I frequently hear hiring professionals debating the value of Twitter as a hiring tool. The space is replete with thousands of social media experts who feel you should tweet but are often maddeningly short on details when it comes down to the specifics.
In my daily life, Twitter has been a tool that I use to promote myself, my company, my events, and thought leadership about recruiting and quality hiring. That's a lot of purposes for a 140-character-limit platform! Being a good citizen of the Twitter world seems to require of me (still feeling it out, of course) a balance between offering good information, responding to interesting messages and friends, and, yep, throwing out the occasional job opportunity.
I find that Twitter works especially well in the IT space, where a lot of engaged discussions go on with regards to open source technologies and programming languages. It's like walking into a room of experts who can probably point you in the right direction and announcing a need for help.
But probably the most intriguing thing about using Twitter--and status updates on LinkedIn and Facebook for that matter--is the space limitation. It reminds me a great deal of how classified ads worked--or still, work, I suppose, though I can't imagine anyone in the IT space still paying much attention to the printed classifieds.
One of the endemic problems of moving job advertisements to the online world was something that seemed like a huge benefit at first: the lack of limitations. Suddenly, it was five times more cost effective to write as much as you wanted in a job description and have it posted online. Isn't that great? Unfortunately, the lack of writing strictures has brought us to a place where economy of words and careful description has gone away. Look at any job board and you'll find thousands of horribly written position descriptions that are geared more toward Human Resources departments than the job seekers they ought ot be aimed at.
Position descriptions as they exist on the boards and on corporate web sites today consist of endless bulleted lists; obtuse, vague, trite or inaccurate descriptions; legalistic jargon; and exclusionary requirements. These descriptions have the effect of convincing the potential hire that a company is asking for too much specialization (a purple squirrel hunt is what it's called in the recruiting biz).
It's no wonder that hiring professionals are now looking at Twitter with a bit of a jaundiced eye. It would require us to get back to the business of writing a compelling, intriguing description of an available position along with a clear call to apply. It does not bore us with endless bullet points (like in PowerPoint, all bullets in job descriptions probably ought to be banned), nor does it exclude, nor does it stultify the company. Tweeting an interesting compelling position description that drives someone to my web site to apply or to ask me direct questions about my work opportunities is a welcome addition to the recruiter's arsenal.
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