A student asked me about how companies are using Twitter for recruiting. There are really several differennt aspects of using Twitter for recruiting that I see for the corporate or professional recruiter:
Communicating or Advertising your opening
1. Straight up adverts - Tweet something like 'Hi - we are looking for a Java developer - details here - www.job.comp.com. This might be the least effective method, but it has an advantage of being quick, simple, and free. Realistically, the success of this approach depends in large part, to the maturity and size of your Twitter network, which I will expand upon in a follow up post.
2.Use TwitHire to generate your job posting tweet. TwitHire gives you a simple form where you fill in Job Title, company name and URL to the job, then posts the Tweet directly to Twitter from your Twitter account. The nice thing about using TwitHire is the Tweets are readily identifiable as Job posts. Here is an example (click on the image to see it full size):
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3. If your Corporate Job Site or other recruiting site (like Monster) can generate an RSS feed, you can use Twitterfeed to 'push' the new job postings via RSS directly to your Twitter account, or to a dedicated 'Company Jobs' Twitter account. Each time a new posting is made on the source site, a new Tweet will be sent with a link to the job advertisement.
Using your Network on Twitter
4.Simply Tweet - 'Hey, I am looking to hire a few great engineers, contact me if you are interested'. Leveraging the folks who already follow you on Twitter can give you a great source of candidates. Again, the size and maturity of your network is key here.Using Twitter Search
5. Twitter Search can be a useful way of uncovering potential candidates, or at a minimum contacts that you may be able to network with to build your Twitter reach. Twitter search is just that, the ability to search the public steam of Tweets for words or phrases. Here is an example I found searching for the words 'job' and 'java' (click on the image to see it full size):
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Twitter is fast becoming an important resource for recruiters, particularly ones recruiting in technical and graphical design fields.
What are some other creative ways you can leverage Twitter in your recruiting?