Edit: I wanted to include the Tweet that we sent out to give you a better look at it. You’ll see it below now.
Right now, we’re actually trying to fill an opening (take THAT economy!). Since the hiring manager and I have a slight obsession with social media, we decided to try to use our online tools to find some candidates. It’s not immediately pressing that we fill it and the position requires ingenuity and creativity anyway, so we figured we’d give it a shot.
We’re not finished with the hiring process, but in the hopes of starting a series of posts, here’s what the process has looked like so far.
I started by taking a look at how job seekers might find a job using social media. Mashable has a great resource for that. To give a quick summary, it’s all about building a network of people within brands, not necessarily the brands themselves. I did a search on Twitter for #jobs and saw what others were doing to get their ads across. It’s important that the tweet have the company name in it, refer people to a job posting (so they know what they’re applying for) and be creative enough that it actually catches attention instead of staying generic. I looked in all of the LinkedIn groups I am a member of and searched through the job boards. I also knew of Job Angels through Mark Stelzner and wanted to find a way to incorporate that in there because it’s an incredibly great thing to be involved with.
We posted the job to our website as a starting point. The hiring manager and I both tweeted out the job with a link to the posting. That included #jobangels to connect with the group of folks associated with that effort. We saw a couple of retweets within the first few hours. I put it on my personal Facebook account (since we’re not quite up to a corporate page yet) and my LinkedIn account to see what might come about. I posted the job to my groups/subgroups on LinkedIn to attract some attention from people I might not be directly connected with. I also put up something on Brazen Careerist in a couple of networks. And to wrap up the first wave, we posted something to a niche job board.
We’ve seen some candidates, but nothing that’s blown us away and not in overwhelming numbers. I’ll keep you posted on our progress.
Any other thoughts on what to do? It’s a learning process here, so I’m open to suggestions.
The HR Intern 