How many tweets would a Twitter bird tweet if a Twitter bird could tweet tweets? You have 140 characters to leave an impression on a potential hire.
Should you tag a fellow user, add a picture or video, include a bit.ly, or use a hashtag? As with recruiting on other social networks, the promise of finding top talent is unrelenting if recruiters know how to play their virtual cards right.
Use hashtags.
The ‘#’ symbol has come a long way since the days of the landline telephone (remember those?). These days, the #, or hashtag, can help recruiters keep track of hiring trends, conferences, events, as well as tweets, quick tips, and articles tagged by fellow sourcers, recruiters, hiring managers, and other industry pros. Likewise, job seekers will be able to find your opportunities easily if you tag them with relevant keywords and phrases. For example, a candidate looking for a job in web development might search tags like #CSS, #techtalent, or #HTML5.
But the key to creating an engaging, trackable hashtag is being aware of what’s currently in use, what’s trending in the industry and locally, and what’s appropriate for your business or campaign. Remember, creating a unique hashtag can be hit or miss – they could either trend well or go unnoticed. Similarly, heed caution when using certain trending hashtag phrases – they may be used in a different frame of reference.
Try these hashtag tracking tools to find out what works for promoting your open reqs:
Have a social promotion plan for your opportunities.
Create several tweets with varying copy that include the position, location, and a (shortened) link to the job description so you can quickly schedule and automate tweets to post to your page. Be sure to stagger the updates so you’re not pinging followers too frequently. Generate a tracking URL for careers pages to monitor where applicants are coming from and if they’re clicking through the link on your Twitter feed.
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You can also use this data to keep an eye on what types of words, phrases, hashtags, and pictures click with candidates. What’s the best time to post tweets? Do followers click through tweets composed of full sentences or abbreviated text? If you’re automating updates, how often would you want them to post, and until what date? Take advantage of promoting the company’s open opportunities by developing a plan of online social action that spans past a single posting date and be sure to examine its performance.
Attract talent by adding variety to your posts and updates.
Avoid treating your Twitter feed like a job posting board. Candidates want to learn about a company before hearing about your open positions. What’s your work environment like? Does the team participate in marathons or volunteer at the local animal shelter? Does the company celebrate weekly happy hour or host regular networking events at the office? Give talent an inside peek of the company culture and employees, and encourage the team to share tweets and pictures of what they enjoy about coming to work every day – all of which can be easily retweeted on the company’s Twitter profile.
Mix up the content between text, photos, and videos to avoid having a lackluster, monotonous feed, or try cross-posting with your Vine, Instagram, and Facebook accounts. If you really want to spark a particular candidate’s interest, reply to or retweet one of their updates. It’s a good way to prove the company’s Twitter profile is run by an employee, not a bot.
Want to learn more about sourcing and engaging with qualified candidates not only on Twitter, but Facebook, LinkedIn, and Google+ as well? There’s a webinar for that – well, four actually. Access all events from Entelo’s social recruiting webinar series here!
