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The Top 15 Recruiting Experts to Follow on Twitter

Take the 20 percent of US adults who use Twitter, add in 9,100 tweets per second and that equals one great big pool of people, posts, advice and information. Recruiters hustling between candidate interviews, scouring responses from job board postings and contacting clients about new talent have limited time to check out their Twitter feeds. Those who hop on periodically can get valuable recruiting advice and insight from recruiting experts — if they know whom to follow.

With that in mind, I’ve created this list of the top recruiting experts on Twitter to be a beneficial starting point for recruiters, who can follow recruiting experts, tweet them questions and use that input and advice to grow their careers. From tips on recruiting passive talent to strategies on using high-tech solutions and recruiting software, these experts do the research and pass along their best practices so recruiters everywhere can benefit. Here’s my list!

Active Recruiting Experts on Twitter

1. @greg_savage | Greg Savage

Tweets about: Recruiting strategies, KPIs, challenges and tips — such as how to manage candidates’ salary expectations.
Followers: 34,500

 2. @Blogging4jobs | Jessica Miller-Merrell

Tweets about: Recruiting and HR tactics, how to stay resilient and tips for staying organized while recruiting.
Followers: 111,000

 3. @LouA | Lou Adler

Tweets about: Avoiding hiring mistakes, pinpointing a candidate’s motivation and recruiting passive talent, including, “Recruiters, find out how to make better hires more quickly.”
Followers: 5,960

 4. @jimstroud | Jim Stroud

Tweets about: Social recruiting and finding top performers, including through internal recruitment and by seeking diversity on your team.
Followers: 21,600

 5. @shally | Shally Steckerl

Tweets about: Recruitment best practices, improving recruiting processes and how to become better at making judgments about talent.
Followers: 19,900

 6. @TheRecruiterGuy | Chris Hoyt

Tweets about: Lessons from what other companies are doing to improve their recruiting, industry news and how to recruit elusive “top talent.”
Followers: 22,800

 7. @FishDogs | Craig Fisher

Tweets about: Recruitment sales advice, insight into dealing with professional challenges and statistics such as, “80% of job seekers expect to be able to apply to a job from their phone.”
Followers: 67,500

 8. @LevyRecruits | Steve Levy

Tweets about: Using social media to recruit, the latest technologies, and recruiting for high-tech areas. He also answers questions from job seekers and recruiters.
Followers: 15.3k

 9.  @MeghanMBiro | Meghan M. Biro

Tweets about: Using Twitter to boost your business, specific social tips such as how to get the most out of your LinkedIn photos and the best use of blogs.
Followers: 78,400

 10. @bryanchaney | Bryan Chaney

Tweets about: Creating candidate pipelines, utilizing social engagement, thinking creatively to be a more effective recruiter and topics such as “Startup companies hate recruiting, how can we make it better?”
Followers: 7,994

 11. @WinningImpress | Katrina Collier

Tweets about: Specific ways to use social media to recruit, including advice about using Twitter tools, LinkedIn and other social tactics.
Followers: 2,507

 12. @Work_GR | Miles Alters

Tweets about: Insightful questions to ask candidates, how to find top talent and tactics for growing careers in recruiting.
Followers: 2209

 13. @SIADailyNews | Staffing Industry Analysts

Tweets about: The contingent workforce in North America and around the world, economic trends that affect the staffing industry and recruitment markets.
Followers: 719

 14. @mattcharney | Matt Charney

Tweets about: Conducting more insightful interviews, tightening up job descriptions, mobile job seekers and topics such as, “Why Candidate Experience is More Than Another BS Buzzword.”
Followers: 8,850

 15. @Josh_Bersin | Josh Bersin

Tweets about: Mobile recruiting, workplace culture, building a Twitter following and talent management recruiting software.
Followers: 20,200

These recruiting experts have valuable insight to share, from big picture encouragement to pinpointed tactics for using LinkedIn to find STEM candidates. By following them on Twitter, recruiters can adopt what’s relevant and stay on top of industry trends to grow their careers and their business.

Learn strategies for integrating Twitter and other social platforms into your staffing growth strategies by downloading 6 Ways Staffing Agencies Can Engage Their Social Channels

How Mobile Technology is Changing the Staffing and Recruiting Industry

The world of mobile technology has taken off, which is impacting a wide variety of industries.

how-mobile-technology-is-changing-the-staffing-and-recruiting-industry_897_521258_0_14089939_500-150x150According to the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project, 91 percent of adults own a cell phone, 56 percent of Americans own a smartphone and 34 percent own a tablet computer. Another 26 percent of American adults own an e-reader. It’s easy to say that mobile technology is taking off, but how is this change impacting the staffing and recruiting industry?

Introduction of mobile-ready technology solutions

More staffing and recruiting firms are beginning to support the inclusion of mobile-ready recruiting software and practices in everyday ways. The faux pas of keeping a cell phone out during a meeting or on a desk has been erased in many work environments. According to a 2012 survey from CareerXroads titled, “The Evolving World of Mobile Recruiting,” more than half (about 54 percent) of staffing companies are now providing or subsidizing their recruiters and hiring managers’ mobile phones as an important business expense. In addition, nearly four in five (79 percent) of recruiting companies are conducting mobile-related staffing practices to better connect with job seekers – prospects and candidates. That’s up from 68 percent in the first CareerXroads mobile recruiting survey conducted in December 2011.

Other recruiting software technologies are becoming mobile accessible to better promote efficient practices. Staffing and recruiting software is now being made to promote greater usability with an intuitive web-browser interface which is mobile accessible. Staffing professionals can target the recruiting software solutions they want to access with a few finger swipes and a click of a button on a smartphone or tablet for streamlined production. Increase productivity and boost success with a variety of mobile-ready tools that are designed with a staffing professional’s responsibilities in mind.

Making job posts accessible to mobile users

Staffing and recruiting professionals are hardly blind to the growing mobile trend, which is why more and more jobs are being posted online on mobile-friendly sites and applications. Developers are creating mobile applications that make it easy for users to search and apply for jobs from their smartphones or tablets.

“Job searching is very ‘transactional,” said Vasu Nagalingam, senior product director for Consumer at Monster. “Job seekers typically visit job boards at frequent intervals for new jobs. The mobile-savvy audience is discovering their mobile phone to be the perfect channel for this type of behavior. Supporting these changes is critical to maintaining a healthy candidate pipeline.”

Nagalingam went on to say that the next generation of workers will find the ability to apply for jobs or research potential positions right from their mobile devices especially appealing.

“The emerging workforce is a popular group of mobile Internet users,” he said. “Employers who want to target this emergent workforce should review their recruitment plans and incorporate mobile recruitment strategies to increase their recruiting efficiency.”

Mobile recruiting is changing everything about the way staffing professionals find and research qualified candidates for positions. Candidates can fill out portfolio questions, take personality questionnaires for preemptive testing and provide sample work right from their mobile devices. Smartphones and tablets even allow for recruiters to use video conferencing and recorded interviews to be embedded in staffing software and recruiting software personnel databases for later review. Recruiting software and technology is continuing to advance and change the way recruiters handle day-to-day tasks; a professional needs to stay mindful of this, while remembering key drivers behind the industry – strategic and personable staffing that achieves results.

Specify Your Mobile Staffing & Recruiting Plans Before Investing

Just because a particular technology is new and hyped, doesn’t necessarily mean its the right immediate investment for your recruiting or staffing agency.

Despite the hype, mobile technology isn’t necessarily something that should simply be tossed into your recruiting or staffing processes.  This is not to say that mobile has no place – and is not a valuable tool – only that you must first have specific goals and objectives for what it is you are trying to accomplish by going mobile.  Otherwise, this technology may become little more than just an expensive toy.

(For a consumer oriented example, think back to the Segway.   If the company had goals that were more clearly defined than – ‘be the next evolution in human transportation’ – many of us may be riding one today.)

To ensure any decision you make involving mobile is based purely on what it can help to do for your agency, here are three specific tactics mobile can help you with almost immediately after implementation.  My advice is to determine if these tactics will be beneficial to your agency, to think of more and similar tactics like these – and to develop a plan for launching these tactics – even before you finalize a plan to fully integrate mobile technology:

1. Launch a mobile friendly website:  Since smartphones are already incredibly popular and will in all likelihood continue to gain in popularity in the future, why not capitalize on the trend?  Develop a mobile website targeted at recruiting people who own smartphones – typically the younger and more tech-savvy crowd.  Make sure you’re equipped with staffing and recruiting software with the ability to capture and organize QR codes, so you can easily create a database of contacts for follow-up.

2. Conduct automated interviews.  Some companies are going as far as to conduct interviews via smartphones and tablet PCs.  Commonly, these companies will use their recruiting software to record several questions, developed especially for high-volume recruiting efforts.  Although it may be faster in screening out who might be less desirable candidates, note that an automated process may not be a complete substitute for interviews via phone or in-person.  What if a highly qualified applicant doesn’t understand a question?  Miscommunications are easily cleared up by in-person discussions.

3. Add a candidate self-scheduling function.  Self-scheduling is undoubtedly a task which would enhance workplace productivity.  Applicants could simply browse an animated calendar and add themselves to the schedule. Remember how many e-mails and how much frustration is sometimes spent working out a mutually agreeable interview time with some candidates?  Eliminate that lost time and added stress with staffing and recruiting software that allows for candidate self-scheduling.

You may or may not choose to use mobile technology in some of the ways discussed.  But, the methodology for any tactic you choose to implement (like the tactics above) – should be based on a plan first, and technology second.