No matter your take on privacy, people are using services like Foursquare to track their check-ins, get perks and let their friends know where they are at. And we know that some companies are using location based services to source and recruit.
Up until now, the way to use it was sort of clumsy. Encouraging employees to check-in to work? Track down potential recruits? Sure, I guess.
But last week, Foursquare announced that they added some new features that should make any sourcer’s mouth water a bit.
Updates and location page
Especially if you do retail or hospitality recruiting, one of your better (and likely untapped) resources are your regular, loyal customers. And while you can do what Amazon did and plaster your message on your home page, there are more subtle options.
Enter the first of Foursquare’s new tools: updates. Businesses on Foursquare can now send out proactive messages. And according to a post on social media news site Mashable, it will allow brand managers to either send it across all of their sites or allow them to tailor them on a location-by-location basis.
You will be able to incorporate an image plus 160 characters of text in your update. Best of all, people checking in will see it prominently displayed while your best customers will get the update in their news feed on their phones (alongside their friend’s updates as well).
I don’t have to connect the dots here. If you have an opening in a specific store or if you have a broad hiring initiative company-wide, this is the perfect tool to use in order to get the word out to those people checking in and already invested in your customer brand.
It will also incorporate brand specific pages for businesses to use that will incorporate content posted about your company as well as a collage of the people who like your company and some branding opportunities with banners and content. It probably won’t drive much to begin with but is something to watch out for.
Stats dashboard
Maybe the most interesting thing is that Foursquare is rolling out a dashboard for companies that will give insight into who is checking in to your business locations. While some of the usage and check-in stats might be interesting to your marketing and business units, the more interesting thing for sourcers will be an easier peek into who is checking into your venues. According to the report from Mashable:
Business owners can see total check-ins, unique customers, people who like your venue and people who like your updates. Clicking “View Report” pulls up day-by-day stats for a deeper dive into the Foursquare — and by proxy, buying habits — of your customers. You can see how many check-ins get pushed to Twitter and Facebook, as well as the number of first-time customers.
In practice, this might not be as smooth as advertised but getting this easy visibility into who your customers (and potential candidates) are is a big deal if you’re using or considering using Foursquare for recruiting.