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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

Comments (0)

Recruiting with Twitter, an example

Posted At: November 12, 2009 2:16 PM
Related Categories: Tips, Social Media & Branding

First, I have only been using twitter for about 7 months (since 16 April, 2009), and in that time I've made 1,090 tweets, followed 418 accounts, 384 have followed me, and in just over a week (when twitter lists were added) I have been added to 40 lists by other twitter accounts.

My account: http://twitter.com/aqlong
Lists I created: http://twitter.com/aqlong/lists
Lists following me: http://twitter.com/aqlong/lists/memberships

These are not super-huge numbers, but the point is that I'm a consistent user and engage in my community with on-topic tweets, most of which are helpful in some way to at least some of my followers. This creates loyalty so that your twitter followers continue to follow you instead of removing you. If you always think to yourself before you tweet something, "is this interesting or helpful to any of my followers", then you're on the right track. If you simply answer, "What are you doing right now?" all the time, you probably won't be engaging with your community very effectively.

If you look at the links above, there is a clear theme here that my account, my lists, my tweets, my followers & friends are by and large related to one technology: ColdFusion. Focusing on one or two themes is essential in my opinion.

To the success story: The other day, without much forethought, I sent a tweet from my company BlackBerry via TwitterBerry:

"I'm curious: how many of you #Coldfusion developers out there don't have a job now or know an unemployed CF dev?"

Within minutes, I had a bunch of replies from my followers. This screenshot is via the twitter implementation in Digsby:

As you can see, some people re-tweeted my question (using "RT" plus @aqlong). So, naturally I followed up with: "For unemployed #coldfusion developers: who would be willing to move to another country for the right position?". Quickly I got these responses:

I also got 3 Direct Messages (DMs) regarding those tweets, but since those are meant to be private, I will keep them that way. Next, I sent this tweet: "#ColdFusion developers willing to move to Holland, we have a Junior Web Dev position now: http://digs.by/jwK please RT" notice that I use the hash (#) directly in front of ColdFusion. When clicked on, the ColdFusion link goes to http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%23Coldfusion, which some people interested in ColdFusion use to find out anything & everything interesting about ColdFusion. So, there were a few replies to my tweets that were not even previous twitter followers of me.

Within about 8 hours we had 4 high-quality candidates who applied via our website and began the recruiting process within the Peoplexs system. Interviews begin shortly. ;-)

Aaron

Comments (2)

Perfect Example on Recruiting through Social Media

Posted At: August 26, 2009 12:33 PM
Related Categories: Recruitment, Social Media & Branding

This must be one of the best examples I have come across in recruiting on how to fill a position. This shows that Forrester understands the effect of Social Media. They are recruiting through Jeremiah's own blog with a guest post. For those that don't know Jeremiah Owyang, he is the one leaving the verry position they are recruiting for. Jeremiah is one of the people that people turn to with questions on Social Media and has travelled around the world for Forrester to teach people and corporates about this topic. You can refer to him as a guru on this subject matter and has met probably thousands of people that know this subject. He therefore is "the one" with the network to recruit for this position.

Recruiting at the heart of your market and using Jeremiah as brand ambassador for 'his Job' is brilliant. Perfect example that Forrester understands recruitment and social media use.

Just for the example I think it would be great to follow the rest of the process and apply for the job myself, but since I don't qualify for the "non-negotiables" and I love what I am doing now, I will skip that part.

So why is this such a great example for the recruitment industry? Here are some thoughts:

The introduction by Jeremiah himself. You cannot be more convincing than this. He knows best what the job includes!
Recruiting on this blog puts them at the heart of their target market
They use the online Social Media network to spread the word. Connecting through facebook allows them to draw more friends in the network to the blogpost and so to the position.
Jeremiah continues to be a brand ambassador to Forrester, even after he's gone
They use links to twitter & blog profiles to follow people and get their impressions to set the company and job culture
They introduce the team with pictures and profiles that the applicant will become part of
They define clear and non-negotionable must-haves for the job
Clear links to twitter and Linkedin profile of the "recruiter"
Clear links to Forrester community for more impressions
Options to share this post with multiple social media channels so the viral marketing of this post can do its work

It would be interesting to see how fast this job is filled, how qualified the person is and if he comes out of Jeremiah's realm of influence.

Some more thoughts you can consider when posting jobs:

Make sure you follow up correctly when people start applying for the job on your website.
The webform and follow up responses are critical. Make sure it is branded and looks the part.
If possible skip the webform and either parse the CV automatically or have people apply for the job with their Linkedin profile or Facebook profile.

At PeopleXS we can make sure that the Facebook profile is read directly into your ATS with contact details, work experience, etc.

So for all recruiters out there. Keep this list in mind when you post your next job. I will do my part in making sure you are enabled to do this easier when using PeopleXS allthough a lot of this comes down to your own creativeness.

Let me know if you have more good ideas and I will include them in this listing
Good luck!

Eelco

Comments (0)

The Future of the Social Web

Posted At: May 28, 2009 12:08 PM
Related Categories: IT Development, Social Media & Branding

The objective of a blog is to keep people up to date of recent experiences and new(s) facts. My visit to the Corporate Social Networking Conference 2009 in Amsterdam has already been 2 weeks ago, but it is still interesting enough to write about. I will discuss the various topics separately in different blogs over the coming period.

The first speaker of the event, Jeremiah Owyang from Forrester, made a big impression on me. He stated "that Communities will continue to evolve over the next few years to and become companies and institutions that will be in power of product brands and services". Basically not new for me, however the steps that he described on the road ahead I find very interesting. In the following article I will describe these steps.

Fact is that the Netherlands is taking the lead and is far ahead in Europe with the penetration of Social Media in daily live and work. 40% of the dutch are on Social Networks such as Hyves, Facebook, Linkedin and twitter being the most popular. Innovative companies differentiate themselves by setting up communities for their customers where they can discus products and experiences.

The whole social experience nowadays is rather chaotic or disjointed for a lot of people. People talk about, lots participate, but by far not everyone, and actually most people are still unaware of what they can accomplish or do with it. Let alone where we are evolving to. Part of the reason for this is that most consumers still have separate identities within the several social networks that they visits. These are still separate islands.

Simple technology should provide a 'portable identity' within the near future that will enable consumer to take their identity with them wherever they surf on the web. This will cause a significant transformation of marketing, eCommerce, CRM and advertizing. Mobile ID's are just the beginning of the steps in this process of independent sites towards a total social experience. Consumers will start depending on their peers and the opinions of others when they are buying online. Socially connected consumers will empower communities and pull away the decision making power from the brands itself. Eventually this will lead to communities that will create and develop the next generation of products by themselves.

Soical Networks are a representation of what we do. We connect to it and share info. Ofcourse companies and brands would like tap into this information and review our social data, profiles and friends. The problem right now is that we are all working on different islands or networks which leads to frustration with the consumers using the technology as they have to register their info over and over again as well as the brands that would like to connect to us.

The web is now evolving to a phase where the various networks can overlap in different area's and share information through SocialID's which allows for brands and people to start communication in a totally different way. The evolution of the web in this area proceeds through 5 phases or 'era's'as Owyang calls them, these are:

1. Era of Social Relationships (people connect and share).
This is the first development fase of the social web as it started in the 90's and as we now know it. Simple data is stored and can be shared with each other. This process that has already taken place forms the basis of the following four era's that will be described below.

2. Era of Social Functionality (Social networks become operating systems).
Today's Social Networks have evolved passed the stages of 'friend' networks to platforms that engage social interaction through various applications and give a new meaning to communities. But even now social relations are still imprisoned within these sites.

3. Era of Social Colonization (every experience becomes soical).
In the following fase of social evolution, that we can probably expect later this year, technologies like OpenID and Facebook will enable people to surf the web and take their social online connections along with them. The bounderies of social networks and traditional websites are beginning to fade out and every website visit will become a social experience.

4. Era of Social Context (Personal and accurate content).
Next year, when most websites are starting to recognize the personal identities of their visitors and their social relations, companies will customize the information presented to visitors of the site based on their experience, their interests and preferences, and who their friends are. In addition to these intense social application social networks will include email type functionality and form a basis for everyones online experience as they will move the information towards you. Which reminds me of the movie "Minority Report" from several years ago. Check this scene...

5. Era of Social Commerce (Communities shape future products and services).
In about two years from now, when social networks are the repository of personal identities and relationships, they become more powerful then ever and even more powerful than Corporates and CRM systems. Communities will become the driving force behind new innovations and brands. This will result in an inferior position of brands in relation to the community and will be a major turnaround in the power of the connected customer.

What do you mean Revolutionary? Democrocy rules!
-Eelco Scheltinga

Comments (19)

Top 5 ideas:

(4 votes) Add FLAGS to report criteria
(19 votes) improve matching
(3 votes) Managers portal
(10 votes) Remove rejected applicants from manager portal
(2 votes) Apply with Linkedin