Jason Davis can barely control his enthusiasm. The cofounder of Splits.org and the new owner of HashJobs.com is bullish on Twitter as a job search and distribution tool.
“This should scare the hell out of sites like Monster and Indeed,” says Davis. “Just go to Twitter and do a search on #jobs. It’s a channel for job seekers to go for openings, and it’s all free.”
Stop us if you’ve heard this end-of-job-boards stuff before. But he may have a point. Job boards by the boatload are dumping job content into Twitter, and it includes many of the names you already know, like Jobing and JobCircle, two of the more aggressive Twitter distributors in addition to the slew of Twitter job search sites.
Does it work?
“We are seeing an average of 20-90 clicks per job posting, with a certain percentage (probably 10-15 percent) being bots and URL checkers, and we’ve seen a fair occurrence of jobs picked up, retweeted, and we’ve seen people talking about our brand,” said Joe Stubblebine, CEO of JobCircle. “We also tweet out 3-6 career articles a day, and those also get retweeted fairly often. We’re just leveraging Twitter as another way to reach out, gain exposure, and build brand.”
Historically conservative Classified Intelligence is even giving Twitter a thumbs-up via their recent annual report. “Yes. We really mean it,” reveals the study. “Post your jobs – some of them, at least – through Twitter … Ordinarily, we’re not big fans of the latest fad – of jumping into something that will be here today and gone tomorrow.
“And to a degree, we think Twitter may just be today’s fad. But! Read this Twitter-gram not as a statement ‘you must be on Twitter tomorrow.’ Rather, read it as a recommendation – no, a promise – that if you’re not going where your users are going (job-seekers and advertisers), you will be irrelevant. And employers and job-seekers are using Twitter. So you’d better be there, along with anywhere else your users are. If they jump in, you do too. If they jump out, you do slowly.”
Not So Fast
The elephant in the room, of course, is a little something the kids like to call spam. It’s done its best to disrupt everything from e-mail to search to Digg to Craigslist and the like over the years, and Twitter is going to be no different. The day when multiple sites are set-up and tons of jobs are dumped and redumped into Twitter with #jobs and everything else, is, well, likely already starting to happen.
A recent smackdown post on the whole Twitter phenomenon by Diggings’ Toby Dayton helps clarify. “As just a small test of Twitter, I searched for Creative Director on Twitterjobsearch.com. There were 6,000+ search results. I scrolled down a bit and clicked on advertischicago’s job for a creative director/Art, and was taken to AdvertisChicago’s Twitter page. After clicking on the same job again, I was taken to Indeed.com’s page, where I discovered that the job was no longer available on Oddskills.com, the original source of the job listing.
“So after 3 clicks, I found that a job that was tweeted about only 2 hours ago was no longer available and that the listing itself had traveled through 4 places. This was the first job I clicked on, and the experience was just as useless as any job search on Indeed, SimplyHired, Monster, CareerBuilder, or any other jobs site that has old, outdated, and duplicative job listings, and/or fake/fraudulent/scam jobs.”
To counterpoint, Davis says his HashJobs is a different animal. “We can control the accounts that get approved or not. We can block accounts from posting or possibly even give more weight to trusted sources.”
We’ll see. I tend to side with the whole thing eventually getting overrun with crap and turning job seekers sour to the whole thing turning them to connect with companies directly. Google, probably the best clutter-cutter we have at the moment, will be the biggest winner (or are social networks more trusted these days?). It’s just the nature of the Web. That said, there’s nothing that should be stopping employers and job boards alike from leveraging this channel while the good times last.
This post was written by:
Joel Cheesman - who has written 1412 posts on Cheezhead Recruiting News and Opinion.
One of the most widely-read bloggers on emerging recruitment issues in the world. Accomplishments include being named Recruiting.com’s Best Technology Recruitment Blog and Best Recruiting Blog. Joel's been featured in Fast Company magazine, BusinessWeek Magazine, Resumes for Dummies, U.S. News & World Report, The Wall Street Journal and more. Plug into Joel via Twitter, MySpace, Facebook, iTunes, YouTube or Flickr.
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