Does Your Employer Own Your Social Media Contacts?

By Mark Mehler and Gerry Crispin

Is tweeting part of how you get your message out to prospects and communicate with your company’s candidates? Do you drive (or ask) the people you have sourced to ‘friend you’ on Linkedin even before inviting them to join your company’s Linkedin group? It might be time to consider a conversation about whose social media accounts are in play during the sourcing, wooing, selection and onboarding of your prospects and candidates: the company’s accounts, the recruiter’s accounts or, more likely, both.

It seems companies are waking up to the customers that former employees are walking away with when they leave. Even when they leave on good terms as a recent NYTimes article about a former employee connecting to 17,000 prospective customers points out. Face it; we are a litigious society and (nothing personal but) your employer will react if they believe you (or the aggregate of many of you) are impacting their bottom line.

It may only be a matter of time before employers consider whether their Talent Community is more closely associated with current and former recruiters and sourcers than the firm itself.

While we think it best to tweet under your name for some things and separate company-related name when dealing with marketing your firm’s employment brand or responding to specific inquiries from candidates, it is difficult to separate work and personal comments.

To keep your personal tweets (and tweets about your own joy and pain at work) separate from the posting of jobs and responses to job inquiries requires discipline. But, as @Phonedog_Noah discovered in the Times article, there may not be a long-term acceptance on using a Twitter Handle that was connected to your job after your job is history. Staffing leaders need to set protocols for who owns what social media accounts now.

— Gerry Crispin and Mark Mehler work full time consulting, educating and discovering how talent and opportunity connect through emerging technology. They can be reached via email at mmc@careerxroads.com, phone at 732-821-6652, or on-line at http://www.careerxroads.com.