I am often asked of the best way to post jobs to Twitter. My response is always ‘why do you want to post jobs to Twitter?’ to which the answer is usually ‘to get more candidates’.
Posting jobs may seem like the obvious thing to do, but Twitter is a place for conversation, relationship building and engagement. Throwing all your jobs onto twitter is akin to butting into a polite conversation at a dinner party and asking everybody if they want a job, over…and over…and over… it’s a bit rude.
Typically profiles full of jobs don’t have many followers because they are only useful while someone is actually looking for work. This makes them less suitable for the permanent roles where a candidate may only be active every 2-3 years. Ideally during this time you will be keeping candidates tied to your brand by giving them lots of relevant and useful content about employment trends and issues within their industry, which is the perfect use for twitter.
Here are some key points for posting jobs on twitter:
- Choose one or two key roles every day and tweet about them, providing a link back to look for other suitable roles, this is much better than sending every job.
- Automation saves time but costs followers as people don’t want to interact with a faceless robot. Make people feel like they are interacting with your brand, not just viewing a list of jobs.
- People un-follow accounts with irrelevant posts, so break your accounts into groups of relevance, for example by sector.
- Monitor the account for messages and interactions and respond to them
- Re-tweet posts, it’s the easiest way to publish good content
- If you are producing content tweet it, and don’t let it get lost among hundreds of jobs. Create a profile for industry information and one for jobs if you need to.
- Use hashtags so your posts appear in relevant sectors #marketingjobs
Automation should be a last resort, but if you need to do it there are tools like http://twitterfeed.com that can help you turn RSS feeds into twitter posts.
Just be careful your candidates don’t get the faceless robot.
