Minnesota Online Video

I have been looking at a lot of companies’ twitter accounts that are focused on their recruiting (usually the twitter account includes the words “careers” or “jobs”). It has been interesting trying to determine what companies are doing the best…according to the available public data I could find. After reviewing the public statistics and metrics of 25 of the top companies who use twitter for recruiting (that I know of), I found some goals and metrics that you might want to shoot for if you have a twitter account for recruiting:

Twitter Rank of 35,000 or less AND a Twitter Grade of 100 when you use TwitterGrader. TwitterGrader uses several factors in its algorithm, including the following: Number of Followers, Power of Followers (they have high TwitterGrades), Number of Updates (within reason), Update Recency (time between tweets), Follower/Following Ratio, and Engagement (number of retweets and citations – and power of retweeter). Considering social media is all about engagement and interaction (2-way communication), I think this is a pretty good metric. I chose 35,000 for rank and 100 for grade, because 5 of the 25 companies I looked at had at least this…and several others are close. This is by no means an impossible goal.

Twitalyzer Impact Score of at least 1.0%. This score is determined by a combination of factors as well, including the following: Number of Followers, Number of Unique References and Citations, Frequency in being Uniquely Retweeted by followers, Frequency in being Uniquely Retweeted by others, and Relative Frequency of Updates. Again, considering that social media is about engagement and interaction, I think that this is a pretty good measure of a good twitter account for recruiting. I chose 1.0% because 8 companies of the 25 met this…so it is not an impossible goal.

Total Interaction of at least 33%…this being the percentage of tweets that are replies plus the percentage of tweets that are retweets. These figures can be found through TweetStats. If potential candidates and applicants are using a company’s twitter account (jobs or careers accounts) to interact with the company and recruiters…that is a far superior account than a company that has low or no interaction. Social media is not one-way broadcasting…so I want to see replies (a conversation). Furthermore, if we monitor what is being said about our companies…we will find things to retweet. If we can’t find anything because nothing is being said about the company – then your standing as an employer is lower as well. I chose 33% because 6 of the 25 companies I was looking at had at least this amount of interaction.

Take all three metrics and out of the list of 25 companies, I still have three companies who meet all three criteria: GoogleJobs, HyattCareers, and SodexoCareers. I read the articles on ERE often and watch for who wins the annual awards, so I was not surprised to see Google and Sodexo as companies really using twitter well…but I see that Hyatt Hotels and Resorts also is doing very well with twitter. I would love to hear from these three companies to hear from them how twitter is working out for them in recruiting.

In conclusion, I would like to mention two other items I noticed about the top 3:
Average tweets per day is between 3 – 8
Percentage of tweets being about jobs is 10% or less.