Looking for an innovative way to stand out from the competition?
A new trend that combines employer branding with a unique candidate experience could revolutionize the way you interact with students online.
It’s called the Twitterview and, in its purest form, eliminates resumes and applicant tracking systems from the hiring equation altogether.
A Dallas-based promotion agency called The Marketing Arm is launching one of the first ever Twitterview-only intern hiring campaigns on Monday.
Candidates aren’t required to submit a resume or apply through an ATS – instead, they’re being asked to:
- Follow @themarketingarm on Twitter
- March 4-8 be on the lookout for one daily #TMATwitterview question
- Tweet back with a killer response for each question
Basically, these Twitterviews will be used as first-round interviews and the students who respond with the best tweets will be selected as finalists.
Why Twitterviews? In an interview with USA Today, the 22-year-old TMA employee who hatched the idea said, “We’re meeting our potential talent where they live. What’s more relevant than Twitter to our interns?”
Twitter is particularly relevant to these five internships, which include an Agency Communications role and a Consumer Engagement role for an airline.
The agency is prefacing the Twitterview with behind-the-scenes photos and interviews on a special Tumblr blog to allow potential candidates to get to know the company before they participate: “Before we find out more about you, it’s only right we tell you a little about ourselves. Come back daily to learn about our agency, our work, and our culture to see what makes us tick and get the inside track on your competition.”
While the Twitterview has its limitations – for example, it’s only ideal for evaluating candidates for a small number of roles for which being Twitter-savvy is a requirement – there’s no doubt that we will be seeing more and more of these next generation employer branding and social media interviewing strategies in the coming years.
For example, MasterCard Canada’s annual “Social Interview” campaign for summer interns by MacLaren McCann, which first launched in 2011, was one of the first to make social media part of the application and interview process. Last year, students voted it the Best Online Campus Campaign in the TalentEgg National Campus Recruitment Excellence Awards.
In his presentation at the TalentEgg National Campus Recruitment Excellence Conference on May 14, 2013, in Toronto, MasterCard Canada’s Director of Digital Marketing Kobi Gulersen will take campus recruitment professionals behind the scenes of their innovative campaign and reveal some of the results from year two. Tickets are available now: register to attend today!
Would you ever make the Twitterview a part of your hiring process?
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February 28, 2013 at 2:17 pm
This is a very cool concept. I think the key takeaway here is that it’s okay to break from your recruiting norm. There are often better ways to recruit for specialized positions like this one. Like you called out, the limitation here is that this wouldn’t be the best way to recruit for many other positions at TMA. This leaves companies trying to balance the best way to hire for every position, or a solution that’s less than perfect, but works uniformly and is therefore cost effective.