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HOW TO: Use Social Media for Recruiting


This post originally appeared on the American Express OPEN Forum, where Mashable regularly contributes articles about leveraging social media and technology in small business.

Finding the right candidate for a job is like finding a new apartment: timing, finances and quality all have to align just right. And somehow, the pool of options always seems to feel both prohibitively large and prohibitively limited at the same time.

So, in both types of searches, online tools have become invaluable. But while tweeting out a call for a good real estate agent is fairly straightforward, using social media for recruiting has nuances that, if overlooked, can render the process far less useful. Here are a few key pointers from experts in the field to remember when getting started.

1. Start Early

Simply tweeting out a link to a job posting might get you some viable candidates, but to really make sure you’re reaching your target audience, it’s important to cultivate your personality as an employer early on. “Social recruiting is about getting engaged and having conversations with people before they’re even thinking about you as an employer,” says Bruce Morton, CMO of Allegis Group Services, a company that provides human resources consulting. Morton also suggests that recruiters could “learn a lot from the consumer industry” in terms of marketing. In that analogy, your company is your brand, and the available job is just one of many products you have to offer. Keep that in mind when cultivating a social media presence for your brand that will eventually allow you to incorporate job announcements.

2. Know Your Audience

These days, it’s the rare holdout who has avoided creating a Facebook profile. But just because potential candidates have a presence on a given social network doesn’t mean that it’s the right site to use when targeting them. Debbie Fischer, human resources manager for advertising agency Campbell Mithun, found resounding success by using Twitter as a recruiting tool for summer interns. But, she cautioned that “you have to think about the types of roles you’re recruiting for,” because while college students can be open about their job hunt, more seasoned professionals may not feel comfortable publicly sharing that they are considering a career move. For those types of roles, Morton says that LinkedIn can be a good place to start, because, as he puts it, “what LinkedIn has done is given people the permission to put their resume online,” without fear of repercussions from current employers.

3. Get Creative

When you make the foray into social recruiting, you are entering a space in which both passive and active job seekers are already receiving a massive amount of information on a daily basis. So, to get the best results, your message has to stand out enough to make people take note. Additionally, presenting your job openings in a creative way allows companies to show more about their personalities as organizations, which in turn helps potential candidates get a feel for whether or not the culture is likely to be a good fit.

This year, Campbell Mithun hired for their “Lucky 13” internship program through a process that required those interested to apply by submitting 13 tweets over 13 days. Due to its novel use of social media, the campaign garnered press from national outlets like AdAge.com, as well as Mashable. Even a straightforward job description can spread like wildfire on social networks if it’s written in a way that sparks discussion, like this announcement from a Florida newspaper that readers found refreshing for its candid and witty tone. And if you have more resources, you might consider creating a short video, as corporations like Facebook have done, to present your material in a more engaging manner. Morton says that when seeking Generation Y talent, recruiters can’t assume that candidates will read a page of text, “but they’ll watch a video.”

4. Be Open in Return

Finding candidates through social channels means you’ll be asking them to share information with you via possibly public means. For the process to work, employers need to be willing to share information as well (while, of course, carefully and closely guarding any personal information they might have about their applicants). Morton says some employers express staunch resistance to putting jobs on Twitter, when in fact, the listings in question are all on Twitter through unofficial channels anyway. For Campbell Mithun, the finishing touch of a successful social media-driven hiring process was getting to showcase the talented, web-savvy young people they had selected. Kristine Olson, the agency’s Director of Corporate Communications, had a communications strategy in place that was designed, fittingly, to use social media channels to share the results of the campaign, noting that the HR team “had to be really open to allow us to publicize who we were hiring.”

Do you have any success stories about finding great candidates through social recruiting? Let us know in the comments.

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, SchulteProductions

More About: career, facebook, human resources, job recruiting, linkedin, social media, trending, twitter

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Why Post Rank Being Acquired by Google Is Huge News for Search

Thanks to my eternally trustworthy pal Paul Gailey, I was made aware that one of my favorite analytics tools, Post Rank, has just announced it has been acquired by Google. And I don’t think its wise to underestimate how important this will be for the world of search and social media.

I suspect a lot of people in the UK have never heard of Post Rank—or at the very least have rarely used the service beyond tinkering. But for more than three years, this has been the bread and butter of blog analytics for both me and the clients I have built and serviced blogs for.

In short, Post Rank attributes a value to each social gesture that a reader may perform on your blog. So, if you look on the left of this blog, there is a list of posts which have attracted a score depending on their popularity. Retweets score differently to bookmarks, comments receive a different score to Facebook shares, and so on. The hugely important distinction to make, is that whilst the values do not necessarily mean anything in any financial or volume-based context we may already be familiar with, the system allows us to set targets and assess something that we are all looking at: attention and authority.

Any post can be widely read—but if nobody re-tweets it, is it in any way influential on that topic? In the same way that Facebook Likes, Retweets, Diggs and so on each represent a modern day “vote” of favor to a piece of content, Post Rank allows you to collate all these votes and provides you with the intelligence to shape your content plan to ensure that it is relevant more often than not, and in being relevant, stands much more chance of being re-posted (and seen) elsewhere.

I have developed over time, a methodology of posting content by very specific content categories (based on conversation monitoring), which is then measured against a Post Rank score for each category of post. Depending on the score of each post, we accurately know what type of content is most responded-to by the audience and can therefore post more content of this type—whatever it is.

Social Search Engine Results Pages

But what does this have to do with the future of search? Look at where search has gone over the last few years and the overwhelming focus has been on addressing the volumes of social content on the web.

  • Universal search introduces video (typically from YouTube) and images alongside standard search engine results pages (SERPs).
  • Google’s Caffeine update places more influence on delicious (among other things).
  • Real-time tweets for popular topics appear alongside “static” SERPs.
  • The Google avatar of friends in your network who have shared content that appear in SERPs are visible.

And so on …

The point is, that without any doubt, google’s issue has been one of attributing human “votes” to content. Post Rank fills this gap.

Take a look at its Google Reader filter below, and you can begin to see just how Post Rank’s system can provide such huge feedback on human votes of confidence in content.

I can now filter my Google Reader content according to what Post Rank has been able to determine are Good, Great or Best (or all) score. This means, it is giving me a score based on the human voted-for scores of content that is out there on the web.

Google Reader is giving me the most relevant content as judged by the interactions/votes of my peers and indeed the myriad people who have also “voted” for this content by sharing, rating and bookmarking it.

Granted, it may not be the most recent (and I have to admit, I don’t know how frequent post rank indexes the content, but it seems pretty instant).

A Ready-Made Human Recommendation System

So, in Post Rank, it would appear that Google is acquiring a ready-made system that provides the much-lauded human attribution of search relevance. What it will look like, maybe the above graphic gives us some clues, but I just hope they maintain the service as-is and not let it disappear like they did with Jaiku. Post Rank, please tell us one way or the other!

Governments Are Still Trying to Kill, Replace or Undo the Internet

For all the optimism — much of it well-placed — about the Internet and social tools like Twitter and Facebook helping to create revolutions in the Middle East, there is a corresponding tide of repression, censorship and surveillance by governments aimed at the Internet and the freedoms it allows. A new UNESCO report looks at the scope of these efforts and the emerging effort to create a form of “digital rights” that can counter-balance the attempts of repressive governments to shut down free speech on the Internet. Meanwhile, both Iran and Syria have upped the ante in their attempts to blockade the web.

Iran wants to create a “national Internet”

Iran, which shut down almost 70 percent of its Internet during the demonstrations in that country in 2009, has stepped up its efforts to wall off dissent: according to a recent report in the Wall Street Journal , Iranian authorities are said to be considering a “national Internet” plan that could disconnect that country from the Internet and confine users to an authorized and government-controlled version. The government is also said to be working on its own computer operating system that would replace Windows and presumably make it easier to build censorship into the computers that citizens use.

In Syria, meanwhile, the government actually loosened earlier restrictions on the Internet and social networks such as Facebook and Twitter — but as Jillian York of the Electronic Frontier Foundation explains, these moves appear to have been designed in part to make it easier to monitor and apprehend dissidents. For example, there have been a number of reports of Syrian citizens being detained and forced to reveal their Facebook passwords. And there has also been a rise in hacking attempts aimed at dissident websites (as documented by the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab) which appear to be government directed.

UNESCO hopes to spur protection

The UNESCO report, which is entitled “Freedom of Connection – Freedom of Expression: The Changing Legal and Regulatory Ecology Shaping the Internet,” (the full PDF version is available here) is an analysis of existing research into how governments around the world are trying to limit use of the Internet by dissidents, and also how they are using the web — including social media such as Facebook — to monitor and crack down on dissent. The organization also said it hopes that the report prompts more protection and support for Internet use and freedom of speech as an essential human right:

Freedom of expression is not an inevitable outcome of technological innovation. It can be diminished or reinforced by the design of technologies, policies and practices – sometimes far removed from freedom of expression. This synthesis points out the need to focus systematic research on this wider ecology shaping the future of expression in the digital age.

The report notes that Internet use has found legal and government protection in a number of jurisdictions, including France — where the French Constitutional Council ruled that the freedom to access “public online communication services” was a basic human right (although that country still went forward with a “three strikes” law to prevent piracy) — and Finland, which last year became the first country to make broadband Internet a fundamental human right (Costa Rica’s highest court has also ruled that the Internet is a fundamental right and mandated the government to provide universal access).

At the same time, however, many governments have also adopted new tools of censorship and surveillance, including “deep-packet inspection” and various methods of filtering, the report says, as well as IP blocking — which countries such as China use to prevent users from accessing certain websites. The UNESCO study even notes that authorities in Western nations, including the United States, have used social networks to monitor and then apprehend citizens, including one case in which a G-20 protester was arrested for being part of a group that posted messages on Twitter:

One arrest made at a Pittsburgh motel by Pennsylvania State Police was of a 41 year old New York social worker, named Elliot Madison, for being part of a group that posted messages on the micro-blogging service Twitter that were designed to help protesters at the G-20 summit “avoid apprehension after a lawful order to disperse.”

But the biggest trend the report describes is the increasing determination by repressive governments in countries like Iran and Syria to both shut down dissent online — in some cases by shutting off Internet access completely — and to monitor and track their own citizens. The Egyptian authorities did both of these things during the revolution in that country earlier this year, although their attempts ultimately failed and President Hosni Mubarak was desposed (the former dictator has since been fined by an Egyptian court for his attempts to shut down the Internet).

The UNESCO report also describes some of the initiatives that both public advocacy groups and governments have been making to fight back against these repressive regimes, including the OpenNet Initiative, which is a joint venture between the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto and the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard that tracks and catalogues filtering and censorship by governments around the world.

More than anything, the picture that UNESCO paints is of global arms race — but instead of guns and tanks, the weapons are computers and hackers and Internet-tracking tools, and increasingly social networking sites as well.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user Jennifer Moo

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How Twitter Works as a Q&A App [INFOGRAPHIC]

If you think about it, Twitter actually serves as one of the most widely used and engaging Q&A apps.

Around 3 million questions are asked on Twitter each month, and the questions range from tech support and product recommendation requests to job and relationship advice, as well as pleas for new music.

And the more followers you have, the more likely you are to ask them questions publicly. People with fewer followers tend to send questions via direct messages. But around 20-30% of asked questions never get answered.

The below infographic from Q&A service InboxQ contains tons of fun — and valuable — facts about how Twitter is being used by average folks and businesses to ask and answer questions.

Twitter, like many modern social media tools, can be just about anything you want to make it. Do you often use Twitter as a Q&A platform?

Click image to see larger version.

[Source: InboxQ]

More About: infographic, q&a, twitter

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