SocialRank for Recruiting

Over the past few weeks we’ve been highlighting different ways brands, agencies, and professionals use SocialRank to help them with whatever their professional or organization goals are. Last week we wrote a post called SocialRank for Journalists, showing how journalists can use SocialRank to find sources for articles. Before that, we wrote a post called Using SocialRank for Local Events, highlighting the ways brands and nonprofits can use SocialRank to find people for location-based activation.

This week we want to show how companies and recruiters can use SocialRank to find quality candidates.

The first step of a strong recruiting process is often to look within your existing network of contacts. With SocialRank, we make this easy by allowing you to search your followers based on Bio Keyword and Company/Function.

Many Twitter users include words like “engineer” or “marketing” or “biz dev” in their bios to quickly sum up what they do. The Bio Keyword filter lets you search for these keywords. Easy enough.

Not everyone includes their job titles in their bio, though, which is where the Company/Function filter comes in. This filter matches the public LinkedIn accounts of your followers, so you can search for anyone with the title “Product Marketing Manager” or the company “Google” listed in their profile.

A Step-by-Step Guide to Finding Candidates

There are two ways to find candidates using SocialRank. You can either look through your own followers, or you can look through someone else’s followers (using our Market Intel product).

Finding Candidates Using Your Followers

Say you have a growing startup and are looking for developers fluent in the Python. We’d like to think that, unless you’re a snake enthusiast, putting Python in your Twitter profile is probably in reference to the programming language.

To find all your followers who have “Python” included somewhere in their bio, you simply search using the Bio Keyword filter:

It looks like I have 9 followers with “Python” somewhere in their bio. Now that I have these followers conveniently up on my screen, I can reach out to them via Direct Message (DM). Hopefully this results in good conversation and, ultimately, a new team member:

Finding Candidate Using Other People’s Followers

While the most effective way to recruit is to look within your existing networks, sometimes you need to search outside of it. There’s nothing wrong with that.

Our Market Intel product (currently in beta but contact us at Hi@SocialRank.com if you want to play with it) lets you run any public Twitter account and peruse these followers to find possible candidates. Once this public Twitter account is run, the process looks almost exactly like the one we walked through above.

Technical recruiters looking to fill a CTO position for a client will find Market Intel especially useful. You can build a robust list of potential candidates by running the accounts of highly-followed tech influencers such as @Github or @Sacca.

For each of these accounts, simply use the Bio Keyword or Company/Function filters to target terms like “CTO” or “VP of Engineering.” After you narrow down these lists, you can export them to a CSV for future use.

Unfortunately, unless these people also follow you, you can’t DM them (as per Twitter policy). However, you can Tweet at these handles, or use them as the tailored audience for a Promoted Tweet campaign.

Other Notes:

• Each profile card on SocialRank displays where a follower is currently working (“Currently Works At”) and where they have previously worked (“Previously Worked At”).
• We encourage you to get creative with your search queries. If you’re looking for a developer, for example, they might not identify with “developer,” but rather with “Rails” or “dev” or “full stack engineer” or “programmer” or “writing code by day” (you get the idea).

If you are using SocialRank in an unexpected fashion, please get in touch with us at hi@SocialRank.com! We’d love to chat.