Twittering for Recruiting

One of the better presentations at the Portland Recruiting Roadshow was one done by Susan Burns of TalentSync (and yes, I am linking her Twitter, not the website, nyah!) and a Portland local nonetheless!

What I love about many of the social networking recruiting “talks” you get is that it starts becoming like a get rich quick scheme. You’ve seen the infomercials before. All of the sudden people are popping out of the audience saying they developed an app for Facebook and received a bazillion dollars or they started using Twitter and now they have a book deal (to be written in twitter too). You start believing that all you have to do is post a few communities, sign up for a couple social networking utilities and start posting stuff from your website or press releases and you’ll get some benefit.

Susan Burns didn’t talk like that.

The best part I thought was the talk about the investment and the give and take aspect (in that order). You can’t extract value from social networking without putting in the work to make it genuinely appealing. That means posting things that aren’t on your corporate website. That means being a human being without being a mouthpiece.

It almost seemed like she loathed or were frustrated with people that took the get rich quick approach. It seems like, based on her description, you shouldn’t waste your time if you are going to do that.

I came away with three things you need to do right in order to prosper with social networking:

1. Be genuine in your message. It is hard for recruiters and HR people to speak like humans. Polished words seem less relevant in the social networking world.
2. Be prepared to spend time on it. This isn’t a one time set up. This is a multiple times a day activity that takes time to develop.
3. It isn’t the end all, be all of your recruiting strategy. Not to say it wouldn’t be possible to just recruit on twitter. This goes hand in hand with your other direct marketing and branding efforts.

Other than the big social network tools, do you use any smaller devices for recruiting purposes?