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.
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May 26th, 2009 at 4:53 pm
Twitter is an interesting medium for distribution, and for Cool Works, we just use it as another way to drive traffic to the actual postings on our website. If you follow us (@coolworks), you’ll find REAL jobs that are available now.
I am curious about the benefits of #jobs vs. just jobs. Both show up in the search so is there a benefit to one over the other?
May 26th, 2009 at 7:53 pm
What if twitter was incorporated into a company’s employee referral program?
Meaning,
1) Find out who in your company has a twitter account
2) If you have a job in their dept, direct message them the short url
3) Ask them tweet it.
Then, anyone following them would see it…especially if they twitter about their work/skills…in addition to their love for cats…and “twitter followers” would see your job from someone they follow.
This would fall under the “trusted source” type of information distribution.
I think something has a far greater chance of becoming “viral” if it flows through “trusted sources” rather than…well…just about anything else.
Same thing with text messaging…better know me before you text me something..or I better have opted in…its a trust thing because you have entered my “personal zone.”
May 26th, 2009 at 8:53 pm
Wow Joel! You managed to get in another shameless plug for Jobing. How much have they paid you to not “report” any bad news there. Layoffs; not reported, Closing Markets; not reported. You have the credibility of a paid celebrity spokesperson.
May 27th, 2009 at 8:45 am
Forgive me for being a skeptic!
Here’s where I get thrown off – is there an advantage to knowing about a job opening three hours before an e-mail alert might arrive?
Will job tweets actually go out before e-mail alerts or will they go out at the same time?
Will it turnout that heavy twitter users (like FaceBook) also get/got lower grades in school?
How long before twitter spam rises from 20% to 90%?
More thoughts on twitter here: http://www.internetinc.com/entrepreneurs-guide-to-bad-karma-on-twitter
– Eric
May 27th, 2009 at 11:56 am
Joel,
Your post does a nice job of balancing the issues regarding how Twitter and other social media sites might play in the recruitment space. I provided some of my thoughts on Toby Dayton’s site but on the off chance that your readers might be interested here goes:
Free publishing platforms (email, wikipedia, craigslist, twitter, myspace, etc.) all have an issue over controlling who publishes. Consequently, each of those channels including, ironically, blogs (blogs and comments thereon have had their death foretold numerous times due to issues that you smartly raised in your blog and I’m addressing in comments) fall under criticism since they are notoriously difficult to search and verify. This critique always seems to appear once each of these platforms reaches millions of users and thousands of companies.
Our belief is that once these platforms scale, it’s imperative to build trust systems, ranking protocols, junk filters, relevancy algorithms, intelligent search systems in order for them to continue to function and grow. This is what we’re building for Twitter. Every day we parse millions of tweets with contextual search tools, we then put them through several different validation processes (check links, block accounts, our own tweet ranking system), we index them, we use crowdsourcing, and then we use our proprietary relevancy algorithms to present them. Twitter presents a very difficult signal/noise issue but every day our systems get better at excluding results.
We’re not a key word search engine or a hash tags engine, we’re taking on the challenge of analyzing all tweets and as a consequence we are finding job tweets from thousands of small businesses worldwide that can’t be found anywhere else plus an index of other jobs posted to Twitter. We’re also building tools for other social media sites and other categories.
Getting the right search results is hard (we look at over 1.5 billion records to find the best 10 to show) and we’re appreciative of all feedback on how we can improve them helps us build a better product.
Cheers,
Bill
http://twitterjobsearch.com
@williamfischer
May 28th, 2009 at 5:22 pm
Joel may never say a bad word again about Jobing which is all right by me because he will never truly understand what its like. Jobing.com is clearly clinging to twitter now like a flood victim clinging to tree. Sadly, still spending their time trying to be “Innovative” rather then fixing and enhancing what they already have. I am sure any day now they will be announcing yet another site revamp. How about adding more tools and features to the back end to create more value for the recruiters instead of slapping another paint job on the front end?
Unfortunately it’s too much to ask management to listen to or act on any feedback given from the bottom up at Jobing.com. A recent study was released highlighting that people value strong leadership and straight answers from their bosses more than even pay & benefits. Ironically, Jobing.com chose to comment on this topic knowing very well that they themselves have been in this very situation. http://ktar.com/?nid=6&sid=1170694
Maher knows what she is talking about but unfortunately Mr. Matos has failed to see that his incompetence while choosing GMs has cost their organization dearly. Handfuls of people have left Jobing in search of a better environment and one with a leader who knows how to solicit the input of key employees and other stakeholders in the company. One who is an effective communicator and who acknowledges unforeseen obstacles.
Clear inefficiencies, overlapping roles, wasted resources, and unnecessary activities are “big picture” issues that are under the control of the CEO and the GM and all go unaddressed. The GM’s responsibility is to monitor the overall health of the sales floor yet Jobing has been plagued with interoffice conflicts, high turnover, and an unsupported vision. That GM is a VP now! Really? What’s next corp retreats to the World Cup or the Tour De France. Jobing is a breeding ground for inefficiency, inconsistencies and favoritism which is probably because the GM and CEO have failed to do their job effectively and with integrity. Tweet all you want, your birds will keep flying the coop!
“And the Nominees for Worse Places to work are!”