Finding Job Candidates through Twitter
22 October 2009Social media and networking sites are clearly the next phase of online interaction. These sites like MySpace and Facebook connect users to one another and offer many ways to interact. From sharing photos to coordinating offline meetings, social networking sites are becoming a part of all users’ daily online routines. One of the most exponentially growing sites of this kind is Twitter.
Twitter allows users to share whatever information they like with other users on the site. This communication takes the form of tweets, or 140 character text entries. Now that the site is becoming mainstream and immensely popular, it is being implemented in all kinds of ways. As a recruiter or company, you can put the power of one of the most 50 popular websites in the world to use to find an ideal job candidate.
While the site is the latest form of social networking sites, the technology is still the same and allows for the same techniques that employers had used with other networking sites. Simply put, Twitter and other sites offer another avenue by which to perform a background check. Made popular by many published accounts and anecdotes, it is sometimes surprisingly easy to find out information about an employee that might make them a bad fit to your organization. Though some question the morality and legality of this kind of background check, the information that a person makes public can be very telling. Therefore, Twitter can give you a sense of your prospective employee that you simply would not get otherwise. And, it also says a lot about the kind of employee who would either not maintain a very public profile to certain standards or misrepresent themselves. So, Twitter can certainly provide valuable information about your prospective employee. Some employers and recruiters store this data in their applicant tracking database and may possibly consider it at various stages during the hiring process.
But what if you don’t have a particular employee in mind to research? Twitter is quickly becoming a valuable marketing and recruiting tool for organizations seeking employees. Several tools have been constructed around the site to match recruiters and employers with job seekers. They operate by recruiters and employers submitting tweets as professionals, representatives of a company, or as companies themselves. Users can then track these announcements through tools like MicroJobs or TweetMyJobs. Therefore, Twitter has the benefit of granularity: users self-select applicable jobs and employers get relevant applicants at no cost.
Twitter is a powerful tool that connects millions of users to one another. Employers can use this popular and growing site to broadcast job openings to applicants and screen them through an online identity. This emerging trend can be immensely beneficial for employers.
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