How to Use Twitter to Find #AmazingEmployees
By Peter McDougall
When Brenda Brathwaite, COO of San Mateo, Calif.-based Loot Drop, a social game design company, was looking for a new game designer, she turned to her 7,000 Twitter followers. "I knew someone in this pool was the game designer I was looking for," she says. So she tweeted a question to her followers, asking all of the professional designers to check in. The resulting replies led to her short list of potential candidates.
Twitter as a human resources tool may seem out of the box, but how better to find potential candidates who share a common interest with you and your company? After all, they're a self-selected group of people already paying attention to what you have to say in 140 characters or less.
Fan Bi, cofounder of Boston-based Blank Label, a manufacturer of custom-tailored men's shirts, agrees.
"Your followers actually know something about your company and your history," he says. Bi filled a customer service position for his growing company thanks to Twitter. "When she came in for the interview, she was able to discuss all the campaigns we'd done over the past year," he says. "She'd been following us for a while -- you can't fake that kind of interest."
Here are a few things to keep in mind if you want to port some of your recruiting efforts over to Twitter:
Develop the right following
Tweeting isn't time intensive, but it does take directed effort to develop a following. It's not about just amassing as many followers as possible; for a quality pool of applicants, you need quality and useful followers. One key to developing the right following: Engage with your followers. "Our Twitter account used to be a feed for company news," says Mike Essex, an online marketing manager with U.K.-based digital marketing agency Koozai Ltd. Automated feeds are likely to attract other automated feeds, which is no good for your business. "Now we engage with people directly and build conversations with followers." The result: Koozai developed a larger pool of well-informed applicants because its highly engaged followers tweeted the job announcements out to their contacts, and word spread throughout the online marketing industry.
Time your tweets
When Brathwaite wants to reach her target audience, she sends out tweets at specific times: Once for the U.K. morning and once each for the East Coast and West Coast mornings (morning time for gamers is 11 a.m.) Failure to properly time your tweets, explains Brathwaite, could relegate your message to oblivion since most users only review tweets from the last hour or so. But if you hit the right window, magic can happen. Brathwaite recalls turning to Twitter to fill a game tester position on the same day she sent out the announcement. She ended up hearing back from a gamer with a master's degree who wanted to break into the industry. "How else are you going to be able to fill a position with a qualified person on the same day?" she asks. The new hire worked out well and he was promoted a number of times. Although he ultimately moved on, he remains an important figure in the industry today.
Use your shortcuts
If you haven't had time to develop a following, try using some strategic hashtags -- a word with the pound sign in front of it -- to get the word out about job opportunities. Hashtags flag a tweet for others who are interested in that particular topic. For instance, companies looking for employees in the gaming industry use the hashtag #gamejobs to get noticed, while those seeking jobs tweet using #gamehires. Find out what hashtags are commonly used in your industry, and you won't have to wait until you have 7,000 followers to attract attention to a job opportunity.
Whether you're casting about for prospective candidates or learning everything you can about someone you think would be a perfect fit for your business, Twitter can make it happen. Just remember that once you hit the send key, there's no undo button; so Tweet responsibly.
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