From Business Day (27/07/09)

Employers are turning to social networking platforms to supplement their traditional methods of searching for talent.

Twitter is one such site being used more and more in the hiring scene. It allows people to post quick, short text messages of up to 140 characters.

Thoughts, news and ideas, called tweets, are broadcast almost instantly in a type of microblogging service. People can select other Twitterers to follow, and others can in turn follow them. This ability to quickly learn from and share information enables powerful relationships to be built, providing employers with a great way to connect and network with passive job seekers.

Candidates with high-demand skills are mostly passive job seekers who are happily employed and not looking for jobs. This means they have to be reached in other ways, as they are not posting their CVs to traditional job boards, says Mark Gray, head of online recruitment group Graylink.

Connecting with them on Twitter is far more cost-effective than appointing a headhunter, and you have the advantage of reaching a talent pool which your competitors are probably not yet targeting, says Gray.

The starting place is setting up a Twitter profile, optimised with keywords related to specific jobs. Based on the relevance of the conversations a company is having about its industry, this will attract followers, which can then be used as a platform to drive relevant content for employer branding and job opening notifications.

Companies can set up multiple Twitter profiles to suit different jobs openings, publishable via instant messaging, e-mail, RSS feeds, the web or even SMS. Different kinds of notifications can be set up to reach followers on their cellphones at certain times of the day. By integrating Twitter with other social media platforms, for example embedding it in a blog or Linkedin profile, job alerts can be extended to even wider audiences.

A host of other complementary applications further exist outside Twitter, which can be applied for recruitment. For example, TwitterJobSearch.com is a search engine for jobs that have been posted on Twitter.

Gray says Twitter is particularly useful to companies looking for talent in the technology and media sectors thanks to the progressive, tech-savvy audience it attracts.

Nonetheless, employers need to understand the profile of the candidates they are targeting, as Twitter has a very specific application when it comes to recruitment.

Facebook and Linkedin are deep platforms where people volunteer a lot of personal information, making it easy to segment and target candidates. Twitter is a shallow platform with more specific, immediate, events-driven interaction. This enables employers to work their network and share relevant, interesting information, making it better suited to get passive candidates to come to them.

http://www.graylink.biz/?p=1114