Should you post jobs to Twitter?
A few words I use very sparingly are ‘Should’, ‘Right’ and ‘Wrong’; especially when talking about anything related to social media. I think one of the most maddening aspects of social media for people trying to decide how to use it or if they should use it is that the answer is often, “it depends”. However, when I get this question asked of me by people unfamiliar with Twitter, invariably my answer is “it depends”.
So yesterday this Twitter conversation happened between myself and Jerry Albright, The Recruiting Animal, Adele Vogel, Janice Worthington, Stephanie Lloyd,Bill McCabe, Sheree Van Vreede, and Stephen Van Vreede.
The topic was posting jobs on Twitter. Jerry said its basically a waste of time, I sort of agreed, with the caveat “unless you do it right”. Which prompted the response from Animal and Adele “what the hell does that mean? ‘Do it right?’” So then I promised to write an extended post on the topic to provide a place for the discussion to expand a bit.
Let me just say, I’m not the purveyor of all things right and wrong, but I am opinionated, and I have tried enough things with social media as to have some actual results (good and bad) that inform said opinions. Also, I think its tough to put absolute statements on this question. I think “it depends” works a lot better as a starting point. Provided of course you can fathom on what, exactly, “it” depends.
Let’s get a few obvious points out of the way.
The most obvious of obvious points. So obvious it doesn’t get a number.
If your sector of people you’re looking to hire aren’t typically twitter users; (ahem) don’t use twitter to post those jobs. Painful to even write it, that was so obvious.
Obvious point #1: If you have very few followers (less than 100) and you are posting jobs to Twitter and posting nothing else, you may as well go to the end of your driveway, cup your hands around your mouth and start yelling “I’m hiring, I’m hiring!” You’ll get about the same results. Mea Culpa; we’ve all done it, right? When we first started playing with Twitter, we thought “ooh, a new place to post jobs!” Our enthusiasm waned as we discovered the ineffectiveness of that approach. We discovered maybe its a bit more complicated than that. Maybe Twitter is not just another distribution channel? Maybe its more than that. So the first consideration is how many followers you have. If the number is low, unless its really concentrated with people in the sector in which you recruit, work on those follower numbers.
Obvious point #2 ‘Who’ is following you is probably important.
If you’re recruiting underwater welders, yet you haven’t found groups of them on Twitter, and likewise they haven’t found you, how in the world is it going to work to start tweeting about your underwater welding jobs? Aren’t the people you’re looking for probably underwater right now? You know, welding? This one seems REALLY obvious, and yet, I’ve witnessed it frequently.
Obvious point #3 Timing and frequency.
The other thing people seem to forget is that their legions of followers are probably following tons of other people as well. Likely, they are not just watching twitter all the live long day waiting for nuggets of wisdom from you or me. They don’t see every post by every person they are following. Sorry to burst your bubble, but even your followers don’t hang on every tweet. In fact if they are using Tweetdeck, Twhirl, Peoplebrowsr or something else that relies on a limited number of API calls (connections) to Twitter, they’re only seeing some of the posts from some of the people they follow. So if you tweet your job just once, you’re not likely to get a lot of response. Likewise if you tweet your job opening at 10 pm, you may not get the run you’re looking for either. Post during higher traffic times for twitter, post it more than once.
Obvious point #4 Measure your results.
So you’ve tweeted your job, you even got a few retweets of that bad boy from some of your BFFs on Twitter. You’re feeling good, but yet you still aren’t seeing people apply for the job. In fact, when you stop and think about it, beyond a few retweets, you have no idea how many people are paying attention to that tweet. Seems obvious to find a way to track responses right? However, I see it often that people don’t use an url shortener that does this for them. Hootsuite and Bit.ly come to mind. My favorite lately is Bit.ly. Makes it easy to post something online with the bit.ly sidebar, and allows easy tracking of clicks. If you really want to get funky, hopefully you’ve set up your career site to track who actually hit the site from a given source, and then took further action like clicked apply. Another blog post for another time.
Ok, that covers the obvious points I think. Now for some less than obvious things to consider about posting jobs to twitter.
#jobs
The # is a hashtag. Its used when you want to associate a keyword or tag to your tweet. Just like tagging a bookmark or a blog post, same idea. When you use the hashtag you associate your post with any other post that also uses that hashtag. In this case if its a job, it certainly makes sense you should associate your post with other jobs. In this way you are displaying your post to people who may be searching on the hashtag #jobs. I’m not entirely sure how effective this really is. Its really applying a job board approach to Twitter isn’t it? You kind of suffer from the same dynamics as job boards do don’t you? Your job is mixed in with a bunch of other company’s jobs. You’re not necessarily targeting people with relevant skill set either. I still use the #jobs hashtag anyway, its cheap, only costs me 5 characters, plus I capitalize on any retweets that leave the #jobs hashtag in there. Do you have to use it? No. Should you use it? It depends.
Its not about the jobs I say this fully realizing it will make some people’s minds seize up. This one probably could go under Obvious Point #5, but for many, oddly, I don’t think this one is very obvious. Social Networks and Social Media are about people, people. It isn’t just another distribution channel for your kitten calendars, your smurf mugs, your male enhancement pills, or your jobs for that matter. If that is all you are using your twitter handle for, you are missing out on 95% of the goodness out there. Even if your twitter handle is @abccompany_jobs it still isn’t just about the jobs. You have a unique opportunity here to interact with your potential prospect, and potential candidate community. You have an opportunity to tell a much richer story about what it’s like to work for your company, or your client’s company. This is unique, and not previously really possible in the job board era, because all you could talk about on job boards was your job description. It made sense there because a job board is expressly about jobs. Twitter is not. Twitter is not a job board. I think its shortsighted to take a job board mentality and apply it to any social network. You’ve missed the point. I predict your results will suffer if you limit your thinking this way.
Don’t just add your jobs to Twitter, add Twitter to your jobs.
Say what? There are a number of ways to do this, but the essence is to allow anyone looking at your jobs to share them via twitter. Who in the world would want to share your jobs via twitter? Your hiring managers for starters, non-hiring manager employees in that department, other recruiters who may work in that same department. Even your BFFs on Twitter may feel magnanimous enough to help. If you’ve established some cred in the networks of people in your target sector, you may even get people to share your job who aren’t interested in or invested in filling the job themselves.
So how to do this if you’re website isn’t enabled for web 2.0 tech? Add a link like this to your job descriptions on your career site or wherever you post your job.
http://twitter.com/home/?status=RT+@(your twitter handle)+cool+job+-+http://your_shortened_jobURL.com
So maybe at the end of your job description it looks like this…(click it to see how it works)
Under that link is the following…
http://twitter.com/home/?status=RT+@bestbuy+cool+job+click+here+to+see+more+-+http://bit.ly/19B7gv
Basically it starts with http://twitter.com/home/?status= then you follow with your message with words separated by + signs. End with a shortened URL (track-able please) to your posting. That’s it. Use it whether you are posting to a niche board, a forum, Facebook, or your own job site. Now you’ve expanded the ability for your jobs to be part of the social stream of things. Sure its a manual process, but thats the only way I know of to do it if you’re career site isn’t enabled with web 2.0 doodads.
Enable others who have a vested interest in your jobs.
Filling a role isn’t just about that role. Its about the hiring managers, the employees above and below the role that’s open, the HR generalist, the C level and management people in some cases, the vendor partners related to that role, and last but not least its about the local community of people in that industry. Moreover, its about the culture of the company, the employment brand, the brand of that department even. So what if you could enable this group, intimately connected and invested in getting the right person, to participate via Twitter? One way to start this, is to use Connecttweet to create a shared twitter channel. This is a channel through which multiple people can send twitter messages. The @bestbuy handle is such a channel. Its not some PR dude, its multiple Best Buy employees, as many that want to be involved, that provide the content for the channel. You can do the same thing on your own using Connecttweet. It allows you as the admin to determine who you want to allow to post through that handle. Members of that handle just use a special hashtag to push selected messages through this shared channel. Imagine if you had hiring managers posting through it, and department employees posting through it, not jobs necessarily, just everyday stuff. You begin to paint a picture of the culture surrounding that job, or category of jobs. Then of course you mix in some job conversation when appropriate, and everything else happens naturally. You’ve attracted a targeted crowd, you have help posting content about not just jobs, but also other things. You start to create some sense of community around your employment experience.
So, obviously this last bit takes some work. If its reasonable to assume that your targeted industry is represented on Twitter it might be worth it. If you’re hiring for that underwater welder job, you may want to consider other options.
Hastags + Conferences
The last thing is something I talked about at the Social Recruiting Summit at Google. Its about using the hashtag functionality as it relates to conferences. Its common practice to associate a hashtag with a conference. Recently in the Twin Cities there was a Social Media Breakfast conference. They used the hashtag #smbmsp (msp = Minneapolis/St. Paul). I did not attend, but while the conference was happening, someone asked me if I knew a good WordPress designer/coder. I don’t, but I figured there had to be someone at the social media breakfast who did. So I tweeted my question, including the hashtag #smbmsp, and within 5 minutes had a referral. My friend has reached out to that person already. Not sure what has happened since, but a useful connection was made in a very short period of time.
1,919 words so far, and I feel like I’ve just scratched the surface, what ideas do you have? What works? What doesn’t?
