Take your social hiring efforts up a notch on Twitter, the world’s most popular micro-blogging site. Use these top 5 tips to improve your Twitter recruitment marketing and social hiring efforts…

Optimisation

Frequency and consistency is key, post between 5 and 15 tweets per day with a length of no more than 130 characters (leaving room for people to retweet your stuff).  Crunching the numbers from our own activity we’ve found that the highest engagement on Twitter is between 1pm & 4 pm, therefore schedule your vacancies and most important tweets during this time.

We have also discovered that CTRs appear highest when listing URLs towards the start of the tweet (before 36 characters) not at the end.

#Hashtags

Hashtags for specific topics are often searched and monitored by jobseekers to find opportunities within their specific skills and location.

Pick effective, targeted keywords to use as hashtags, generic terms such as #Jobs are used too often to be considered effective (more the 3 tweets per second contain the hashtag #Jobs). Use those specific to your requirement i.e. #DigitalJobs #PHP #DesignJobs #Dev #SEO #Shoreditch etc.  Generic terms such as #Hiring #Recruiting #JobListing #Employment are also OK to use.

Example: We are #Hiring a #PHP #Developer… <LINK>  – We offer great projects with cake and coffee on demand. #PHPJobs #Shoreditch

@CompanyCareers

Create a dedicated Twitter channel for your vacancies and careers news, this gives you the freedom to approach potential candidates and promote relevant content targeted purely at talent attraction and your employer brand.  Keep things on brand and promote content that showcases how great your company is, benefits, vacancies, company bake offs etc.

For inspiration take a look at how these companies do it… @redbullgrad / @JagexJobs / @ITVCareers / @GuruCareersJobs

Build Following

Monitor keywords, hashtags and locations in order to build audiences based around the harder skills you need to recruit for.  A useful trick is to use your geo location to discover what people are saying in your direct locality, combine this with relevant keywords and it can provide a real eye opening view of relevant local chatter.

The string used for a geo location search on Twitter is based around the following format:

skills geocode:latitude,longitude,distance

So, to search for PHP related tweets near your location use the following string, replacing the latitude and longitude (you can get your geolocation here):

PHP geocode:51.5033630,0.1276250,25km

Track Everything

Use Social Hiring Tools to identify trends and to convert twitter chat into meaningful job applications.