Lead The Pack With Your Love For Social Media

Lead The Pack With Your Love For Social Media Can you use your social media savvy to help your career? I write a lot about using social media in job search, but now I want to share some thoughts on how and why your social media skills can help you while employed. The War For Talent Needs A Pro-Active Strategy In case you havent heard, companies are worried about losing disengaged employees and are complaining they cant find people to their job openings.  This is where you and your passion for social media come in. Be A Solution Maybe my post on US News World Report today will give you some ideas about how you can be the solution by stepping up to share your social media skills. What Im encouraging you to do is propose a social media recruitment strategy at your company. Important Data If you are looking for data to support your proposal, check these out. Bullhorn Reach Social Recruiting Reports Jobvite Social Recruiting Reports Trends QA I had the opportunity to interview Erin Osterhaus who  researches and reviews HR systems  via  Software Advice blog. Erin recently wrote an article featuring Twitters recruiting tips, How Twitter Uses Twitter to Recruit. I had some questions for Erin based on reading her article, and here they are with her answers. What if I am a small company with under 250 employees? Can I still reap the rewards of using Twitter to attract talent? Definitely. In fact, there might even be some hidden advantages to being a small company and recruiting on Twitter. Software Advice is relatively small, yet we still encourage our employees to Tweet out job postings and company news. However, unlike Twitter, we don’t have a corporate recruiting profile on Twitter. Instead, our two full-time recruiters have individual accounts which they use to Tweet postings and respond to potential applicants. We’ve found that this works better for us. Since we are a small company without the name recognition of a company like Twitter, allowing candidates to have personal interaction with our recruiters keeps them interestedsomething larger companies don’t have the time for. Is frequency of tweets a factor to growing followers? Yes. In my experience, growing your Twitter following has a direct correlation with how often you Tweet. I would recommend Tweeting at least two to three times per day. There are great tools out there like Tweetdeck, that allow you to schedule multiple Tweets at once. I usually set aside an hour on Mondays to create the Tweets that I’ll post throughout the week. Do you think companies that are serious about using Twitter need to train their employees on best practices? Recruiters, and HR in general should train employees to avoid social media catastrophes (like what happened at KitchenAid). You should always be aware of what’s going on and develop a social media policy so employees are never confused about what is and isn’t allowed. What if a company doesnt have a great culture like Twitters does? Are there other things a company could share if they dont have photos of a cool yoga studio or mimosa bar? (Or maybe this might inspire a company to add more perks?!) Even if your company culture isn’t as “great” as Twitter’s, it still has one. You can share events that your company has participated in, conferences you’ve attended, or even cool projects you’re working on. If you’re honest about your company culture and can more or less accurately portray the environment potential applicants will be working in, then you’ll probably have more serious candidates apply anywayones who aren’t merely after the free mimosas. How are employees incentivized to share tweets? A lot of companies are now using software solutions that allow employees to automatically post open positions to their social media profiles. The link each employee posts has a unique URL that identifies their profile as the source of any subsequent application. At Software Advice, we use such a system, and our employees are rewarded with a $1,000 bonus if a successful new hire comes from one of their social media profiles. It’s a great way to encourage employees to get the word out. Thank you Erin! I appreciate your thoughts on recruiting using Twitter!