Curiosity killed the cat, and grew the recruiter – Part II

Two weeks ago, I started sharing with you my journey in the world of recruitment influencers and how I learned from them. Truth be told I had an ulterior motive.

Six weeks ago, I set the recruiters at Next Generation with an upskilling program in social media and inbound sales. The first task of the program was to find 5 Recruitment | Talent Acquisition | related subject experts on social media.

This at first glance easy task, turned out to be quite difficult for some people, so instead of giving them internally a spreadsheet of people to follow, I decided to write an article about it so other (junior or not) recruiters could benefit from it. And lo and behold, the click-fest and follow-fest that I expected did not happen.

"Oh, but I did read your article!" 

A couple of days ago, someone posted on the Recruiting brainfood’s Facebook group, asking for the Top 5 TA influencers.

90 comments later, I’ve learnt 6 things:

  1. We do like a good list.
  2. We all disagree on who should be in the top 5
  3. Your usual suspects in the top 5 influencers are usually the ones with marketing money and something to sell to you
  4. TA influencers are a disastrous example for D&I (most of them are white men based in native English speaking countries)
  5. Our top 5 TA influencers have not recruited in years
  6. I am way too shy to contribute the list I wrote to such a large audience of my peers


So where does that leave me?

1.     There’s a bunch of TA people that I follow and interact with, that focus on different areas, and that share interesting stuff and that I could not rank if my life depended on it.

2.     From an L&D perspective, my team is following 0.5% of them.

3.     From a personal perspective, I have huge impostor syndrome.

(Remember how TA people love a good list?)


I have put together a bunch of (interesting or funny) recruitment-related tweets from people that I find interesting enough to follow on Twitter. This way, you don't have to believe me, you can see for yourself the sort of content that is shared on the platform.

But before we go into that (or you can just scroll down), here is some random stuff I learned while researching this:

  • D&I is dead in that list.
  • How many "Matt" do I follow, seriously?
  • Women seem to be more likely to be using a pseudonym even when their Twitter account is largely focused on recruitment (The Sourcing Hat, (formerly) The Sourceress, Mistress Mousey)
  • The women I follow seem to be more likely to be propping other people’s content rather than promoting their own.

Obviously, these are random findings on a small data sample, so I’ll have to investigate more and maybe write another article about it...

Without further ado, let me introduce some of the content I enjoyed reading and I hope you’ll enjoy it and learn as much as I do every day, thanks to these (TA | "talent acquisition" | recruiting | recruitment) (influencers | experts).

Hung Lee

John Vlastelica
As I'm writing, I'm listening to "The Shortlist with John Vlastelica" and I agree; hiring managers that do no suck do make me happier as a recruiter.

Râleur Suisse

Lars Schmidt

Amy Miller

Jerome Ternynck

Mark Lundgren

Matt Buckland

Nicolas Revol

Adam Karpiak
He tweets out-loud what we're all thinking quietly.

Jessie Caudron

Jean-Marie Caillaud

Matt Charney

Guillaume Alexandre

Tris Revill

Guillaume Lhote

William Tincup

Dave Hazelhurst

Resisting Jobcat

Craig Fisher


And last but not least, the blog post I asked my whole team to read by Greg Savage