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Twitter as a selection criteria in recruiting policy.

Posted At: May 28, 2010 2:02 PM
Related Categories: Recruitment, Social Media & Branding

Recently I read a message on a dutch blog stating that staff could or should be selected based on the amount of twitter followers. This article shows a great example of a gamer with 700,000 followers. When this person sent his followers a link to a game for testing, sales went sky high. Any entrepreneur or business owner would like this to happen of course if you could recruit and hire people like this, but is it also feasible?

In principle you should be able to do this. The article proofs that. Someone with this number of followers can affect the market as long as his followers follow for the content and not just 'to follow'. Unfortunately you see that a lot, but as long as they don't represent the majority of the followers.

Reality

When you really look at top talent and assume that they are all using social media, this would certainly be a good or smart qualifier for recruitment. For instance, Jeremiah Owyang of the Altimeter Group, someone with great influence over his followers in the area of Social Media and related markets. Or take Gordon Lokenberg or Jeroen Kneppers our homegrown über tweeters from Holland, which have quite some impact on their network of followers on Mobile Marketing, Google Optimization and e-Recruitment in the Dutch market. And I am sure there are others we can think of. But even Gordon and Jeremiah do not have 700,000 followers yet. Not even 1/10th of it. Which does not say that their network is not large enough.

Perhaps too early

Furthermore, reality is not yet at that stage where all top talent has a twitter or social media profile, and use it the right way. With focus on "all". Selecting purely on twitter seems so reckless that it will exclude a lot of other talent that is equally good or even excellent, at this stage. Currently, such selection criteria will likely result in customizing your search for a bigger result.

Advantages

The advantages of talent with many twitter followers lies in the direct impact they have. This is reflected in several areas. Thus their influence is directly reflected in additional or increased sales as evidenced in the article, but also in terms of personnel. By tweeting, or otherwise communicating through social media, about a corporate culture top candidates can become more interested in working for that company. We have not used this as selection requirement ourselves, although I would gladly like to do so.

Additionally a large reach among followers can lead to more product information or ideas about the future direction of product development because of the replies received. And there are undoubtedly more advantages to think of.

Twitter as HR-policy

When the combination of such a candidate is hard to find, it is still possible to create the tweeter yourself. Nothing keeps you from stating that employees are required to use twitter. Sure you can not force them, but if you have it listed as requirement in your human resource policy and the candidate in question does not want to comply with the policy you would not recruit him. But it remains difficult, since you do not know how many followers someone will get in advance.

Looking at our situation at PeopleXS good candidates with a twitter or social media presence would be preferred over the same candidates without that good presence. Simply and not only because they are people who share our vision of technology and use of new media channels within the discipline of recruitment and talent management, better yet, they already carry it out that way. However reality shows us that not everyone wants to communicate with the world. Some people attach great importance to their privacy, which I understand and respect. So I don't see it become mandatory human resource policy yet. By far not everyone within PeopleXS is using twitter for the outside world. On the other hand the whole team is connected to Yammer, our internal twitter-like tool to keep everyone on top of each others activities. Something that also works very well for us.

A smart idea

Smart idea? Yes, that's for sure though. Only time will still have to prove that top talent is taking full advantage of twitter feeds to excite the general public about products, information, business, jobs and other things. I certainly believe it is possible and I think there is already plenty of effective examples to see. However to include it as a "make or break" in the field of hr policy and sourcing I think is a bit on the early side. If your company does, it sure makes a progressive statement. The perfect combination of top talent and top tweeter with many followers is hard to find already, especially in a difficult market as is. Whenever you do find that candidate I would definitely hire!

Eelco Scheltinga

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Twitter as a selection criteria in recruiting policy.

Reality

Perhaps too early

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Twitter as HR-policy

A smart idea

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