Social Media Recruitment: Advance techniques to reach out to candidates on Twitter and beyond
As a recruiter how can you reach out to a potentially large candidate pool on social media space in a short span of time? The answer is in carefully crafted social media strategy.
Link your social Media Accounts
As a recruiter build your professional profile carefully on Linkedin, Facebook and Twitter. A strong presence in these 3 social media forums are an absolute must if you want to taste success in social Media Recruitment. Linking up your networks is even more important as it allows maintaining uniformity across social media networks.
It may seem a little daunting to start with but with but maintaining all 3 networks can be automated in such a way that if you do a Twitter update it will automatically update your statuses in LinkedIn and Facebook saving valuable time and energy. Both Linkedin and Facebook offer Twitter widgets and all you need to do is to activate the widgets to link all your 3 accounts together. Once you link up your Twitter account with Linkedin and Facebook you are ready to move to the next level.
Create your Blog Site for Job Posts to harness RSS Feeds
Do I need a blog? The answer is no if you have applicant tracking system which generates RSS feeds for your jobs and offers a job publishing platform. If you don’t have system to rely on than a blog can become an indispensible tool for your recruitment process. Blogs can be used as a remarkably cheap platform to publicize your jobs and hundreds of smart recruiters are doing so.
So go ahead and create your blog. Build your profile on your blog carefully with links to your Linkedin, Facebook and Twitter accounts. Make sure the banding is uniform across all 4 platforms. The best approach here is to keep things simple and professional to start with. You can always add bells and whistles as you grow confident. And yes there are ready-made widgets to integrate your social media profiles with your blog and can be unearthed with a little research.
All popular blogging platforms (Blogger, Word Press, Typepad etc to name a few) generate RSS feeds. The innocuous RSS feed are most effective form of content syndication on the Internet today and offers limitless possibilities in spreading your content on the internet. We need to harness RSS feeds to reach out to a larger audience. Once build your blog and start posting, your blog site with generate your RSS Feed. There are many ways to publicize your feed:
You can submit your feeds on all major search engines; you can integrate them on Feed Directories. And you can integrate your RSS feed into your social network which is what I will focus on this article.
Use FeedBurner to auto publish your blog RSS feeds as Tweets
Create a FeedBurner (http://www.feedburner.com ) account and burn your feed to make your blog feed RSS reader friendly. After you burn your Feed use the FeedBurner tools to optimize and publicize your feed. To publicize your feed FeedBurner offers a gem of a feature called socialize which integrates your RSS feed with your Twitter account. The interface is simple and intuitive and can be activated with a few clicks! The system allows you to send your blog feeds to your twitter account in 1 hr intervals in a twitter friendly format.
Now you have created a system where the moment you post your jobs on your blog the post will be automatically fed into your Twitter account as Tweets via FeedBurner . Once your feed is published on Twitter your already linked accounts on Linkedin and Facebook will automatically pick up the tweets and publish them as your status updates. In other words all your connections across 3 major social networks can view your job posts as status updates with a link to click on. This in turn which will lead them to your blog to view your jobs and apply. Now you are ready to move to Level 4.
Moving beyond your network using Twitter
Now you have created a system to publicize your jobs across your Twitter Linkedin and Facebook contacts. Is there a way to move beyond your network? Social Networks tend to grow organically depending on how aggressively you are building them and your jobs can spread quickly via viral mode to a larger network of 2nd and 3rd degree contacts. You can move to an audience beyond your network with the help of a few twitter tools.
• Create an account with http://www.twitjobsearch.com/ and integrate your twitter feed. You Job tweets will become part of a large twitter job platform and will reach out to thousands of followers beyond your network.
• Also use http://www.twitterjobcast.com/ all you need to do is use the word hiring in your job titles. Twitter job cast will automatically pick up your posts and publicize on twitterjobcast.com. As a strategy start your job posts with the word hiring and use the position and location in a tightly constructed blog title. Example “Hiring Mortgage Sales Officers in San Francisco, CA”.
• You can also explore the following paid services as part of your broader outreach strategy: http://twitterjobs.org/, http://tweetmyjobs.com/ and http://tweethopper.com/
Closing the Loop
Now you are reaching beyond your networks and effectively closed the communication loop for effective social media recruitment.
This article at best lays a very basic foundation of what can be achieved in social media recruitment. There are hundreds and twitter tools out there and possibilities are limitless. You can refer http://www.twitglry.com/ OR http://www.feedmyapp.com/ to experiment with social media tools and to move your social media recruiting strategy forward.
