How to leverage social media to attract a recruiter’s attention.
We all know the drill. You send the first recruiter email, wait 3 days. Nothing
Firing off another after 5 days, nothing. The Hail Mary comes next, wait 5-7 days, send…then give up.
There is a better way with social media, including LinkedIn and Twitter. Never on Facebook.
The recruiter keeps ghosting you
You’re perfect for the open position. Sending a nicely worded email or cover letter with your resume, besides applying online, seems like a great idea. Waiting becomes painful since you know the job has your name all over it.
Hearing nothing, you try again in 3 days. Nothing again. You try one last time, then give up.
The problem is you never caught the recruiter’s attention because you never “added value” to them. It’s a two-way street. You can’t ask for something without giving something in return.
Use LinkedIn and Twitter
Did you know that every time you like, share, reshare, or comment on someone’s LinkedIn post or tweet, the social media SEO algorithms push the post/tweet (“post” from now on) to a larger group of people? Action leads to a wider distribution, which leads to more action and more distribution.
If you follow the recruiter on LinkedIn or Twitter, you will see their posts in your newsfeed.
However, even if you didn’t catch the post in your newsfeed that second, you can go to their LinkedIn profile or Twitter account and see what they posted. Make a list of the 25 most important recruiters or individuals with whom you want to connect on these social media platforms.
Once you see a post, read it, and make a comment (vs. just liking the post) since commenting is more effective for a wider distribution of the current and future recruiter posts. You are increasing the recruiter’s “social media capital”.
So, you have actually done the recruiter a favor by pushing out their blog to more people on social media. You can even share the post with your network and mention something about the post.
In fact, don’t just comment once, but comment on the comments of the same post. Each time you post or comment, LinkedIn/Twitter notifies the recruiter. Better yet, ask the recruiter a smart question, forcing dialogue. Don’t forget to share the post!
Restart your original email campaign a week later, and you will have greatly increased your chances of some love. To learn how to comment and like, check out this LinkedIn article.
My fixed income trader client Rob wasn’t feeling any recruiter love
Apply, ghost, email resume, ghost. Rinse and repeat. Rob was a spectacular trader but never realized that he was missing one side of his job search trade.
He never realized that although in trading you have two parties involved, he was ignoring the needs of the recruiter by only using one-way communication. He never really used social media much, so didn’t connect it with his job search.
Why should the recruiter respond to Rob when many others know the social media tricks of the trade and show more innovative communication techniques?
We put together a list of 30 key recruiters
We put their names, companies, LinkedIn profiles, and Twitter handles on a spreadsheet. Rob then checked LinkedIn/Twitter 2x per week for posts, covering half the recruiters on Monday and the other half on Thursday.
Every time a recruiter posted, Rob read the post, and any related article. Thinking about something clever to say, he liked the post and commented. When someone commented, he commented again, especially when the recruiter commented on anyone’s comments.
He started asking the recruiter to further comment or clarify their post, forcing a dialogue. Sounds weird? So is interviewing.
It’s like badminton, back and forth.
Since most marketers know you must create 7 impressions before you get attention, after a couple of weeks, we got what we wanted.
The recruiter finally responded to his second round of email campaigns and the rest is Citi.
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