We’ve made our first hiring via Twitter. Liverpudlian Matt Watson joins us next month. He’s run a cracking blog for the last five years about his experiences as a student, most recently at Huddersfield University. We got in touch directly via Twitter. Welcome Matt you’ve got a great career ahead of you.
Recruitment via social networking: it’s the brave new world. Like traditional networking but much better. A place in the network is earned not only by who you know, but crucially through personal expertise and reputation. And best of all it doesn’t involve recruitment consultants.
PR students listen-up. If you want a fast track career in digital PR use your holiday time to get work placements and like Matt immerse yourself in the tools of your trade such as Blogger, Facebook, Flickr, Google Tools, Twitter and WordPress. Chances are that if you do you’ll have a head start on many of those that have been in the industry for several years.
I’m always gobsmacked by candidates, both graduates and those that have been in the industry for some time, that come for an interview (almost always via recruiters) at Rainier PR that don’t make an effort to look at the agency web site or our blog. They typically don’t use an RSS Reader and haven’t had “time to look at Twitter”. Bollocks. Don’t waste your time – or ours.
And to those people to whom I dismissed Twitter last year I got it completely and utterly wrong and I apologise unreservedly. I’ve now got a case study with absolute return on investment. We’ll all learning, right?
Congratulations to Matt!I think this is proof (alongside your unsuccessful interviewees) that if you’re the right person for PR you’ll always find the right opportunities. The people that ignore the tools of the trade are the people who are looking for the ‘Ab Fab’ vocation, and from what I’ve seen it doesn’t and shouldn’t exist.
Well done mate, makes sense as a way of recruiting with social media if you can’t walk the walk for yourself what chance have you got of doing it for clients.
Nice one Matt and Wadds. We just made out first new hire via Twitter last week too. It is a great way of meeting people through friend/ex-colleague’s recommendations…and DM is good for getting short succinct references too!Becks
Yes. Congrats to Matt! I think LinkedIn is also starting to become valuable for hiring too. Not only does it allow you find people with relevant skills and experience, but you can get feedback from people who actually worked with them in previous jobs. Powerful stuff. Recruitment 3.0 anybody?
Thanks guys! I’m looking forward to starting at Rainier
@escherman It would be great if LinkedIn displayed recent posts from your blog or twitter instead of simply linking to it. Also I wonder if the feedback on LinkedIn is less critical than traditional references since it’s public.
Some very encouraging words of advice there. As a recent PR graduate from Leeds Met I have keenly followed the latest trends and tools of the industry e.g. blogging, Facebook, twitter etc. Similar to Matthew I have received warm responses from consultancies resulting in offers of work and placements. I look forward to this form of recruitment being more and more common and I feel we can sometimes learn more from web 2.0 than we can in the lecture theatre. Perhaps it is time for degree courses to adapt and give students the skills employers want?
@Matthew I wouldn’t be surprised if LinkedIn don’t add something of that kind in the near future – they’ve been pretty savvy over the last 6 months in adding some very useful new features (RSS alert feeds, plus aggregating data at a company level).In terms of feedback, I was thinking more that you can use LinkedIn to get trusted introductions to people who would have worked with a candidate previously ie once you are connected, your conversation is completely in private – I agree that there is a tendency for mutual backslapping on public recommendations – but I don’t think that’s where the real future power of LinkedIn lies.
I’ve got a good story http://pr-media-blog.co.uk/youre-hiredcom/
This is a great story. I’m a Corporate Communications student here in Singapore and got internship offers via my blog as well. It’s a great time to be into social media!
It’s amazing how often the ‘next big thing’ in social networking seems utterly useless to start with but turns out to be almost infintely useful. Twitter seemed like a waste of time but it’s got people together, got others out of jail and apparently, got people jobs. New uses pop up every day and for my fellow PR pals here’s a new one: http://twitter.com/swhittle This is a tweet along the lines of Response source but independent. Have a good weekend!
Congrats Matt!!!From Mosnar Communications, Inc Public Relations Blog – AdAge Power150 List http://mosnarcommunications.blogspot.com