Boring Job Tweets

HR Business Partner, Slough, £55,000

Supply Chain Manager, Manchester, £45,000

Finance Officer, London, £35,000

IT Director, Bristol, £100,000

Recruitment Consultant, Boring us all rigid...

Not another job tweet!!

Would you read a blog if this was the only content?  Of course not, it’s deeply boring, it’s not engaging and it’s not why you read a blog.  A link on the blog to a jobs page or the occasional job post is fine, but if this is all you got you simply wouldn’t read it.  This is of course hardly incisive information, but pure common sense.  In fact, I can’t recall ever coming across any blog that simply posted jobs (I stand to be corrected!).  So if it’s obvious not to clog the blogosphere with jobs, why isn’t it obvious with Twitter?

If anyone knows of any specific data relating to Recruitment Agencies’ use of Twitter I’d love to see it.  I would hazard a guess that less than 10% of agencies attempt to engage with their followers.  The vast bulk simply just tweet new job, etc.  Most don’t even add the # tag to attempt to make the job more findable.  They expect the job seeker to find their job post amongst the other 200 million tweets that day!  If you read through the timeline there isn’t a single re-tweet or @.  Worse still they don’t even acknowledge the few people that attempt to engage with them – In fairness to Recruitment Agencies, an awful lot of companies do this too!

If you were a job seeker, be it active or passive, you are not going to be encouraged to follow an account that does nothing but sell, sell, sell.  Even if you were to follow the account, as you are not engaged with them you are not going to be looking out for their tweets.  In what can be a quagmire of daily tweets, it is very easy to ignore or miss tweets from an account that means nothing to you.

The followers were engaged... with their naps!

Bill Boorman wrote a great blog post recently that details why agencies fail to utilise social media properly.  As a summary he suggests they expect quick wins and fail to engage and I feel he is spot on.  The agents that are failing woefully with Twitter are wasting their precious time – and it is their precious time that is making them put so little effort in to this.  The agency feels the returns are too little to invest properly and therefore they get little from it by not investing properly (this sounds like one of those awful management mottos!). They fail to realise that you need to build followers by engaging with them.  It is only once you have engaged with them that job tweets work.  The follower may not be suitable/interested in the job, but if they choose to RT it, the potential breadth of people the job can reach can be enormous!

A further point is if a potential client is viewing the Twitter account, whilst they may be impressed by the number of roles, the tweets do not portray the agency as an expert and knowledgeable in the field.  Similarly the tweets aren’t exactly selling the client to the market place.

I seem to be harking on about engaging a lot recently (as you’ll see with my next post too), but it really is the key to getting social media to work for you properly.  As Bill states in his post, it needs to be long term but it doesn’t have to be hours on a daily basis either, just a commitment to engage.  So next time, rather than tweet about the new job, tweet something completely random as you never know where it will lead!


Addendum

To act as proof of the pudding and that I am not making this engagement lark up, I want to share with you the results of my last job tweet.  It is important to note I am not suggesting that recruiters don't post any job tweets, just not all the time.  Yesterday I posted a job tweet, which within 30 minutes had been retweeted 4 times.  I was  interested to see how many people this reached and between the 4 RTs the tweet went to 2,500 people on top of my own followers.  So the recruiters that think I was preaching rubbish, ask yourself this - when was the last time one of your job tweets was retweeted and did it reach 2,500 people?  I am not being self-righteous as when I started using Twitter all I did was post these boring job tweets, but hopefully this example truly proves that engagement is the key to success.

Following on from Katrina's comment below, I hadn't factored her RT into my figures. So it was actually 5 RTs reaching over 3,500 people - even more proof!

*****

Ed Scrivener is an experienced HR recruiter, a LinkedIn trainer and now an award winning blogger! He writes, tweets, praises and moans about his passions – HR, recruitment and social media.