intel.

Now that nearly 2 years has passed since the Searching Social Media Requires Outside-the-box Thinking article was published, social media usage has continued to explode – monthly visitors to LinkedIn and Facebook have doubled, they’ve nearly quadrupled for Twitter , and we now have Google+, Pinterest and others springing on the scene, making the topic even more relevant today. As such, I wanted to rework the original piece and update it with a few more examples.

The primary challenge when leveraging social media for sourcing talent is that nonstandard terminology is prevalent – it’s generally acceptable to use slang and other verbiage that would otherwise never be found on a resume, even when it comes to describing one’s profession.

If you use the same query terms when sourcing LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, etc. as you would when searching for resumes, you will certainly find people. However, you will also exclude a decent portion of the available results, unknowingly relegating them to Dark Matter and otherwise undiscovered talent. This is because you can only retrieve what you explicitly search for. Continue reading

Twitter 101 for Recruiters

Twitter Icon by JoshSemans v2There 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.

How I Made 3 Hires with Twitter in 6 Weeks

Megan_Hopkins_Loves_TwitterArticle 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.

Confessions of a Twitter Hater…

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