Social recruiting can be social marketing too

{ 03/25/2011 @ 8:55 am } · { Effectiveness, Recruitment, Social recruiting }
{ Tags: Recruitment, Social Marketing, Social Recruiting, Twitter }

Doing the rounds community managing our Social Recruiting Twitter accounts yesterday, I came across a conversation in a stream wishing that one of our retail clients had an online store to buy from. It was just a random tweet. The client’s marketing Twitter didn’t pick it up as they’d ‘clocked off’ earlier in the evening. So, taking off the recruiting hat, I tweeted that they did with the link to their e-commerce site – after all, recruitment is about promoting the business as much as any vacancies, right? Within 15 minutes, received a reply saying they’d placed an order. All of this between 10.30 and 10.45pm.

Now that person will probably never want to work for this retailer, but they may know someone who will. As it happens they are a magazine and radio journalist, I discovered afterwards, so that could work in our client’s favour at some point. Plus the brand reputation of our client has gone up a notch, all for an ‘out-of-office-hours’ tweet. Bi-winning, as Charlie Sheen would say.

It’s another small, but we think powerful, example of the benefits of utilising social media channels for recruitment. Especially, to all those nay-sayers and ostriches out there who don’t think (or want to ignore) that people will connect with ‘recruitment accounts’. Or that they’re far too much of a risk as you’ll be overwhelmed with negativity to the brand.