Social media and the staffing industry

Yeah, ok. I live on Facebook and I twitter my life away and have been doing so for a few years now. For as long as I have been tinkering around with social media, a few people find it surprising that my employer’s official social media presence (which is a part of my day job) is fairly new. Our blog is just a few months (and a few posts) old, our Facebook presence is just recently taking off, and our Twitter account, until just recently, was a placeholder for a long time. We knew we wanted to be in this space, but just like anything that involves time and investment, we had to make sure it was right for us, that it was in line with our business goals, and that we could do it right.

It’s a perpetual learning experience. And as part of that learning, I spend a lot of time watching what my colleagues and competitors do in the social media space. I see lots of things that I like and when I spot them, I try to copy and improve as needed.

Unfortunately, though, I cringe a lot more than I say wow.

I think each company has to figure out their own Twitter strategy and how they can make it work for them, but I literally cringe when I see firms using Twitter as their “free billboard” with tweets to the tone of “We’re a leading staffing firm in So and So City! Call us now with your needs!”

Lemme guess. You hired yourself a “social media expert” and they said Twitter could drive traffic to your site, so you started tweeting away with links to — big surprise — your site. Awesome.

Have you measured exactly how much traffic you’ve gotten from those tweets? Did it work? My guess is, it didn’t. But hey, if it did, please let me know so I can start doing that, too. That’s much easier than having to actually think of something relevant to say.

I’d say, figure out how you want to use Twitter first. Do you want to post jobs? Plenty of people do that. Do you want to engage in industry conversations? Yes, let’s be real, we’re all looking to promote ourselves on Twitter. But it really isn’t as simple as tweeting “I’m the best staffing firm ever. http://beststaffingfirmuseme.com.”

While I really can’t control how staffing firms use Twitter, it does affect the industry as a whole, contributing to the negative image that we are pretty much the equivalent of used car salesmen and offer little to no value. This is not to crucify anyone on their Twitter usage. Heck, I’m guilty about posting about my gastronomical adventures on my *personal* Twitter account. Twitter may be free to use, but it takes time and effort to use it effectively. How you make it work for your firm is for you to think about. Just please don’t behave like a used car sales person. It makes the rest of us look bad.

Need some inspiration? I personally like how MBO Partners use Twitter to connect with free lancers, and Shiftwise (tweeting as @staffingrobot) to tweet about VMS in healthcare, and the issues that affect the industry.

A lot of us have also established our presence on Facebook. I think this is a great way to connect with the communities we serve, giving them another way to communicate with us. If your social media expert told you that being on Facebook is an awesome addition to your web strategy, I hope they also told you that when you open lines of communication, it means just that. Open. You are exposing yourself to free commentary. The good. The bad. And yes, even the malicious. Yes, people pay attention to what others say about you, but that doesn’t mean that you should delete commentary that fall short of singing praises to your organization.

A couple of weeks ago, I was browsing through a staffing firm’s Facebook page and saw that a few folks had made some negative commentary on their page:

I was curious to see how they would handle this situation, so I was closely watching this page. I logged in the next morning and saw this:

Ok, I found it a little bit funny at first…that a couple of employees (it’s not that difficult to check on LinkedIn) came to the rescue and started flooding that post with “likes,” but it did nothing to address someone’s legitimate concern. She was feeling like the staffing firm she was working with was fully utilizing her talent. Perhaps the concern was legitimate, or perhaps the staffing firm just didn’t have the job orders she was expecting. But since the comment was deleted and was not addressed, we’ll never know.

Again, it shouldn’t be any of my business, but it does affect other staffing firms. There is a significant cross-section of contractors out there who feel they are under-valued or that the staffing firms they represent don’t really care about them. I’m sure the staffing firm in this case really does care. I mean, how could you not care? Our livelihood depends on keeping them happily working for us. They don’t work, we don’t bill. The business of it all requires us to care. And yet here was an opportunity to address it, and it was deleted. In my opinion, a simple “I’m sorry to hear that, please give so and so a call..” would have added more value than replacing it with “you rock!”

I’m not saying that comments should never be moderated. I think that there is no room for profanity in anyone’s Facebook page and I personally would delete them. But if someone is attempting to engage in a conversation using their adult words, we should keep in mind that we opened ourselves up to this and should engage.

Express Employment Professionals did just that, and I thought it was handled quite well:

I’m not here to preach the good ol’ “in social media, you have to be genuine.” And we can all be honest…we’re all making the investment in social media because we are hoping it will positively affect our bottom lines. But we also have to recognize the new realities of the web. There are lots of opportunities out there if we listen and keep an eye out for them. Companies like Dell figured this out (Google “Dell hell”) and figured out how to turn their customers’ frustrations into a mine of new ideas. I think the staffing industry as a whole can benefit from this as well, if we can get over ourselves and start listening.