Twitter is a great place to snag hidden candidates especially those in technical fields who are hiding from recruiters and have deleted their profiles from LinkedIn. I’m always a little surprised that Twitter isn’t utilized more by recruiters especially recruiters who are focused on technical recruiting. They still rely on the tried and true method of sourcing on LinkedIn or the post and pray. Using Twitter is an enigma and is still very new. It really shouldn’t be. Twitter is free, and we make it more complicated than it has to be.
The competitive hiring market is alive and well especially in Silicon Valley where job seekers are increasingly becoming more frustrated as extremely aggressive recruiters are mass emailing and cold calling candidates even though they are not qualified or even looking. Qualified candidates are so scarce especially those of a technical nature for those experienced in Hadoop, Java and NoSQL.
To demonstrate, a quick search on Dice’s Open Web product for keyword “Hadoop” shows that there are 25,707 Hadoop professionals within the US and 9,660 of those professionals are within a 50 mile radius of San Francisco. I guarantee every technical recruiter in Silicon Valley and the Bay is aggressively hunting for these same 10,000 Hadoop candidates and only a fraction of them <the candidates> are on LinkedIn.
The solution is easy. It’s Twitter to build a list to engage the technical candidate and professional community.
Twitter offers recruiters a great opportunity to engage and focus on relationship recruiting targeting their time, effort and conversations on candidates who are sharing content or are engaging with communities of people without identifying themselves in their profile that they fit your candidate profile. Learn more about how to recruit and source on Twitter here.
Best Practices to Recruiting Technical Talent on Twitter
With Twitter’s new profile and Leadership Cards, it is finally becoming a place that is designed for optimal recruiting, and it’s about time especially since Twitter has been the third most popular search engine on the Internet for over three years. Recruiters can finally use 140 character tool to feature and promote jobs and specific tweets while targeting specific groups. Frankly, I’m excited and as a recruiter you should be too.
Twitter’s new profile and changes are still rolling out, but you can take advantage of the great recruiting opportunity that the social network presents by checking out this infographic detailing 16 of Twitter’s current recruitment hacks.
Have a hack you care to share? We’d love you to leave a comment below.
