Social Media and how NOT to use it for recruitment – Rachael Moss Interview Part 2/3

Many recruiters are still mis-using Twitter as a push channel rather than really listening, understanding or engaging in conversation”

This interview follows Part 1 of my discussion with Rachael.

Steve: When you look at social media, how un-effectively, and I’m leading the question here… How un-effectively are you seeing it being used by recruitment agencies?

Rachael: I think there are some agencies that do it well and then there are other agencies that are just scary. For example, they add a Twitter button to their website, it opens up to encourage a share, but doesn’t even feed back to the page they’ve shared!

Then you’ve got another group who just don’t understand it’s about conversation, it’s about engaging, and literally their feed is just jobs. 100% jobs. And let’s be honest, why would you even follow that unless you’re job hunting and you’re very going to very quickly switch that off?

And then I’d say there’s a middle group who are generally much better and understand that “OK, I’ll post some jobs but in between I need to share content as well” – but they are still mis-using it as a push channel rather than really listening or understanding, or even responding to what some of those questions and themes are.

Social media background research.
A standard feature of idibu.

Steve: What’s your favourite social network as a professional marketer?

Rachael: Oh interesting, I have been a huge Twitter fan and I’ve been using it for a very long time… I love Twitter because its current. If I want to find something out, my first go to is find it on Twitter rather than Google because with Google you’ll get the most prevalent search rather than the most recent.

And LinkedIn obviously, you can’t ignore LinkedIn as a platform. It’s an incredibly good professional networking system without question. But also for me now, Facebook is becoming more relevant in order to to talk to your candidates, and it’s becoming more used as a professional network in the US.

It’s all about understanding what these channels are and using them intelligently and testing. It depends on what your defined objectives are.

Steve: It’s interesting that Twitter seems to be losing its market value and at the same time, I think from a professional value standpoint, it seems to be increasing.

Rachael: I think it’s doing that partly because they’ve failed to understand how to monetize it – they’ve been less, strong perhaps in terms of the paid social campaigns that you have there. It still works well for you if you have built a solid Twitter follower base.

If you’re following the right people, and they’re following you back – you’ll be reaching the right audience and by additionally targeting those that can influence a group… *then* you’ll get great results.

Rachael Moss (@RachaelMoss2) is the Group Marketing Director of Bond and TEMPBUDDY.