Recruiters – Twitter Makes You More Approachable than LinkedIn?

Twitter is a fast-paced massively open platform where 80% of the conversations are “lost” (or engaged with if you’re lucky) in the first hour. Blink and you’ll miss something. It is growing faster than many other social media sites and has more plugins and apps to power it up than you can shake a dead bird at!

Twitter is currently ranked by alexa.com as 8th (US) and 10th (UK) - note LinkedIn is 10th and 13th. Are you an average user spending 7:26 minutes per day on it, looking at, on average, 5 pages per session? (…almost the same stats as LinkedIn.) Were you one of those happy recruiters who in 2011 started to notice that people were applying to 3 x more of the roles you advertised on Twitter than LinkedIn? People spend more time on Twitter than LinkedIn – they are even more likely to be using it on the toilet (ultimate engagement!) Hence Twitter should be part of your recruitment toolkit.

Recruiters are Still Twitter Sceptics

But still the recruitment world is a little sceptical about how Twitter can be used for recruitment – I rarely come across a recruiter with a tangible goal for Twitter. But in the very least Twitter can:

• Source talent, clients and job leads
• Communicate (listen and speak)
• Demonstrate your specialism
• Expand your brain (perhaps make you interesting…?)

Recruiters Need to Get Over Themselves

I hear the word engagement too often. I really feel it’s often a myth in the recruitment world. Twitter may do all of the above, but does it make you more approachable? Are candidates really going to be insane and openly follow and engage with you?

 DM me Dammit!

There’s a feature that I’ve had for almost 6 months and I want you to check if you have it too. Does your Twitter allow for you receive DMs (direct, private messages) without you following them?

The idea of a DM (a direct message) on Twitter was to give users private messaging capability. You may only still be able to send DMs to someone if you were both following each other. I think that this is an ace feature. Imagine not having to follow all of your talent (and hence give away your talent database to competitors) and they can still DM you? Check your settings to see if you have this feature.

What do you think to this? Would this be a help for you? What do you think about this new setting? How can you capitalise on it?

Checkout this video to see where to find the feature and if you have it. 

Images: Image 1