Twitter – The Disregarded Channel for Sourcing Untapped Talent

With 302 million active accounts, sending 500 million tweets a day - Why wouldn’t you use Twitter to source talent? The answer is you should – assuming you’re not already!  92% of companies use social media to recruit candidates. 73% have hired successfully with Social Media and 54% of companies use Twitter! Sure, you are on Twitter, you might even tweet jobs every day but are you using it properly to source the best candidates? Are you using it to find the people with the right skills to match the right job?

Here are a few tips on how to attract the right candidate:

1. Choose a profile picture that represents you – No one wants to talk to an egg or your dog even though they look adorable with their puppy dog eyes! That would just be barking up the wrong tree.

2. Use your descriptive bio to show your personality – A little humour goes a long way…it can even break ice!

3. Grow your followers to your target area by using keywords - Don’t follow every Tom, Dick and Harry. They will not be the right candidate for the job – well you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover ;) Follow back! Twitter is a two way thing. Tweeting without conversation would get rather boring after a while. Reply, retweet and favourite what you see on your feed.

4. Tweet useful and valuable information. Tweet often!  The life of a tweet only lasts up to an hour (depending on your number of followers). But keep your target audience in mind, #jobseekers, when writing content to keep your followers engaged.

Make sure you: • Share • Inform • Add value • Converse –use their @handle

Your tweets shouldn’t always be about your product – nobody likes a brag. Include gifs, interesting facts, pictures and links to keep your followers entertained.

5. Patience is a virtue – Twitter is like planting a seed, watering and nurturing it for months until you see a sprout and after years it turns into a blossoming tree.

It will not happen overnight, so if at first you don’t succeed pick yourself up and try again. Spend half an hour populating your twitter daily. It might seem mind-numbing, but if you’re tweeting the right content, you will find it interesting whilst being sociable on social media – That’s just the way it is! When 29% of job seekers are using social media as their primary tool for job searching, you are bound to find the right candidate for you.

If you have any more tips that you would like to add or found this helpful please comment below and share! Better yet, follow us with your new twitter at @recirp, @irpawards and @recmembers and tweet with us!