I always see comments on recruiting blogs and ERE about the use of Twitter as a sourcing tool.  Twitter broadcasts about your status in short, text-based posts.  It’s a great way to stay in touch with friends and other people with similar interests.  You can even follow the postings (or Tweets) of famous people like John Mayer, Heidi Montag, Gavin Newsom, Al Gore, Lance Armstrong, or John McCain (if you’re into that sort of thing).  I, myself follow some of my favorite musicians, directors, and staffing professionals like: Trent Reznor of NIN, Imogen Heap, Lisa Nova, Michael Ian Black, Kelly Dingee, and Jim Stroud.

But can this cool, connected medium be used for sourcing?  The answer is yes! And to help illustrate, I have enlisted the services of my friend, Plugged-in Pete.  He is going to demonstrate the benefits of using search.twitter.com with the right search strings.

Click on the image below to see:


Great demonstration from Pete! By entering some simple words or phrases that a software engineer might “tweet” about, you can get yourself a geographically targeted list of passive candidates. Here’s the example of the search we used:

coding OR “source code” OR compile OR compiler OR OOP OR OOD OR “object oriented” near:”mountain view” within:50mi

Even though Twitter profiles have limited contact information, there is enough to go on so that you can track down the individuals. They contain name, location, and sometimes personal websites or company references. From this point, you take all that information and start your sourcing to find the individual’s contact information. For more help on that, see my other posts about finding people online:

People who need Pipl 1, People who need Pipl 2, and People who need Pipl 3.

Happy hunting!

- Mark

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