News about Social Media in the World of Recruitment.

• April 28, 2010


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Two Twitter Recruiting Strategies: Push versus Pull

Twitter is here to stay.  The site has hundreds of third-party applications, millions of tweeters, and now its own ad platform.  For a while, many wondered what Twitter’s killer app would be.  They wondered this 5-8 years ago when cell phones started getting internet connections.  People asked, “What can I do with internet on my phone?”  Today you can do a million things online with your phone, but it wasn’t until you could received e-mail on the device did wireless web uptake really catch on.  So what is the killer app for Twitter?  Well if you ask me, it’s recruitment.

Today there are hundreds of applications and tools you can leverage to tap into the power of Twitter.  For recruiters specifically there are probably 100.  If you are a recruiter and just starting to think about recruiting using Twitter, here is something to consider.  Will you use a push or a pull strategy?  Or will you use a hybrid of both.

Push

The push strategy is how most Twitter users use Twitter today.  You go on Twitter.com (or Hootsuite etc.) and tweet about something.  For our purposes you go on and announce that your company will be recruiting sales people in May.  Or you may post a tweet that says “We are hiring retail store managers” and provide a bit.ly link to the posting on your ATS.  With the push strategy, you will need a large follower base to get this message out far and wide.

There are a lot of successful organizations that use this strategy.  IRS Careers uses this strategy and they are known as one of the best Twitter recruiting organizations. 

With the push strategy, you need to have a trustworthy employee be the face of your organization.  Be careful not to post too much content.  You should probably tweet once, twice, or three times a day, but no more.  The goal is to get your tweets to the right followers and be in front of them enough that they will look forward to your tweets.  Too many tweets per day will turn these followers off.  They will either ignore your messages or stop following you at all as they will view your tweets as Twitter spam.

If you get this strategy right, your followers will be your advertising medium.  They will take your relevant Tweets and ReTweet them, giving your recruitment message the viral/social aspect you desire on a platform like Twitter.

Pull

The pull strategy is almost 100% the opposite of the push strategy.  Pull is probably the most popular of the two strategies.  Technology makes the pull strategy very easy today.  Using your ATS, job aggregator or any of the automated job tweeting services makes pull recruiting cheap and not dependant on human resources. 

With the pull strategy, you want to get as many messages out as possible.  This strategy works great for high volume recruiting organizations.  Many pull recruiters use tools like TweetMyJobs.com or a job aggregator to get their multiple daily tweets (sometime 50+ per day) out to the Twitterverse.

The secret to the pull strategy is the hash tag.  When posting a tweet for pull recruiting, you want to write a tweet that announces the job, provides a link to the job and then uses #jobs etc. to get the tweet in the right search categories.  See my article about writing successful recruitiment tweets here.  Organizations like IHG and Sears use this strategy today.

An example of a pull tweet is this:

The user does not have a large base of followers.  Instead they use the hash tags to get found in Twitter searches for this specific job type or location. 

Hybrid Approach

Lastly, there is the hybrid strategy.  Because there are many options with Twitter recruiting, don’t feel like you have to choose one of these strategies at the expense of the other.  Do keep these two strategies separate though.  You don’t want to use the push and the pull strategies from the same Twitter handle. 

Sodexo uses this hybrid approach very successfully.  The Twitter.com/sodexocareers handle is the formal voice of the company’s North American recruitment efforts, so the push strategy.  It pushes recruitment news out to its followers.  From this Twitter account, followers can keep up with what’s going on at the organization and what to expect in the coming weeks.  This handle is followed by more passive job seekers that aren’t just looking for whatever jobs are available today.  These followers may be interested in a job in the future, like when they finish college.

Sodexo also uses a pull strategy.  The company has partnered with its job board partner to tweet out job announcements that have hash tags like #jobs #dietician etc. so that the more active Twitter job seekers can view at real time what openings the company has announced with #tags on Twitter.

Whatever strategy you choose to employ, it’s not wrong.  The great thing about recruiting with Twitter is that you don’t have to stick with one strategy.  You can always change (unless you have a huge base of followers that you are ready to abandon) strategies mid-stream.  And let’s be honest, no Twitter recruiter really follows the push or the pull strategy exclusively.  All push recruiters will post a job announcement with hash tags in it from time-to-time.

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