I’ve been bullish on Twitter since last year when it quietly became the No. 6 driver of traffic to this site. And I haven’t wavered. Today, it’s the No. 2 driver of referral traffic to Cheezhead.
In its evolution, however, the site has gone from microblogging platform to a real-time search engine and, in a growing number of cases, the backbone of entirely new businesses. Start-ups of real promise developing an almost foreign language of hashes and at-signs. I can’t declare complete understanding, but winds of change are certainly blowing.
Most notable among these would-be players in our space is Splits.org.
In a 3-part series entitled The Twitter Revolution, industry icon John Sumser declared Splits.org “profound and revolutionary.” Started by Jason Davis of Recruiting.com and Recruiting Blogs notoriety, as well as Miles Jennings, founder of TalentBar, the site empowers recruiters to partake in, well, splits. Described nicely by Sumser, “In recruiting, a ’split’ is when one recruiter finds the job and another recruiter finds the candidate.”
“We started the site to provide recruiters a simple way to partner up and make placements together,” said Davis. “The idea originally was to just adopt #splits as a hash-tag on Twitter because it was not being used and ’splits’ is a common word for third party recruiters who work together.
“Based on that idea, we developed a basic data entry system into Twitter. There was a lot of interest, so we fine-tuned the service and built-in the ability for a user to really authenticate into their own Twitter account. Now it’s the fastest way out there to communicate that you have a candidate, need to split a job or just want to do splits with other recruiters.”
With Twitter as the engine, recruiters can input a search query to find matches for specific categories and locations. By using hashes and keywords, a unique lexicon is created that supports this modern day bazaar.
“The response has been great,” said Davis. “On day one, hundreds of recruiters used the site. People are connecting and we hear a lot of positive things about it. We’ll keep listening to what recruiters think of the service and continue to make improvements to the site in the coming months.”
It’s doubtful a handful of companies out there are all that excited about this phenomenon, however. Bounty Jobs and Dayak, to name a few, make their living on bringing people and opportunities together in a similar fashion. Since Splits.org is a free option, well, you get the idea.
Davis downplays the threat, saying “Splits.org is very different from a Bounty Jobs or Dayak because they are big systems that control the way communication gets handled. We just rely on the technology to make the introductions and don’t want to do more than that right now.”
Note the “right now” part.
Splits.org is actively seeking investment capital with the hopes of taking things to another level. A little funding to go along with the communal power of Recruiting Blogs could pack a nice punch.
“Recruiting Blogs.com has always been about serving a community of recruiters and getting people together,” added Davis. “Splits.org is a natural extension of that philosophy. We want Splits.org to be the simplest form of real-time recruiter communication on the Web.”
See Also
How Recruiters are using Splits
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May 5th, 2009 at 3:46 pm
I think we will see many different sites in the future make their way to the surface that allow to use Twitter variables to help many different industries. I agree with the author when they say when Twitter was first getting started but it is definitely evolving right before our eyes.