Earlier this week, I wrote 10 Easy Ways to Build Social Media Into Your HR Practice. Today I’m sharing specifics on each of the ideas I suggested. These are written with beginners in mind.
My first suggestion is to tweet your jobs. It’s becoming common for companies today to have a company Twitter account. Make sure that at a minimum, your recruiters are sharing their job openings on Twitter. But Twitter is not just about posting jobs like a job board. Recruiters and HR pros should also tweet reasons candidates would want to work at your company, share awards or recognition the company has received and in general, any positive messages about the organization.
If you’re not on Twitter:
- Go to https://Twitter.com and open an account. It’s easy to get started and Twitter now has easy steps to walk you through the process of creating your profile and following a few people.
- Once signed up for Twitter, go to the search box and type in words related to your business or industry. It will bring up people related to that industry. Start following people. The only way to begin getting people to follow you (which you’ll need later) is by following them.
- Take an online Twitter tutorial to gain understanding of how to begin to use the tool. Twitter provides a good tutorial and you can also search for videos on YouTube that give good demonstration on how to use Twitter.
If you have a Twitter account for your company or your recruiting team:
- Compose the tweet. Now that you are using Twitter, compose a tweet that suscinctly describes keywords about the job. Be sure to include a shortened link to the job on your career website. An example would be “Charlotte manufacturer hiring Director of IT. Relo available. https://ht.ly/aEbSs #Charlotte #IT #Jobs“. You can see that it describes the location, type of company, role and gives a bit of information on relocation. It includes a shortened version of the link and a few hashtags to help the tweet reach more people.
- Use hashtags. In the example above, you can see I included three word “tags” that will help the job show up in searches on Twitter. Since it is located in Charlotte, I chose that as a search I would want the tweet to appear. I also chose IT and jobs since there are people who run searches looking for IT jobs. For more information on what a hashtag is and how to use it, click here.
Remember, using Twitter is not just about pushing information out. It’s about engaging in conversation with people, in this case, potential candidates. Be sure to tweet out information about your company so that people are more likely to ask questions about the company and more likely to re-tweet and share your job postings!
Happy Tweeting!
3 Comments
For those wanting to save time, use some of the auto job tweet services (LinkUp, etc) and spend you active tweeting time engaging candidates.
I like automation josh but there is a part of me that thinks that any form of automation still needs to be written and posted by the same hand. If your twitter interactions look half automated and half hand tweeted then you will lose out on the interaction which is what SM is all about. I tend to use Bufferapp but will vary this with hootsuite, and even good old fashioned tweets as the idea hits me.
Thanks you bring up great point about the use of twitter. We’ve just started to concentrate on using it smarter, its a nice combo with Facebook actually.