In the history of social networks, never has a service risen so far, so fast; and never has a social network started to deliver lucrative customers to business so quickly. [JV1] Pinterest drives more referral traffic than Google+, LinkedIn, and YouTube combined. Here’s a quick start guide for you to tap into the 3rd largest and fastest growing social network in the world with little recruiting competition.
10 tips to use Pinterest for recruiting
- Add a Pin It button to your (Career) Website to allow people to share graphic content with their Pinterest followers. See how to do this here https://developers.pinterest.com/docs/add-ons/about-addons.
- Create a Pinterest account to boost Employer Branding by visualising and promoting your company culture and values. Looking for a candidate that cares about networking? Pin images of your team at a recent industry trade show. Do you want to attract team players? Consider adding images of a recent team-building event. The US Army is doing a great job here; http://pinterest.com/usarmy
- Start adding pictures and videos to your boards and link them to your website e.g. work locations. Pinterest is a multimedia channel and supports video too!
- Create a custom board with details about a job. It takes a bit creativity and planning as you cannot reorder your pins (so place lasts pin first) but when ready it reinforces your employer brand image as a first mover and innovative firm; http://pinterest.com/sandozzz/work-club-is-looking-for-a-new-creative-director/[JV2]
Or create a custom board where you place your (infographic) vacancies. It’s less work but it generates amazingly interest. My vacancies board, http://pinterest.com/jacco/vacancies/, has gained 1200 followers in a very short time without putting much effort in it. To put things into perspective, my Facebook Pages has the same amount of followers (fans) but it took many months of hard work!- Create infographic presentations of your vacancies. You can use a free tool like ResumUp.com for this or create custom-made versions via specialists such as Jobgram (getajobgram.com).
- Make use of the Pinterest RSS-feed to aggregate your Pins automatically to other social platforms such as Facebook or Twitter. The RSS-feed looks like http://pinterest.com/jacco/feed.rss, or this for a specific board: http://pinterest.com/jacco/vacancies/rss.
- Search and follow people within your target group(s). They’ll be notified that you follow them and they will most likely visit your account or follow you back. Make it easy for them to contact you directly, Pinterest doesn’t allow direct (private) contact, and make it easy to connect with you on other social media platforms.
- Share. Eighty percent of the content on Pinterest is “repinned” – that is, something that has been copied from one board to another, rather than something that has been newly uploaded. Your main aim on Pinterest should not be to protect your intellectual property. Rather, it should be to have your content shared as widely as possible.
- Forget the volume and focus on quality. You’ll find trend leaders on Pinterest, which you can find via their boards or infographic resumes.
Here are some more companies who have started with this already: General Electric, PepsiCo, Friday’s,, Taco Bell, Pizza Hut , Aon, and Hershey. Check also my Pinterest account with lots of Recruitment related pins, Visual Resumes, Infographic Vacancies, LinkedIn, Personal Branding (About Me) and more.
Good luck with this great opportunity to build your firm’s image as an innovator by being the first to use new approaches! Let us know if you have any questions, comments or want to share your results with us.