Recruiters & Social Media – Love/Hate or Love/Love?

The most frequent comment I hear from recruiters when we talk about social media is that it takes too much time… they are super busy finding candidates and filling reqs and don’t have 2 -3 hours a day to spend on social channels, updating their statuses and sharing information. While I agree that it takes a bit of time up front, once you have all your social profiles completed you really only need to spend 30 minutes a day monitoring and updating them. 

I’m all about automation to save time.  My favorite tool right now is Buffer App.  This is a free tool that allows you to schedule up to 10 articles at specified times of your choice.  Use this scheduling tool with Feedly.com or whatever reader you use and set your updates to your social networks in advance.  By using a reader you can follow blogs and online papers like Mashable, TechCrunch, Fortune, VentureBeat, INC.com, Wired, Engadget or any of the many, many other great publications.  Then use RSS feeds to your reader or Outlook.  You can quickly scan and click on interesting articles and then use Buffer App to schedule sharing via Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook. 

HootSuite or TweetDeck are great tools to manage social feeds and schedule postings.  I use HootSuite and have linked it with my Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn Feeds.  I have tabs for each stream and can schedule posts to all of these networks, multiple times.  It’s easy to post your current job openings directly from HootSuite.  You can also schedule them to recur every week and keep them at the top of your social profiles. 

Use your downtime and leverage mobility.  While you are waiting, pull out your mobile device and check your social feeds and retweet, share, like and repost articles that you find valuable.  I’ve spent many hours at the salon, doctor’s office, auto repair shop, coffee shop or restaurant catching up on my Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn feeds and sharing content from them. 

If you decide to automate (and I hope you do) remember that it is best to read the content that you want to share first and then share with your network.  If you allow the tool to pick the content, you might end up sharing content that is not relevant to you or your network.  People follow you for a reason and you should be sharing what you consider valuable information.  If it’s not valuable to you, it probably won’t be valuable to your followers.  

Technical Difficulties

In our world of high tech: blogs, video chats, LinkedIn, Facebook, twitter, etc. What are we supposed to do when our technology lets us down? Soldier on? Not likely... I’m more the freak out and run around with my hair on fire type. Hup two three four... get out of that fetal position and make the best of it! Ummm Hummm.... I know, right?

Sooner or later it happens to us all... the best we can do is... keep on keepin on, make the best of a bad situation, gittin jiggie with it... OMG! How many more Soul Train references can I come up with?

In case you haven't guessed, I was the victim of technical difficulties this afternoon. We were presenting a video chat at work today on our Facebook page and right after we started our computer crashed. Being totally prepared, we quickly switched to our back up computer, and realized the video camera wasn't working. We diligently pressed on and continued with the presentation. Just a few minutes later the network at work went down... arrrgggghhhhh!!!!

Somehow we managed to keep the voice up and running along with the PowerPoint and we were able to finish the chat and limp away licking our wounds. The moral of the story... you can never be over-prepared (and next time we will run the chat with multiple admins stashed away at hidden locations) I'm not saying it's a cave in Afghanistan but... this next time the SAT phone stays on! Stay tuned... more to follow... same bat time, same bat channel.