Pinterest Can Help Recruiting Get Visual

When I see Alison Doyle posting on About.com how to use a certain platform for job search, I generally know its time to take that platform seriously for recruiting.  I’ve been advising recruiters and employers on how to use Pinterest for recruiting for a few months now and have been highlighting it at TalentNet Live events.  My overriding theme?  Job postings can and should be more visual.

Crystal Miller posted a great article today on TalentNetLive.com describing some ways Pinterest, the most hyped online scrapbooking platform in the history of ever, can benefit recruiting.  And on 4/17/12 on the #TalentNet Radio Chat and #TalentNet Twitter chat, we discussed Pinterest for recruiting with Elise Oras from Payscale.com.

Some interesting brands touched on in the post, like General Electric, PepsiCo, and Friday’s, do a great job of describing company products and culture.  Others do a great job of visualizing employment and recruiting like Taco Bell, Pizza Hut , Aon, and Hershey.

One thing they all share is a great visual interest element that speaks to a modern audience.  Both Pinterest, and Facebook’s new timeline format for pages, give you a great opportunity to tell your employer story in pictures.  Pinterest, because graphical is the only choice.  And Facebook, because the timeline only looks good with plenty of graphical elements.

Here are my top 5 ways to use visual interest to your recruiting advantage.

1) Make your job descriptions more graphical.  Tell the story of the job and company culture in pictures and graphs instead of run-on sentences and internal corporate language.  Maybe create a custom infographic to attach.  Use this type of job description on an alternative job listings page or blog attached to your company site.  At the very least, include a compelling photo in your job description.  Snag a job is doing this with great success: http://pinterest.com/search/?q=job+description.

2) Make it Pinnable.  Add a Pin It button to your job description:  http://pinterest.com/about/goodies/.   This way, anyone who wants to can Pin graphic elements from your job description to Pinterest and it will link back to your job page. 

3) Create a custom Pin board for your jobs.  Get creative.  Check out how Work Club created an entire Pin Board to showcase its search for a creative director: http://pinterest.com/sandozzz/work-club-is-looking-for-a-new-creative-director/

4) Use the RSS feed from your boards to repurpose that material to a Facebook page or sidebar on a blog.  The raw feed url looks like this for all your boards: http://pinterest.com/fishdogs/feed.rss, or this for a specific board:  http://pinterest.com/fishdogs/linkedin/rss.  That gets you the raw xml code.  Funnel that through something like Feedburner to create something very usable:  http://feeds.feedburner.com/fishdogspinterestlinkedin. 
Check out the example on the bottom of the side bar of the TalentNetLive.com site where I inserted a bit of code to show the TalnetNet Pinterest feed.

5) Use videos about company culture and job descriptions.  Pinterest allows you to Pin videos as well as pictures.  What better way to showcase your employer brand? 

Want more?  One of my favorite posts about the various features and marketing opportunities with Pinterest is here:  http://www.simplyzesty.com/social-media/top-tips-for-brands-on-pinterest/.

Have you found more good examples of employers using Pinterest or getting graphic with their job descriptions?  Share them here!