Recruiters shouldn’t get hung up on the number of Twitter followers they have, as it is not a good measure of recruitment success.

So says Katharine Robinson, sourcing manager at Capgemini.

Robinson told a meeting of The FIRM (The Forum of In-House Recruitment Managers) in London earlier this week that the “directionless pursuit of followers” was a common mistake made by recruiters.

“Don’t worry too much about the number of Twitter followers. You can count a lot of stuff but how valuable is it?” asked Robinson.

“They might be a spambot [a Twitter user that is not a real person but an automated computer program sending spam] and completely irrelevant to the type of people you want to hire. Try to count the things that matter.”

Members of the panel went on to describe what metrics they used to measure the success of social media.

Robert Allen, talent acquisition industry team lead at Accenture, said that the crucial measure was time. He added that analysing where applications came from was also important.

Helene Williamson, group head of resourcing at BMI Healthcare, agreed that time-to-hire was a key metric. “The longer it takes the more frustrated the line manager is,” she said. And she advised the audience to compare how long it takes to do their social media recruitment against other channels.

Katie McNab, talent acquisition change lead (Western Europe) at PepsiCo, said that measuring engagement with your brand was a good thing to do. For example, how many people say nice things about PepsiCo and how many respond.

However, she added “ultimately” she was a recruiter, and therefore the number of hires from social media was the key measure. “Sixty per cent of PepsiCo’s UK hires came from LinkedIn. It has paid for itself and then some,” she said.