When you hear people extolling the virtues of social media they usually lay particular emphasis on its uses as an advertising tool, as a means to examine and to market to potential customers. You hear less about their benefit to business processes. One process of particular importance to growing companies is recruitment – finding the right people.
For exemplifications sake let’s look at recruiting for one particular industry – the oil industry. The principles employed to recruit for this industry are much the same for any other.
The process works in the following order
- Finding the relevant people, companies and organisations on Twitter (relevant twitterverse)
- Joining the relevant twitterverse
- Further filtering
- Getting in contact
- Making your pitch
Finding the relevant people, companies and organisations on Twitter
Practically every business and business person has a twitter account these days. Think of their presence in the twittersphere as their permanent attendance at one huge networking session. As a recruiter you will want to get in amongst them at that networking session, but you won’t want to waste time on individuals you can’t recruit. How do you find the players in your industry.
Searching for players in your own industry on Twitter couldn’t be easier. Search by topic and you will be shown hundreds of twitter accounts of competitors, industries associated with your own, individuals working in that industry and organisations monitoring or regulating or even campaigning against your industry. Search…
- Oil company
- Oil exploration
Very quickly you will have a list of Twitter accounts numbering in the thousands all involved in or interested in the oil industry.
Joining the relevant twitterverse
Once you have found the right section of the twitterverse, you’ll want to get acquainted with its members. How are you going to get noticed and make yourself heard?
- Become a follower of interesting twitter accounts and many may become your followers
- Mentioning players in your industry in your tweets e.g.using their twitter handles like @shell, some of their many followers may notice your tweets and start to follow you. There are 35,174 oil-interested individuals or companies and organisations following @BP_America alone. Catch the attention of even a small fraction of that constituency and you’ll be well on your way
- Putting a hashtag (#) in front of key terms in your tweets make them visible to tweeple searching those terms. Studying the hashtag terms used most frequently in oil industry tweets you can begin to use them in your tweets and become increasingly visible to tweeple searching those terms. For example, looking at BP America’s tweets it is evident that #biofuels # energy #EO2030 #naturalgas are important terms. Platts oil is using #shale #crude #natgas
- Get involved in conversation with other tweeters on subjects dear to your recruitment heart
- Retweet the tweets of others that you like
- Following lists is another good way of putting yourself in the eye line of individuals in your industry. There are 1,644 lists following BP America alone. Join those that look interesting.
As you continue your involvement in what social media commentators call ‘the conversation’ your profile within it will grow – you will become an established member of the oil industry twitterverse. This will be where you find people who work in oil and have skills relevant to oil exploration, sales, marketing, engineering and management – your dream audience ( and hopefully the word of mouth audience around it too).
Further filtering
Seeking to recruit for a vacancy or vacancies in the oil industry and plugged in to the perfect audience you’ll still need to do some drilling down to reach the ideal candidates
- Use the hashtag terms most relevant to the particular vacancies when tweeting vacancy alerts
- Follow lists that grow up around certain areas of the oil and gas industry and enable you to focus in on the group of individuals for whom a specific vacancy may be of interest
- Monitor the tweets of specific individuals of renown in your industry – their likes, dislikes and aspirations – with a view to headhunting them
- Connect to prospective candidates blogs or websites detailed in their twitter profiles and deepen your insight into them
Getting in contact
- If the candidates you identify on Twitter are also followers of your tweets you can contact them directly and privately by twitter message
- If a candidate is not a follower you may be able to find contact details on a blog or website mentioned in his or her profile
- Mention a candidate in a tweet and he may be interested enough to find out who you are and what you are looking for
Making your pitch
No one would suggest employing someone via Twitter. The ordinary conventions of 1st and 2nd interviews face to face still have their place in recruitment. However, knowledge accrued from Twitter will help you make appropriate offers to candidates by providing you intelligence on things like
- The candidates aspirations
- The evolution of industry norms in terms of renumerations, bonuses
- Industry developments and impact on surplus or shortage of candidates
A final note
If you’re big enough, or your ambition is then it might be worthwhile setting up a company twitter account dedicated to recruitment like Shell (shown below). This can be linked to company web and blog pages dedicated to recruitment.
(Yes! The savvy amongst you will already have twigged. You can even fish in @ShellCareers pool of job-seeking followers)
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