Engage, Inform, Excite: Best Twitter Recruitment Practices

By Julia Dunn on August 25, 2017

One of the most fundamental principles of recruiting for job openings is to market directly towards your target audience. These days, recruiters need to be active on social media for students to notice them. Of course, Facebook and LinkedIn are huge platforms that continue to grow in reach and functionality, but Twitter is now becoming increasingly more prominent as a recruitment tool.

If you’re a recruiter who’s mystified about how to use Twitter to its full potential, check out these best practices for catching students’ attention on this fast-paced and concise platform. Before you know it, your notifications will blow up!

1. Keep up your activity

If you have a Twitter profile (or your company does), make sure you’re consistently using it. If you only go on intermittently, you won’t attract new followers and you won’t give people a reason to remember you on Twitter. How often you use Twitter for recruitment depends on your needs, but it’s best to show activity every couple of days if not every day. When you fall behind on your Twitter usage, you damage relationships with your followers simply by disappearing. The more followers you gain over time, the more important it is to keep your Twitter presence alive.

Image via Pixabay.com

If you aren’t able to create live Tweets every day, you can consider scheduling posts (which is what many larger companies do if they don’t have a social media manager able to post live every day). You can schedule posts on Twitter itself “up to a year in advance and down to 1-minute granularity,” according to Twitter itself.

If you don’t want to do that, you can also use outside services such as Hootsuite, a social media managing interface which is most useful to companies or organizations who use more than one social media platform and want to manage it all in one place. With Hootsuite and similar services, you can schedule content on multiple sites, including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, Google+, and YouTube.

2. Be friendly in your replies

Want to recruit students and generate interest in your organization’s positions? Talk to students with respect and enthusiasm (it sounds obvious, but given the harmful stereotype that students and millennials are entitled or lazy — which is false for the majority — courtesy towards students isn’t always commonplace).

This might be as simple as throwing in a few smiley faces or emojis when replying to students who tweet in response to your posts. You’ll find much more success if you communicate with a sense of humor and clarity, especially when answering students’ questions on Twitter.

The more effort you demonstrate to get to know students and learn about their interests, the more personable you’ll feel to whoever is in Twitter correspondence with you. This directly benefits your recruitment, as you’re giving followers a positive experience that becomes associated with the brand you represent as part of a company or organization searching for talented employees.

3. Direct message interested students

To keep the conversation going with students, send them direct messages via Twitter. This is a smart move if you want to have a more personal conversation with those you’re trying to recruit and possibly give them more information about job openings you have available. You can also use direct messaging to keep in contact with students who may not be currently available to work (but who have expressed desire to keep in communication with your company for future openings).

4. Put time into your Twitter bio

You only have so many characters with which to make a good impression. As a recruiter, your bio needs to hit all the key points essential to who you are and what your company is all about. Include all necessary details for contacting the company in case followers have questions. Note your location and mission statement. The content you choose to include in your Twitter bio is all dependent on your needs as an organization so you may find yourself needing to write multiple drafts of your bio.

It’s the first thing a follower (or, more importantly, a prospective follower) sees when they click on your profile, aside from your photo. Pretend you’re a student who’s just clicked onto your profile: would they get a clear picture of your company? Would they feel enticed to learn more? Would they bother to Tweet you and say hello? If not, it’s time to revise your bio.

5. Have a photo

This is super simple yet super important. Students are automatically suspicious of profiles that don’t have profile pictures, and uploading a photo is the easiest way to increase your profile’s attractiveness and effectiveness. If someone clicks on you and you don’t have a photo, you appear illegitimate (and somewhat clueless with regards to social media).

Image via Pixabay.com

You can use your company’s logo as a Twitter photo, if appropriate; this will increase your visibility and cause viewers to remember you a bit better (which is true for all social media platforms — always have a photo!)

Effective Twitter recruitment boils down to three principles: engage, inform, and excite your followers!

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