May 23, 2013

Social Recruiting: A New Twitter Tool for Lead Generation

Twitter is testing out a “Lead Generation Card” and I for one think its a wonderful thing. So, what does it do? From the Twitter blog…

“When someone expands your Tweet, they see a description of the offer and a call to action. Their name, @username, and email address are already pre-filled within the Card. The user simply clicks a button to send this information directly (and securely) to you.”

How cool is this?! I can imagine a client tweeting about a pending career event or webinar and asking those interested to click a button to receive future notifications in email. Oh, how easy it would be to build a mailing list of passive candidates using this!

I also like the idea of using this in connection with a hashtag. Imagine that there is a conference on biotechnology, just the people you want to recruit. (smile) You could tweet about a new whitepaper related to that industry and that you are giving it away only to your twitter followers who click a button to receive the research via email. When they get the whitepaper and read it, they see an advert for your careers website in addition to the report. (Make sense?)

Below is an example of this in action.

I think this is a GREAT idea and predict that it will be widely adopted. For now, the function is new and being tested by only a few brands, but I would LOVE to test this out for myself. Just sayin’…

Jim

How To Find Free Resumes and
Passive Candidates on Google

May 19, 2013

Social Recruiting: How To Recruit with Twitter Trends

Twitter is a website that I cannot geek without. I am on it waaaaay more than I should be but if loving Twitter is wrong, I don’t wanna be right. (Hmmm… did I just date myself by quoting that song lyric?) Well, hmm… where was I? Oh yeah! Twitter. One thing I like about Twitter is that it helps me keep tabs on what’s important to the masses at any given time. If you are a power user of Twitter (or a novice for that matter), then you know about “Trending topics.”

Just in case you didn’t know (or care), trending topics let’s you see what the most popular topics being discussed at that very moment on Twitter. Now this is great if you are an infojunky, but what if you only care about what you care about? Is there a way to see what is popular with a certain niche of Twitter users? Why, yes, there most certainly is. Simply go to the Twitter search page and use some of their advanced search functionality. For example, check out the screenshot below.

This is the search string I used –> #lrnchat filter:links include:retweets

What I am asking Twitter is to:

1.) Find tweets that are using the hashtag “#lrnchat”

2.) Return tweets that include links to some website.

3.) Return tweets that have been retweeted

Get it? I am focusing on a niche topic (#lrnchat is a hashtag for teachers discussing the education industry), asking for tweets with links will let me see what websites are hot at the moment and if they are being retweeted a lot, then I know that they are especially relevant. Make sense? I have been looking for a tool that will do this for me automatically, but have not found one yet that I like.

Here are a few suggestions on how you can leverage this trick:

Zero in on passive candidates discussing your industry.
Zero in on popular websites being discussed by passive candidates and see if you can leverage that somehow. Maybe you can pass it on to the next passive candidate you reach out to? (Hey Bob, this article was getting some buzz and I thought I would share.)
Zero in on websites that you might want to tweet yourself with the hope that it will attract passive candidates your way. It works for me. (Smile)

I would love to hear about your experiences with this technique.

Happy hunting!

Jim

How To Find Free Resumes and
Passive Candidates on Google

P.S. If you like this type of thing, you will love my book – Resume Forensics. Just sayin’…

May 16, 2013

How To Find Programmers Worth Recruiting

I was approached recently with an interesting question.

“Jim,” they said, “I need to find some open source programmers, game developers actually, but I only have time to recruit the very best.”

“Umm… un huh,” I replied.

“How can I find a programmer that is worth recruiting,” he asked and when on to say, “especially when I do not know (expletive) about programming?”

Hmm… I thought that was an interesting question. After a bit of thought, I think I came up with an interesting answer.

I directed them to SourceForge, a repository for downloading free open source software. The programmer they wanted to hire was a game developer. The project was a first-person shooter game.

Resume Forensics - How to Find Programmers Worth Recruiting

2. I found a category for “First Person Shooters” under the “Games” category.

3. Clicking that link lead me to a list of (open source) first-person shooter games. Cool! I pay close attention to which of the games was recommended the most and had a high number of downloads. Why? If a LOT of people are giving the game the thumbs up, it must be a well made (and creative) game. Can a bad programmer make a highly popular video game? Maybe, but most likely not as a game made by a bad programmer would be very buggy. Make sense?

The game I decided on was “Unvanquished” which was downloaded 15,364 times and recommended 92%, a high ratio compared to some of the other games I saw here.

4. I go to the download page, but instead of downloading the game, I click on the name of the programmer who developed it. Clicking their name takes me to their SourceForge profile page which lets me see their recent activity on the site. (Although, nothing to see there at this writing.) More importantly, it also offers me a way to contact the Programmer. I simply click “Send me a message” and I am taken to a form where I can, well, send them a message. (Its not rocket science folks!)

You have to be a member of Sourceforge to send a message, but no big deal as its free to join the site. The person I assisted really like this strategy because, well, let me count the ways.

There was a lot of software available for downloading, which meant that there were a lot of programmers they could be reaching out to.
They could target their searches to programmers who were proficient in building a certain type of application. (In our case, first-person shooter games.)
They could pre-qualify their leads based on the wisdom of the crowd. Most likely buggy software would get bad recommendations and not rank so highly, so if they focus on the “good stuff’ they can spend time on the “programmers that worth recruiting,” if I can use their words.

So, what do you think? Do you like this strategy? Please do leave a comment and let me know.

Happy hunting!

Jim

How To Find Free Resumes and
Passive Candidates on Google

P.S. If you like this type of thing, you will love my book – Resume Forensics. Just sayin’…