Applying for work in 140 characters may sound impossible, but it could land you a job. Stephanie Quine investigates how social media is mobilising the employment market and replacing traditional job-seeking methods.

It has evolved from a platform where friends stay in touch to a central component of brand marketing. It’s a place where journalists, politicians, celebrities and legal professionals all share ideas. Loved for its brevity, Twitter is used by more than 500 million people worldwide. 

When the lead partner of Deloitte Digital in Australia, Frank Farrall, needs to recruit, he looks to the popular micro-blogging site. It’s not only fertile ground for passionate minds skilled in digital technology; it can also reach an audience of thousands, even millions, within minutes.

Last year, Farrall tweeted an iPhone developer job, which was then retweeted 15 times, including to Deloitte’s @Green_Dot feed and its then 4000 followers (now 7706). Instantly, a 12,000-strong audience was generated. The result was an influx of highly-relevant CVs from well-qualified candidates within days; no money spent.

A similar thing happened for Marque Lawyers in September last year. In a week-long ‘Twitterfest’, the firm attracted potential summer clerks by posing five questions on Twitter. Wannabe clerks replied, via tweet, and the best responses were asked to email in their clerkship applications.

On the first day, managing partner Michael Bradley asked ‘what’s your favourite cheese?’. The firm was inundated with hundreds of tweets (and appalling cheese puns). More importantly, Marque Lawyers was retweeted by the Sunrise  television program to its 55,000 followers.

The short form lends itself to immediate communication that’s interactive, says Bradley. It also allows the firm to draw from a larger pool of potential applicants.

“I think it has saved us money; it’s certainly enabling us to get out to a wider audience much more quickly because previously people would have to just keep checking on the website as the only way to find out if we were recruiting,” he says. 

Getting to know you

Around the same time as Marques’ Twitterfest went viral, in the UK, media executive Alan Geere announced: “I’m fed up wading through turgid ‘letters of application’ and monstrous CVs outlining an early career in retail handling and a flirtation with the upper slopes of the Andes.” With that, he asked budding reporters to apply for a job via tweet. “What can you do? #journojob,” he tweeted.

Not everyone appreciated his strategy. Matthew Holehouse, assistant news editor at the UK Telegraph tweeted: “Why would you want to work for someone who can’t be bothered to open a CV?”, to which Geere replied: “You’ll probably never find out.”

Twitter recruitment campaigns can be hit and miss but, at the very least, they can quickly build a relationship between employers and those who want to work for them. 

Bradley says Twitter has allowed him to “really give the firm a voice [and] attach a personality or extend the personality of the brand in a really immediate way”. 

He has just finished looking at hundreds of dodgy t-shirt designs after Marques called for its latest round of clerk hopefuls to design the threads for its JP Morgan Corporate Challenge.

“We didn’t go with any in the end; we came up with our own design. Turns out we’re better at designing t-shirts than law students,” laughs Bradley, admitting it was challenging for applicants as they couldn’t use the firm name in the design.

“It’s quite tricky to try and nail someone’s sense of humour in a t-shirt design …but it was very inventive and some really quite disgusting entries,” he says.

The campaign did not achieve as great a reach as the Twitterfest, but that was partly because the firm did not promote it as actively on Twitter, its own website and through online university portals. 

While the Twitter audience is still a relatively narrow part of the population, those who tweet early and regularly can give themselves the upper hand when it comes to getting a job. An active Twitter feed or blog offers valuable insight into a candidate’s interests, expertise and ability to communicate the spirit of an idea or issue in 140 characters or less. 

According to Career Enlightenment, 45 per cent of companies use Twitter in some way to find talent. While they still have to carry out due diligence, it narrows down a better shortlist more quickly. The recruiting experience is more engaging, personal, informal and often more convenient than traditional methods.

Talkback

Social media has been under the microscope here since it exploded over Alan Jones’ comment that Julia Gillard’s father “died of shame”. The outcry led to advertisers pulling hundreds of thousands of dollars from The Alan Jones Breakfast Show on 2GB, as hundreds of people boycotted brands advertising on the show. 

Slater & Gordon, Turner & Freeman Lawyers, Telstra 24/7, Harvey Norman, McDonalds, Mazda, Sydney Symphony and Medibank were just a few of the many sponsors that suspended or terminated their relationships with the program.

Anti-sexism Facebook group Destroy the Joint doubled its ‘like’ count to more than 20,000 after Jones’ comments, triggering a broader discussion on sexism in Australian politics and discrimination against female “tall poppies” in society. 

People share with the click of a button on social media. Clayton Utz has taken advantage of this to boost its image. The firm now boasts more than 2300 ‘likes’ on Facebook and regularly interacts with potential employees through promotions, firm news, university road trips and event photos.

For the first time this year, it ran a winter clerkship program in its Sydney office targeted at third-year law students.

Catherine Craven, Clayton Utz’s graduate recruiter, says the recruitment strategy, which included advertisements inviting people to information evenings and other events, was completely run through Facebook.

“It’s been really effective; it’s given us an opportunity to have a dialogue with more students that’s not as stilted as on-campus presentations and the traditional ways that we’d recruit; because it’s more relaxed, it makes us more approachable,” says Craven, adding that she responds to questions on Clayton Utz’s Facebook page within the hour from 9am to 5pm on weekdays.

When it comes to sharing jobs among colleagues and friends, Darren Buchanan, the director of Hays Legal, says LinkedIn is the most commonly used forum, especially for senior and highly-specialised positions.

Facebook, he says, is seen more as a “true social media”, accessed by millions of people every day.

“A lot of companies are posting Facebook profiles to attract people to their company and people can comment on your company; it’s quite useful to find out how your company is perceived in the market,” he says.

Craven agrees LinkedIn is good from a referral perspective and says that Clayton Utz’s clients and markets team has focused on individual lawyers and partners profiling themselves on LinkedIn.

When it comes to junior roles, however, the firm seems set on Facebook.

“We have a particular case in the firm that requires German-speaking paralegals. So we’ve been able to use Facebook to recruit for those things, for businesses development and other shared services roles,” she says.

Risky business

Despite the fast benefits and low maintenance of Twitter, like all social networks, it’s a dangerous place to be if you get it wrong.

“As with everything else, we make it up as we go along,” says Bradley, whose humour online is working wonders for the firm’s brand so far.

Like any recruitment drive, be it through online advertising, Twitter, or an agency, it’s up to the operators; those people running the process, as to how successful it will be.

According to Buchanan, you can never really be sure what you’re looking at with an online application. If someone on LinkedIn has 475 connections, great recommendations and a stand-out CV, that doesn’t make them better than another person with 10 online connections, no LinkedIn recommendations and a scant CV.

The accuracy of some content being posted on LinkedIn, he says, is being questioned more and more.

 “A lot more thorough actions are required to take it to the next step,” he says.

 “There are also different levels of access, so the more you spend with LinkedIn the greater the access you have to skilled individuals, and so again it’s what your company has invested in it.”

The use of online job boards has been in place for many years, but few have mastered the art of recruiting via social media.

Although it wasn’t designed for recruitment, social media looks set to replace some traditional job-seeking methods.

UPS, an American global package delivery company, attributed 955 hires last year to social media. Of the 5000 employee referrals Deloitte receives each year, largely via social media, around 500 people are hired.

 Buchanan says social media can’t take the place of traditional recruiting methods, but that it can complement them.

“Companies are adopting it without really understanding how best to use it and … [they’re] finding it does bear some fruit, but realistically it’s part of a recruitment solution as opposed to being a recruitment solution,” he says.