So far, a whole bunch of you have read my first efforts at de-complicating the process of recruiting on twitter in my How to tweet a job vacancy post. This next post is specifically for recruiters, be they recruitment consultants, agencies or HR departments. Fairy dust incoming!

Bullhorn Reach

Bullhorn Reach is a godsend for busy recruiters, sure, and a great tool. You can share vacancies via your networks very easily, and you don’t need to remember to resend your tweet regularly.

The downside is that you’re sharing the same tweet over and over again. Check in regularly – recraft your tweets and vary your settings. It’s a bit annoying (understatement) when you see the same tweet for the 75th time in a month with “NEW JOB” on the front.

At this point, there are certain jobs (and recruiters) that I’m almost guaranteed not to amplify because I’ve seen the same stuff from them so many times. This definitely defeats the point of Bullhorn Reach!

Also double-check your hashtags are separated by a space. Yes, this is very basic stuff. But I keep seeing it done wrong, so do double-check it!

Check your mentions, not just your retweets

Your mentions! Check them! Another of the downsides of Bullhorn reach is that you’re not actually logging in to twitter to see how your tweets are doing. It’s hard to listen when you’re using a Bullhorn 🙂

You could be getting comments, feedback or pertinent questions to your tweets and you’re missing out if you don’t check in regularly.

Sure, you have LinkedIn and Facebook to check too – and it’s an awful lot for a busy recruiter. So use a tool like HootSuite, set up all of your accounts and then you can set aside a few minutes a day to check in without getting distracted by everything else that’s happening in your networks.

Like it or not, Twitter is a two-way communications channel. If you don’t use it as such, at best you appear clueless, and at worse you come across as a clueless asshole!

Seriously, don’t just blart all your tweets out at once!

Another pet peeve for this jobfairy is when a recruiter or a recruitment company very obviously decides to “Do their tweets” and tweets a pile of jobs at once. When you do this, you’re minimising the impact of each job that you tweet, and annoying your followers with overload all at once.

Once again there are tools that can come to your rescue. Hootsuite (mentioned above) has a scheduling tool and you can craft your tweets (and facebook and linkedin updates) and decide the best time to share them, spacing them out and maximising their impact. My personal favourite is Buffer – you just add your tweets to a queue and Buffer will tweet them according to your pre-set schedule.

Understand the value of a retweet

A retweet is not an endorsement – as so many Twitter bios say. What it is, however, is an amplification. If someone with lots of followers retweets one of your vacancies, they are seriously increasing the reach of your tweet. If, say, you have 350 followers, and I retweet you, that’s ten times the reach right there.

So say thank you! Not for every retweet, of course. But if someone is consistently amplifying what you’re tweeting, or if a major influencer with a ton of followers picks up your tweet, then say thank you!

Make sure it’s working for you

Social media can be deceptive. “Everyone is on social” isn’t a good enough reason for you to be. Make sure you know what you want to get out of it before you get into it!

Another thing to be aware of with social is that it’s not free! Even if you’re not paying to promote or advertise, you still need to be spending time on getting things right, checking in, and maintaining your presence.

If you have a clear goal, and you’re doing things right, but you’re still not getting any return from your presence or posts, it might be time to re-think things.

If you have any questions, feel free to leave a comment or send me a tweet @jobfairyHQ