Lauren Simonelli is the Social Marketing Manager at Gozaik (www.gozaik.com) and you can tweet her @Gozaik.
Let’s face it. You probably won’t know your next hire from a single 140-character tweet, but that should not stop you from using social media to accomplish your hiring initiatives. When used correctly, social media platforms can help you find, engage, and hire top talent. How? Tweet, tweet, and tweet some more. If you haven’t started already, you’re late to the game. According to Gozaik Analytics, there are thousands of jobs being tweeted daily, totaling over 700,000 every month. Join in the conversation and accomplish your hiring initiatives with these 3 steps:
1. Compose the perfect job tweet: Every job you tweet should include the title of the position, the location, and a link to the description. It’s important to hashtag relevant keywords such as #job or #hiring so that job seekers can find your tweet. Hashtagging other keywords will increase your opportunity to appear in search results, but hashtagging 4 or more keywords in a tweet will be a turn-off to job seekers.
2. Share relevant information and express company culture: Establishing yourself as an expert in the industry while also having a great company culture is what’s going to attract top talent. Job seekers want to see that you’re a reputable company where current employees are happy, and tweeting news content and culture content is exactly what will do that.
3. Engage: Communication is a key part of the hiring process. On Twitter, you have opportunity to engage with job seekers and applicants and even participate in the Internets cocktail parties- Twitter Chats. Although you’re limited to 140 characters per message, Tweets or Direct Messages are a free way of sending a LinkedIn In-mail, and you can quickly take the conversation offline if you see fit.
The Twitter-verse is currently made up of over 500 Million users, including passive and active job seekers, and the best part is that it’s free to connect with them. Although I’d still suggest taking a peek at a candidates LinkedIn and Facebook profiles before hiring, I urge you to give Twitter a chance. After all, Vala Afshar from Entarasys filled a six-figure position directly through Twitter without even looking at a resume.
Photo Credit: Flickr user shawncampbell
