Recruiting on Twitter: Overcoming the Challenges

By Jobviddy

Even though it’s a few months old, I only recently came across an article by Jennifer Miller-Merrell on Twitter Job Cards. Within her article, Jennifer links to the announcement by Dice on how they’re utilising this tool. Further searching found a press release from Monster in July detailing their launch of Twitter Cards and then way back in May last year was a blog from Work4Labs on how they were the first recruitment company to support Twitter Cards, which at that point were Twitter’s latest feature.

Whilst these articles are full of positivity for the opportunities provided by Twitter Cards, I’ve yet to find anything from a UK perspective, or indeed any wider noise from candidates or recruiters about their use of this tool.

The Challenges Twitter Presents & How Twitter Cards Look to Overcome Them

In theory, Twitter Cards make a lot of sense. Twitter is a hugely popular platform, with 271 million monthly active users, and so it’s of little surprise that recruiters have turned to it as a way of trying to find relevant people, especially with ‘passive’ candidates being regarded by many as the Holy Grail. However, the one big challenge Twitter presents is the 140 character limit. Not a lot of space to detail the role, company, location, salary, benefits etc. - let alone wax lyrical about what a great opportunity it represents. Sure, you can include a shortened URL linking to this information but without enough in the initial tweet, what’s going to encourage the reader to click through?

Adding to this challenge, there are 500 million tweets a day with the average life span of a tweet being under 5 minutes. To stand any hope of getting in front of the people you want to reach you need to be using hashtags, which are going to eat further still into the precious character limit! This competition and short shelf-life just add additional pressure for your tweet to be compelling enough to grab the intended audience’s attention.

So, with this in mind Twitter Job Cards seem like a great idea. Without taking the person away from Twitter, you can reveal further information about the role, such as the full job title, location, company logo and a snippet of the job description. This certainly provides you with a greater opportunity to create a compelling argument for why the viewer should click to find out more.

Are They Enough?

However, I have a couple of reservations:

• An increasing number of studies are revealing the importance of company culture for people in deciding where to work. Despite enabling you to increase the 140 character tweet limit, Twitter Cards are still too restricted to reveal any information about this. They make the assumption that knowing the company name, location, job role and salary is going to be enough to gain your interest. Granted, if it’s a company that works hard to broadcast its great working culture then you may be ok, but chances are many of these companies won’t be advertising on Twitter in this way anyway. In addition, given that part of Twitter’s appeal is reaching passive candidates then you have to wonder even more whether the bare minimum of information is going to be enough to entice them to click.
• People use Twitter for its short, bite-sized content. The 140 character limit is key to its appeal and popularity so I can’t help wondering whether bolting on additional information actually goes against the whole ethos of this platform. It feels a bit like a clunky solution as the current arrangement doesn’t suit our needs, despite it being what the user signed up for.

Some Other Options

On looking into Twitter Job Cards after reading Jennifer’s article I came across Work4Labs Job Cards. The whole backbone to the article, about the lack of evolution in job descriptions and how important visuals are in attracting attention – especially on social channels, struck a chord with me as this is the exact logic behind our company. Work4Labs describe this product as:

“Graphic representations of a job meant to look great in a newsfeed to attract attention, and make the job’s key info easily digestible so candidates can quickly decide whether to read more.

Job Cards are automatically generated using information available in the job description: job title, location, category, keywords, company name, and logo are used to create a collection of images that are then stitched together.”

This certainly seems a massive step in the right direction but it still doesn’t address the culture point that I make above. This is why our company is dedicated to video, and providing cost effective, easy-to-produce video job adverts to companies and recruiters. These naturally sit on all social channels and within just a couple of minutes are able to provide so much rich detail about the hiring organisation and what it’s like to work there – all in a visual style that we know is more engaging than text.

I’d be really interested in hearing your thoughts on this topic – had you heard of Twitter Job Cards, have you used them, what do you see as the benefits, do you agree with my reservations, do you see visual job adverts as being the way forward?

And if you would like to talk further about creating video job adverts, or see more about what we do, then please visit our site: https://www.theplacementgallery.com/jobviddy.aspx

This post was contributed by Andy Kerney, Founder of Jobviddy

 

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