I find Twitter fascinating. I see it as many different things ranging from a search engine to an instant messaging device to a blogging platform to a time suck. And while these are just a few of the things that I myself have used it for – I love them all.
One of the first things recruiters have been struggling to understand since it’s release is if Twitter is a viable tool for recruiting and/or sourcing. Of course if we’re honestly looking for the answer to this issue we’ve got to understand that recruiting and sourcing are two different things. Yes, I know that many Recruiters source and that many Sourcers recruit – but the practices of Recruiting vs. Sourcing are very different.
Recently there was even a bit of static in the blogosphere about how social networking and new media channels might, or might not, be used for recruiting. And while this sparked some debate about what “social networks” work best and who had the biggest tweeter network I thought I’d try a little something this week. Let’s walk through a quick experiment performed yesterday and create a little dialogue about what we think the results might mean, shall we?
We’ll stick with Twitter for the sake of keeping it simple – but know that similar actions can be taken in nearly any network…
I sent a link out to the Twittersphere early yesterday and asked anyone that clicked on it to keep it open through the course of the day – and just watch it. The link was to the results of a search in Twitter for the phrase, “need a job” and nothing more.
The beauty of the search results in Twitter is that they’ll continue to stack up throughout the day until you update the search. Each time telling you that there are X amount of new results waiting for you. The idea was to see how many times the phrase “need a job” would hit the microblogging platform in just a single work day.
At the end of the day I asked people to take a look and see what they came back with. Obviously we were all looking at the same results with totals that just depended on when we began our own instances. My total however, was over 600.
The phrase “need a job” was sent out over 600 times in just ~8hrs.
Okay… that’s interesting.
At a glance we saw that there were some funny posts in the results but that overall the messages were pretty clear and consistent – there are people saying that they’re looking for a job.
So while we’ve got quite a few people tweeting about finding jobs we definitely can see that they aren’t exactly experts at marketing themselves. And that’s okay… this is Twitter, not LinkedIn. This is a microblogging and instant messaging time suck for most users – it’s not a place that they’re readily throwing up resumes… yet.
I’m not going to go into a full blown sourcing lesson here on how to use Twitter to find candidates… but I am going to show you some pretty basic stuff that should get you thinking about (or re-evaluating) Twitter as a recruiting/sourcing option.
So head to the Twitter search page and kick off the same search I started – except head the the advanced search link. Throw the “need a job” phrase in the appropriate fields and get a little crazy with location. For this example I just put in “Dallas, TX” and left everything else as default.
I don’t need to go into a ton of detail about what I got in return – but know that we’re now not only looking at people looking for jobs but we’re looking at other Recruiters and/or Sourcers doing their thing Online – and we may want to at least connect with or “follow.”
While the screenshot above is more funny than it is evidence of how drilling down to locations works know that the displayed items are a result of my cropping to show the map and language fields as opposed to quality of return. (although I may have to follow @floorgal if for nothing else than the drama.)
Smart players are digging in to the Twitter search fields by using keywords and basic boolean operators as well as taking advantage of the date range and “attitude” filters. Really smart players are stepping outside of Twitter and kicking off the searches in Google with strings like, “site:twitter.com “bio * verizon” (Dallas OR Houston)“
Of course you’ll need to keep in mind that this is just the “pull” side of recruiting and sourcing via Twitter. There are several “push” methods and even new Twitter based job boards and feeds springing up almost daily.
So is there something here? Have you dug in and taken a look at some of the recent changes made to the features within Twitter? With Twitter job boads, RSS feeds, Hashtags, etc. I think we’re hard pressed to simply ignore the application.
All things considered… If I told you that I was setting up solid interviews and making direct hires from sourcing via Twitter would you call me a trickster? I can assure you that I wouldn’t be “scamming” you. I’d just be telling you the truth.
