How to: Recruit Tech Pros on Twitter - Social Talent

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Top keyword searches include: java, “ruby on rails”, javascript, github, .... that person to apply for your job or s
How to: Recruit Tech Pros on Twitter

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Introduction If you want to find tech pros, you need to think like a tech pro. Their definition of a professional network is somewhere like Github, Stack Overflow, Dribble or Behance. This is where you’ll discover who they are, what they’re working on and the skills they have. You won’t discover this information on LinkedIn alone. However, most tech recruiters aren’t tech pros themselves and would get lost in the likes of a Stack Overflow thread talking about the merits of Ajax Vs PHP! And trust us, there’s nothing worse than a tech recruiter pretending they’re all down and hip with the latest tech lingo in a forum purely for developers or designers! No matter, my trusty tech recruiter, there is a common ground and its name is Twitter. Twitter boasts more than 200 million active users made up of almost every sub-culture, profession and demographic, but arguably more than any other there are tech pros – and boy do they talk! We recently checked and there were 76 self-confessed Developers on Twitter who have tweeted over 100,000 times! Forget the phone or email, Twitter is the default preferred method of communication when it comes to tech pros. So, what can tech recruiters do to leverage this amazing resource? We believe there are always 3 ways to use a social network as a recruiter: 1. Search: You can treat the network as a database and search it for keywords and skills. 2. Market: You can market yourself, your employer and/or your jobs to other people in the same network. 3. Engage: Most importantly, you can reach out to other people in the network and start a conversation. Great recruiters do all 3. They maintain a strong, credible personal brand on the network, they know how to find people when they need them and when they reach out to chat with a potential candidate, their existing, credible footprint gives them authority and ensures that other users engage with them.

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Chapters: Part 1: Search

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a. Twitter Profile/Bio

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How to Search Twitter Bios Using Followerwonk

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b. Tweets

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c. Location

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d. Followers

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e. Lists

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Part 2: Market

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Tweet Your Jobs - The Importance of Filtering

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Gaining Influence and Authority

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6 Things to Think About

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Part 3: Engage

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What’s Your Objective?

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Messaging Candidates on Twitter

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a. The Technical Side of Twitter

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b. 8 Quick Tips to Persuade Candidates to Reply

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Conclusion

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Part 1: Search You can use the various elements encapsulated within Twitter such as the users bio, their tweets, their location, their followers and lists as a giant search database. Here’s how:

a) User Profile/Bio: This is the most obvious way of finding talent and the best way to search users’ Twitter profiles/bios is using a ‘freemium’ site called Followerwonk.com. Twitter users can write a profile consisting of a maximum of 160 characters. You can search profiles for job titles, employer names or skills. This works, but you need to be conscious of the fact that Twitter users aren’t writing a bio with the express intention of being found by a recruiter. Also, 160 characters is not a lot. It’s about 20 words at best. So expect to find a skill, a one or two word job title, or maybe – just maybe – an employer name. But don’t expect much more detail than that. How to Search Twitter Bios Using Followerwonk Login to Followerwonk.com, before clicking the ‘Search Twitter bios’ tab.

Enter all of the keywords you’re searching for in the primary search box and enter the location you are searching for below this by first selecting “More options”. Press ‘Do It’ and off it goes to find the candidates you need.

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It’s important to note, that although Followerwonk does support Boolean search, it does not support AND, OR and NOT. Use a space between words for the AND, use | for OR, and use – for NOT. Once you have your list of results in front of you, you can sort them using the columns Followerwonk provides. Active Twitter users (AKA the ones you want to hire) will have lots of tweets, plenty of followers and recent activity. Sort your results by tweets, followers and days old, to get a real sense of who is truly active on Twitter.

b) Tweets: This is a little trickier, but potentially much richer than just searching for keywords in a bio. Many Twitter users don’t list their job titles or skills, but you can infer their skills from what they tweet about. For example, if someone shares a tweet that contains “github”, its likely a link to a page from Github, which probably makes them an open-source developer. Twitter’s internal search algorithm is perfect for finding tweets. If you want to get hardcore with your searches, try their Advanced Search Tool (it can be found at twitter.com/search-advanced), which allows you to build simple Boolean strings and geo-targeted tweets. You’ll probably want to filter out recruiters by adding “-job -jobs –opportunity” etc. to your search string.

Top keyword searches include: java, “ruby on rails”, javascript, github, stackoverflow and kernel. When writing your own synonyms, think about programming languages or sites from which someone might share content.

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c) Location: This is a free-text field that most users complete even though it’s not a required field. You will likely want to zoom in on Twitter users who are living in or based in a certain location or city, but remember that they might use several synonyms to describe the same location. For example, someone in San Francisco could write “San Francisco”, “San Fran”, “Lakeshore”, “Bayview”, “Oakland”, “Emeryville” or simply “Bay Area”. You can use Followerwonk (as mentioned above) to combine this with a Bio Keywords search. Click on “More Options” to reveal a search filter that allows free-text searching of user locations. Put the location you’re hiring within (including all it’s synonyms) in the search box. It supports Boolean but you’ll need to use | instead of OR between all those possible locations.

d) Followers: This is for those of you who are already pretty comfortable with searching bios and tweets and enjoy following rabbit holes! If you find one user who tweets on the topic you want to hire someone for, try checking out their Twitter followers by clicking on their follower list. For example, a person who tweets about graphic design is likely to be followed by graphic designers, so you can infer their followers profession or skills. When you find one person, check who they follow to see if there is a pattern. If that person only follows one account talking about graphic design, he or she is probably not a graphic designer. But if that person is following lots of similar accounts, you may have struck gold!

e) Lists: When you find potential candidates on Twitter, you should be creating well categorised lists so that you can find them again quickly when you need them. As a recruiter, we recommend that you create private Twitter lists, but there are hundreds of thousands of public lists that other users have kindly curated that group people by skills, job titles, interests and locations. Finding lists can be tricky; you’re probably going to need to do a bit of Google searching. The quickest way is to type in the keywords that you expect to be in the name or description of the list (such as job titles, skills, etc) and add them to the following Google search: site:twitter.com inurl:lists.

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Part 2: Market Trust. Credibility. Authenticity. Authority. Influence. No, we’re not talking about some new ranking index that we’ve invented; these are characteristics that any niche tech recruiter should aspire to develop with their candidate base. When you’re honest with a candidate, you build trust and credibility. When you speak from the heart, they respect your authenticity and are more inclined to deepen their relationship with you. When you speak knowledgeably and ask the right questions, you are perceived as an authority in your sector. Those qualities combined give you the all-important power of influence. As Dan Pink put it in his brilliant book “To Sell Is Human”, the ability to influence is the ability “to move others”. This is what recruiters do – we try to move others. We move people to consider a new job, a new location, a new employer, a lower salary, to take risks etc. So what has all this got to do with Twitter? Well, we started by saying that there are 3 key ways to leverage Twitter as a tech recruiter. The first was Search, and we pick up here with the second: Marketing.

Tweet your Jobs - The Importance of Filtering For most recruiters, marketing on a social media platform means marketing their jobs, which can be highly effective. In fact, our CEO Johnny Campbell was recently asked by a tech staffing agency if he could recommend a recruiter for a vacant position they had. Rather than recommend someone, he offered to tweet it out as his Twitter following consists almost exclusively of recruiters. They emailed him two weeks later to say they had hired a great tech recruiter who reached out directly from his tweet! Why did this Twitter marketing tactic work?: • • •

Johnny has a reasonably large following. His followers are engaged because he posts relevant content. He doesn’t solicit referrals or candidates too often.

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You should aspire to have a similarly engaged audience who sees you as an authority in your niche. If you simply blast jobs all day, every day from your personal account, you don’t have any authority or influence; you’re just annoying. Yet employment marketplaces like Dice.com thrive on fulfilling the specific need of enabling job seekers to find jobs. Tech pros may follow a Twitter account that feeds them the latest jobs from your company to find out who’s hiring, but many tech pros just want to keep in touch, gain some insight into their market, and network with lynchpins like you. Our advice is to set up specific job feeds on Twitter that are designed to fulfill very specific interests, such as “[Your company] Open Source Development Jobs” or “[Your company] Downtown Chicago Tech Jobs”. After all, if I was a Cold Fusion programmer in Philadelphia, why would I want to hear about all of your other tech jobs based in different parts of the country? It’s better to have only 20 followers of a niche Twitter job feed that you can profile exactly, than to have 1,000 followers who ignore 99% of your tweets. There is no way to filter a Twitter account, so set up accounts that are filters themselves.

Gaining Influence and Authority First things first, you shouldn’t have separate Twitter accounts for work and personal. Most Twitter users aren’t on Twitter to find a job; they’re tweeting for their own personal reasons, networking with a wide variety of people and talking about most anything and everything! Think of Twitter as a beach bar where everyone is wearing board shorts and flip-flops and sipping cocktails. If you’re the recruiter walking in wearing a three piece suit, clutching a briefcase and ordering Cristal, nobody will want to talk to you. To gain our trust, we want to see the “complete” you, not just the “work” you. Our friend and Social Talent Mentor, Craig Fisher, calls this strategy “Profersonal”. Social scientists point to studies that show people will always find “uncommon commonalities” when first striking up a conversation with a stranger. You need to “show a little leg” on Twitter, and that starts with feeling comfortable mixing personal tweets with your professional content. Common sense should prevail and stop you from posting anything overly personal or controversial, but chatting about sports, entertainment, the weather, and ideas you have are all good.

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As a tech recruiter, you have insight and knowledge that tech pros want to hear about. You may not consider it unique, but the insights you can provide on salaries, who’s expanding, who’s laying off staff, what hiring managers are looking for, and what skills are hot are the types of information they will lean on you for. If you work in-house or on-site, share insights and photos about the firm you are working for (making sure not to violate any digital communication or privacy policies). A potential candidate will care more about what the break room looked like when you had lunch today than about your carefully photoshopped corporate branding posters. When he was over at National Public Radio, recruiting expert Lars Schmidt fostered a really good initiative in which employees are encouraged to share moments from their day or thoughts on life at NPR using the hashtag #NPRlife. It sends a powerful message when an inquiring candidate searches Twitter or Instagram and finds hundreds of employees sharing their insights. Ask yourself: “Do I want my Twitter account to resemble NPR or an RSS feed?” If you work in a typically conservative environment or you are concerned about “getting it wrong” when tweeting, start by asking questions. Influencers are found drumming up ideas at the center of the conversation, not on the fringes spouting a radically controversial opinion. Questions aren’t just a way of avoiding putting your own opinion out there, they also provoke much higher levels of interaction among social media users in general.

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6 Things to Think About 1. Does your Twitter profile photo and bio say to candidates: “I’m a nice guy/gal who you just might enjoy interacting with”? 2. Make sure that at least 50% of your content is interesting and useful to your target demographic, regardless of whether they are looking for a job right now. 3. It’s OK to re-tweet jobs from your “Current Jobs” account(s), but it’s much better to appeal for occasional help as a peer, rather than a robot. Think “Hey guys, can anyone recommend any good java devs in Austin? Free beer on me if u can help! ;-)” rather than “Java Developer, #Austin, $negotiable. Click here for more info”. 4. Ask if your favorite job board supports Twitter Cards. If they do, your tweet will have an embedded Twitter Card (i.e. a preview at the bottom) that shows the job title, location, salary, skills, a bit of a summary and an apply button. And you won’t eat into your 140 characters. This is brilliant for using Twitter to get tech pros to engage. 5. Use hashtags. When sharing content, try to reach people outside your network by jumping on relevant hashtags. Keep up-to-date on industry events that your target audience might be attending and add the event hashtags to your insight posts on days that event is happening. Also, when posting a job, search Twitter for similar jobs to see what other employment-related hashtags are being used in your sector and location. 6. It’s easy to re-tweet a good article. It takes more effort to write your own blog post responding to that article, but when you share that link you are drawing your audience into your careers blog where your current jobs are being advertised. This is much better!

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Part 3: Market So many recruiters just rely on their job postings to deliver results. But that’s where they fall short. In order to be successful, you need to step up and do what should come naturally — it’s time to sell. But just what is selling? Many recruiters hate being tarred with the “salesperson” brush, but in our opinion, they are judging the fine art of persuasion in the wrong context. The aforementioned author and speaker, Dan Pink, defines sales as the “ability to move others” — there’s a key distinction there from what many consider sales to be. As we mentioned earlier, in recruitment, we are constantly seeking to move others. The best of us do this by understanding the needs of both hiring managers and potential candidates — and aligning the two. A person’s online profile might show you a potential skills match, but the only way that you’re going to figure out if your opportunity is the right match for them — right now — is to talk to them. Great recruiters spend less time online and more time talking with the right candidates. But that conversation has to start somewhere and, most of the time, it’s going to start on Twitter.

What’s Your Objective? Before you engage a potential candidate for the first time on Twitter, you should ask yourself, “What is my objective here?” If your answer is to get that person to apply for your job or send you their resume, you’re only setting yourself up to fail. It is impossible to truly assess someone’s interest and suitability in one exchange — it is more likely to take four or five. The objective of your first contact is to start a conversation. That’s it. It’s a really simple goal but essential to understand before you try and reach out to anyone on Twitter (or anywhere else, for that matter). Once you understand your goal, it’s much easier to adjust your language, tone and style to focus on a truly successful outcome — a response!

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Yes, your goal is simply to get a response, any response. These days, candidates are overwhelmed with unsolicited approaches from recruiters and most simply ignore them. Getting a reply should be your objective. So, start thinking about what would get someone to reply — and not reply.

Messaging Candidates on Twitter Messaging on Twitter requires both a technical knowledge of the platform itself and the ability to be super concise yet persuasive. a) The Technical Side of Twitter • You can tweet absolutely anyone. Even a superstar celebrity or CEO of a Fortune 500 company. All you need to do is begin your message with their username, which is the @ symbol followed by their “handle” with no spaces. • All tweets are public. There is a private messaging system on Twitter called a Direct Message or DM, but the person you are messaging either has to be following you or have changed their settings to allow DMs from anyone. (Very few have done this, but you can DM us (@socialtalent) even if we don’t follow you.) •

You can publicly tweet someone without alerting your network. Just make sure your tweet begins with the person’s username — it has to be the very first thing in your tweet. No spaces or dots. Absolutely no other characters — just the person’s username followed by the rest of your message. If you have anything else in front of the username, your tweet will appear in the update feed of everyone who follows you. (Note: if you begin your tweet with the person’s username, it will appear in your followers’ feeds if they also follow the person you are tweeting, which is highly unlikely.) The tweet can still be found if someone visits your profile page and looks at your recent tweets, but who does that? So, now that you’ve begun your tweet with the person’s username, it’s likely that you are down to 130 characters or less to get their attention. And we have 8 quick tips to help you do just that.

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b) 8 Quick Tips to Persuade Candidates to Reply 1. Get personal. Candidates around the world complain that recruiters do not personalise their approaches. So, be sure to read your candidate’s bio, research them elsewhere, and check out their tweets to see what makes them tick! If you were to bump into this person in “real life” and they were wearing the sports jersey of the team you support, you’d mention it, wouldn’t you? It’s exactly the same on Twitter. This person’s data is public and therein lies the opportunity for you to find an “uncommon commonality” — something that you have in common with them and can hang your conversation on. What TV programs are they watching? Have they been on a trip recently? What articles are they reading/sharing/commenting upon? Make it short and snappy, but personal. That’s your opening line. 2. Think about the candidate’s best interest first. What’s in it for them? Why have you singled them out? Give them a compelling reason to want to hear more. Focus your language on “you, your and yours.” Not “we, I or us.” Don’t say, “I need an x.” Try, “Ur knowledge of x could make u an awesome candidate for…” Yes, you can abbreviate words. You’ve got less than 140 characters to work with and this is not a letter to the editor of the New York Times. Be concise and use appropriate shortcuts when necessary. 3. Close with a call to action. Ask a question that is easy for the person to say yes to. “When would u b free to talk?” is actually a cognitively complex question to answer. The candidate will need to refer to their calendar, think about an appropriate time and suggest it back to you. This takes too much effort. The question “Would u b free to talk tonight?” is much easier to answer. 4. Use emoticons if you have space. We don’t care if you hate them — they’re a good icebreaker and help prevent the candidate from seeing you as a schmoozy salesperson. Go on, it’s not going to kill you! ;-) 5. Don’t tweet two or more candidates in a row about a job. Your tweets are public and your candidate is not going to feel very special if you’re tweeting every Ruby Developer in town. Less is more. This your “Jerry Maguire” moment — you’re thinking of the candidate’s best interest — so gather your goldfish and be selective.

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6. Keep their interest. Every time you tweet a potential candidate, be sure to mix it up by tweeting a couple of non-related tweets — such as industry news or something personal. 7. Pin a tweet to the top of your profile tweets. This way, you can make sure one of your older, more flattering and representative tweets is what they see first! 8. Pin the job spec you’re working on. If you’re spending this week reaching out to candidates about a particular job, pin it to the top of your tweets. Better still, if you’re using Twitter cards (via your preferred job board), pin that tweet as it contains all the details from your job posting in an image that is created as soon as you paste the web-link. The prospective candidate can just click to apply or view the posting straight from the tweet.

Conclusion That’s it! You’re now ready to recruit like a pro on Twitter. Our advice is to start small. Find one person — just one person — to tweet. Then, see what happens. We guarantee you’ll get a positive outcome. The person may not want to be considered for this particular job, but you’ve made a connection. You’re networking and building a pipeline for future roles and referrals. Hone your short game and your long game. You have to be great at both. When it works, send us a tweet at @socialtalent to let us know. We’ll be listening! Happy hunting, guys.

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Use our Free Boolean Generator to build your searches like a Pro. Register at labs.socialtalent.co now. Social Talent are a world-leading Recruitment Training company who turn Recruiters into Sourcing Ninjas through our Black Belt in Internet Recruitment programme. A Sourcing Ninja is a recruiter who has mastered the art of interner recruitment to find more, higher quality candidates, faster than anyone else. We’ve trained thousands of recruiters since 2012, and now our certified training is available online! Visit www.socialtalent.co/training for more information or contact or Sales team at [email protected].

Whitepaper Authors: Johnny Campbell Síofra Pratt

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