Social media is entering the work place in more ways than one, including certain job requirements. A recent posting for a Senior Manager, Emerging Media for Best Buy listed among its preferred qualifications at least 250+ followers on Twitter.
This particular job opening was announced on Twitter and became the tweet heard round the recruiting world – primarily because of that one bullet point.
At least 250+ followers? Although I can’t boast a stat like that (yet!), I also don’t approve everyone that wants to follow my tweets. It’s relatively easy to generate quite a “following”, but not so easy to have a following that’s truly engaged in what you have to say.
The resulting buzz generated quite a novel response by Best Buy’s CMO, Barry Judge. On his blog, Judge acknowledged the resulting commentary and revealed, “It seemed to us to be a natural progression to get the community involved in crafting the job description and qualifications. So that’s exactly what we’re going to do.”
They turned the table, or the keyboard, over to all of us out there who had a thing or two to say about their job posting to help craft a better job description. Judge continues, “This role is a new one for us as it likely is for other companies. So instead of thinking we know it all, we’d like to increase our chances of getting it right by surveying the wisdom of the industry.”
Those who wanted to take a shot at the rewrite were directed to submit a draft through their Best Buy IdeaX site – a website dedicated to ideas on making the company better. All submissions have been entered and are now ready for voters to select what they think is the best entry. (Click on the job description tag on the site to view and vote.)
What a smart move. As I noted above, my opinion is that engagement is a key component to successfully using social media – particularly as a marketing tool, and that goes for marketing a product or a position. There’s no question that’s what Best Buy is doing here. Strong marketers in emerging media now have this job on their radar and I’m excited to see the results.
