I’m followed…I call. I’m invited…I call. I’m friended…I call.

I call, therefore I am.

Over the past few months, my little experiment has included calling up some of the people who decided to follow me on Twitter. If you’ve received one of these calls, I suspect your response was shock, followed by more shock. I’m pretty sure everyone I called told me that it was the first time someone had called them after a follow.

Call? You mean using a phone? My reason for calling isn’t a gimmick – it’s how I was weaned into recruiting and I hope I’m not being pompous by saying that I bet my call is remembered more fondly than a “thanks for following me” DM.

The impact of one of these conversations has been better than I could imagine – it was richer and more personal than back and forth DMs or emails could ever achieve…and in a far shorter time frame. I’ve done the same with LinkedIn and Facebook with the same reactions and results.

If you think social media begins with the follow followed by an inane stream of RTs and “Kudos” Tweets, you’ve simply missed the best opportunity to quickly seed a relationship. This is the cornerstone of the oxymoronic anti-social recruiting.

There’ll be many more anti-social recruiting techniques demonstrated at TRU USA in Madison, WI on April 19-20. The description of the Anti-Social Recruiting track with Jerry Albright, Scott Gordon, and me is a bit obtuse but each of us has a good deal of capital built up around social media. The one difference is the personal touch; it isn’t an “either or” proposition but each of us certainly have successfully blended traditional recruitment techniques with social media tools – and we’ll be talking and demonstrating these at TRU USA.

Remember you social media only recruiters – scars are simply tattoos with better stories.

I also plan on showing anyone who wants to learn, the complete way to use the United States Patent and Trademark Office to source and recruit technologists and scientists. If you’re interested, let me know and I’ll use your jobs as examples.