By Neil Patrick
A lot of recruiters follow me on Twitter. Over 500 at the last count.
And I follow them all back. I’m always interested to see what they are tweeting about. And I am hugely grateful to the select few who share my content with their followers. Thank you all!
Some recruiters really ‘get’ social media. Many more do not. So I thought I’d run through what I see as the biggest failures by recruiters that I see on social media.
The first give away of a recruiter failing on social media is nothing but endless tweets about job vacancies they are seeking to fill. Tweet after tweet after tweet with links to job postings. And not much else. Sharing your vacancies on social media is fine as part of your activity. But only part. If you are doing this and this only, you are never going to see much return on your investment in social.
Fair enough, it’s your business, and you are free to run it as you see fit. But this approach fails on so many levels and I think it’s a tragically wasted opportunity.
Here’s my list of the eight points I see most often where I think recruiters are getting it wrong.
You don’t have a social media strategy
I’m not saying that no recruitment firms have a social media strategy, but I am certain many do not. And I am certain because there is no evidence of one in most cases. And here’s my evidence that’s there’s no erm…evidence (!):
You only have a small following
This is such a fundamental point, it’s amazing to me. But many recruiters I encounter on Twitter have less than 1,000 followers. This is such a tiny pool that it makes a nonsense of advertising your vacancies via Twitter. Let’s say you are a recruiter in the IT field. It should be your prime mission to find and connect with thousands of IT professionals. They are your audience and your revenue stream. Moreover, they also know lots of other IT professionals, so if they see your tweet and know someone who might be a great fit, they are in a position to make them aware of it.
Except this won’t happen because:
You don’t share other people’s tweets
Social media isn’t a free version of broadcast media. It’s an interactive medium and building goodwill is an essential pre-requisite to having others like you enough to be willing to even consider sharing your content.
One retweet or comment doesn’t constitute the basis of a relationship either. Just as relationships mature slowly over time in the real world, so the same applies to the social media world.
You don’t create a sense of community
A recruiter depends for their livelihood on knowing everyone in a given field and geographic area. Or they should. And social media makes this easier than ever before. Social media allows you to build relationships with people even when you and they are really busy. So you don’t even need to meet or speak to be aware of each other. What’s more powerful, a business card at the bottom of a dusty drawer, or a living breathing relationship with a potential future candidate?
You don’t engage or participate in discussions
With a few notable exceptions such as my friend @AxelKoster (who has over 500k Twitter followers), recruiters generally never contribute to discussions outside of the recruitment community. Big mistake. Especially when this is arguably a more powerful profile building strategy than simply making endless connections on Twitter and Linkedin.
Providing a recruiter’s viewpoint on job and carer topics is so underutilised typically, that the opportunity to steal a lead on your competitors is just there for the taking…
You don’t make your tweets worth sharing
When I look at my own tweets, one of the things I see is that my tweets without links generally get shared the most. These are tweets when I try to provide a snippet of insight in less than 140 characters. It’s not the easiest thing in the world to do, but clearly people like the immediacy and simplicity of something which can be consumed in 5 seconds or less. And they share them. A lot. It’s not unusual for these tweets to be retweeted 30 times or more. And this attracts a lot more followers.
The life of a tweet is just a few minutes. Then it’s gone. More or less for ever. I don’t expect anyone to be so interested in my tweets that they visit my profile and scroll through my tweets. It’s not going to happen. Tweeting a job vacancy a few times to a few hundred followers will likely never get seen by anyone who is interested. Period.
You give the job of social media management to the most junior person in the office
How I tire of the tweets I get from the office junior or worse an outsourcer in the Philippines! Whilst I genuinely appreciate the courtesy of any acknowledgment of an RT, ‘Thx!’ is so cursory, it’s almost a let-down. Office interns may have grown up using texting as their default MO for digital communication, but this is business and in the business world, what we say and how we say it determines how others perceive us. If you own a recruitment firm, do you really want to be perceived as a business junior? Because that’s what’ll happen if the intern is left in charge.
Worse, if your social media is being executed as a routine task like answering the phone, how can you expect to build any sort of interest or engagement with the people you really want to be your biggest advocates?
You don’t give anything to your followers
In the world of social media, giving before expecting to receive is the mantra for all success. And recruiters are in such a privileged position to share the benefits of their insight and experience. But very few do. It’s as if giving is an alien concept.
It actually doesn’t take much. Build your relationships with the people you want to be your candidate pool by supporting them online. You don’t have to RT them. Just like their tweets, or comment on them. Show a genuine interest in them and they’ll show a genuine interest in you.
I am being harsh I know. And there are plenty of notable exceptions like my friends at @Intellegojobs, @HRISjobs and @RandstadUSpros and others. But many more are failing in my view.
There’s a thing called ‘first mover advantage’ in business. Right now this opportunity has been recognised by so few in the world of recruitment that the door is wide open, if not globally, then at least in local markets where the majority of recruiters operate.
And last but not least, this state of affairs ironically creates a big opportunity for jobseekers who are savvy enough to turn this situation to their advantage. If you want to get recruiters to notice you, I’ve created a social media strategy that will enable you to do just that. Go here to discover what this is and how it works if you want to know more.
And if you are a recruiter I’d love to hear your thoughts about this post!
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