Spotlight for Recruiting Professionals
May 9, 2012 

With the surging popularity of Pinterest, there are a number of ways to use the content-sharing social media website to bolster the efforts of a college recruiting program.  

Brie Weiler Reynolds, the content and social media manager at FlexJobs and a former career counselor at Emmanuel College, advises recruiters to take advantage of the “search” function to find students that might fit their hiring needs.  

“You can search by pins, boards, and people,” she explains. “Use keywords like ‘my resume,’ ‘my portfolio,’ and ‘graphic design resume’ to find leads.” 

She also recommends creating a Pinterest page to give candidates a glimpse into your organization, and its mission, culture, and values.  

“Branding [can be relatively easy] as most companies already have readily available images that show who they are and what they do, and that provide related info,” Reynolds says, adding that employers should also focus on images that reflect corporate social responsibility, corporate culture, office environment, and other aspects of the organization that may appeal to job seekers.  

She offers some examples, such as:

• Creating boards for different departments and the jobs available in them.
• Pinning events with which your company is involved.
• Pinning charities that your company supports. 

Each Pinterest account is made up of boards, which are made up of pins, making it easy to create different content areas for your organization. 

“And since Pinterest is a multimedia platform that accepts both pictures and videos, organizations that have existing YouTube or Vimeo channels with career-related videos can post them on the site,” Reynolds says.  

Like with any social media vehicle, there are pitfalls. Reynolds recommends that organizations check every picture’s link before repinning it. 

“If you’re pinning photos from your own website, you should be fine,” she notes. “But if you’re repinning a photo from someone else on Pinterest, click the links until you come to the original source. Like any fast-growing social site, scams can creep in, and every now and then, the links have been changed to lead to an unrelated and potentially dangerous site.”  

Once your organization’s page is up and safe content is loaded, how can you tell if your efforts on Pinterest are effective? The simplest way, Reynolds says, is to watch your page’s “followers” and “repins” grow.  

“Each board you create allows people to ‘follow’ it, and the more followers you have, the more people are seeing the pins within each board,” she notes. “As more people repin your pins, your reach grows considerably.”