Why don't more companies use Twitter to hire the right job candidates?

Most companies still think of Twitter as a marketing and communication tool. As individuals, we know that Twitter can function as a kind of super-email: for instance, last week, Karie was in Denali National Park, and was staying up late to watch for the Northern Lights. She sent a tweet out at 2 am Alaska time, and by 2:10 had four responses, including a link to a YouTube video to watch as a substitute if the lights weren't visible.

We also know that there can be an opportunity cost in not tweeting: last month, Jeanne was at the Legg Mason tennis finals watching Andy Roddick lose in 122-degree heat. After the four-hour match, she wrote a tweet about it — and before she'd even left the stadium, several followers sent replies asking why she hadn't met up with them to watch the match together.

So think of the untapped potential opportunities for companies looking to source and attract talent. As social media is used inside the company to increase collaboration, communication and innovation, it's become important for recruiters to locate prospective employees who are also users of social media. Using Twitter can level the playing field so that smaller firms can find those people as effectively as the Fortune 500 do. And those companies who have turned toward Twitter have found it an efficient way to identify passive job candidates who might not be scanning job boards.

Some companies are going beyond posting tweets about new positions to using the wisdom of the crowd to actually write a new job description. Consider what happened at Best Buy when they posted a job description for a position as Senior Manager of Emerging Media Marketing. The qualifications included one year of active blogging experience, a preferred graduate degree, and 250+ followers on Twitter. Yes that's right: the number of followers you have on Twitter is now finding its way into a job description. This led to internal commentary, and spawned a number of blog posts and dozens of re-tweets and conversations.

What happened next is an indication of the future direction of recruiting: in listening to these conversations, Best Buy decided that the community had other ideas — and good ones — for how this job description should look, and what the qualifications should be. As a result, the job description was crowdsourced, and anyone with an interest was invited to post qualifications to the job role on Idea X, a forum for Best Buy customers and employees. The final job description spoke to the traits of the social media revolution we are all experiencing: humor, collaboration and authenticity. For instance, the revamped job description included a requirement that the Senior Manager "understand the following acronyms: RSS, SEM, SEO, PPC, CPM, CPC, LOL, IMHO, WTF, API, B2C, B2B, CTR, IM, PV, RON, WWW, TTYL, LMAO, ROTFLMAO, WYSIWYG and, most importantly, RTFM." It's unlikely that Best Buy would have come up with that on their own.

Welcome to the new world of recruiting, where the nascent list of organizations using Twitter and crowdsourcing to locate the best candidates includes a wide range of companies and industries: Accenture, Burger King, Hershey, Intel, Mattel, Microsoft, UPS, even the US Department of State. But is your organization on the list?

Has your company uses Twitter to find talent or crowdsource job descriptions? We hope you'll share your experiences with us here.

Jeanne C Meister is an internationally recognized workplace-learning consultant dedicated to delivering competitive advantage, innovation and improved business results for organizations. Jeanne is the host of the blog, www.newlearningplaybook.com. Karie Willyerd is the Chief Learning Officer of Sun Microsystems and has been the Chief Talent Officer or head of executive development for three other Fortune 500 firms. At Sun Microsystems, she has led the organization to win over 20 awards for innovation excellence in learning. Jeanne and Karie are the authors of the book The 2020 Workplace (forthcoming in Spring 2010).