Thanks to everyone for what has been an amazing response to my recent post about Twitter as a “Job Cloud” . There were so many comments I’ve decided to group them into topics and address them together. Here are the four main themes-
We’ve tried it and Twitter doesn’t work as a Job Board
That doesn’t surprise me and certainly doesn’t disprove the concept in any way. Things always develop over time and the picture may be very different in a few months. The sheer number of people who have told me they have tried it and it does work would indicate there is much potential here. Also it’s important to look at all the variables. If it didn’t work for you could it be something to do with the way you posted the jobs, the timings and quantity of your feeds, the quality of the landing page, the keywords, the employer brand or indeed the jobs themselves? As the successful case studies emerge so will the best practice needed to get results. I would suggest that would be a much better point at which to have the debate about whether it works or not.
Twitter isn’t a mass market tool
I agree. However the concept here is of Twitter as a massive open database of jobs. Yes a lot of people will finds jobs on Twitter itself but most will get the content via other third party tools and sites. The real question is whether those third parties will get the mass or niche market penetration required to make the Job Cloud work
Twitter will never replace the skills of recruiters
I never said it would, I’m talking here about the distribution of job posting content
HR won’t be able to get their head round it
A good point but I’m not sure they will have to. I would suspect that a lot of the work will be done by their existing suppliers (ATS, Web Agencies, Ad Agencies, Job Boards and Job Posting tools) and that Twitter integration will just be automatic add on.
There seems to be so much interest in the Job Cloud concept that I’m keen to investigate further. I’ve started to map the Job Cloud “Ecosystem” by researching which companies are offering Twitter based job services. I’ve been contacted by several already but would urge any others to get in touch if you want to be part of the study. I will publish my results soon.
March 1st, 2010 at 7:21 pm
Hi Matt,
I believe twitter job sites like Twitmyjobs and twitajob will play bigger role in future. Even all job boards will have their skill specific twitter channels.Twitter search will also become a fav place to find job.
I have posted my detailed opinion on this matter in my blog. Please go through it and give your valuable inputs.
March 1st, 2010 at 10:42 pm
Matt
Call yourself a guru? Surely you are pandering to the nay sayers by even writing this post. Twitter is the future of all comms and it will kill off SMS, e-mail, VOIP, even the good old fashioned telephone
Remember when job boards started? Same story! Even new job boards get the same. I remember having to stick to a new retail job board for 9 months before we got any hires but it paid off in the end and, they made it worth our while to stick with them; and remembered it in future price negotiations.
I think the more interesting aspect is the overall job cloud ecosystem which will be more than a simple jobs database but an intelligent, we’ll find YOU, hunter type job that takes a lot of the data available in (for example) twitter and analyses sentiment as well as content to determine when someone is actually looking for a job. But that’s well, maybe a couple of months away yet!
Peter
March 2nd, 2010 at 4:49 pm
I think you guys have the right idea, but I’d be much more skeptical about Twitter as the means of distribution. You’re essentially shoe-horning data onto a system which was designed for something completely different and has big spam issues. Companies simply publishing their content using RSS would create a much better experience (I’m still confused on why more companies don’t do this).
March 3rd, 2010 at 6:27 am
@Kurt surely isn’t everything Twitter is now used for against it’s original “what are you doing?” micro status update purpose. I don’t disagree with you about RSS feeds in principle but as you point out most corporates haven’t used them for jobs. I’d be interested to know your thoughts on how people or aggregators would find and subscribe to these feeds other than on an individual company by company basis which can’t be very efficient or effective. I’m also not sure the spam issue is so relevant, companies like TwitJobSearch have shown that it can be filtered out very effectively
March 3rd, 2010 at 6:32 am
@Peter I’ve never ever said that I’m a guru
lol
March 3rd, 2010 at 10:14 am
Matt
But we all know you are such a person lol
Peter
March 3rd, 2010 at 3:13 pm
I really don’t see how Twitjobsearch have solved any spam issues. Almost every job I click on is from… a job board. Do they let some job boards in and some not? What kind of reputation system are they using to filter jobs? I don’t know how they filter, so I could be off but.. for me this is an even worse kind of filtering- at least job boards are transparent on how they control spam (simply by requiring $$).
RSS Job search would function exactly as Indeed or SimplyHired. (I’m not sure if they already use RSS or simply scrap HTML) Indeed/SimplyHired have separate facets for filtering by Company, which to me is a much better experience than searching twitter.
March 9th, 2010 at 7:29 pm
Twitter is a great push delivery engine, but is not great for recruiting or jobseeking without help. Twitter can only be used as a job board if the jobs can be targeted towards the jobseekers that are interested. Simply tweeting a job on your account or via RSS doesn’t solve that problem. Why would a jobseeker want to follow that account? Jobseekers would get ALL the jobs. e.g. a sales rep in Boston would get IT jobs in San Francisco in his/her feed. Too much noise. We’ve built and intelligent layer on top of Twitter, and tweet jobs over an 8300 vertical job channel network on Twitter based on location and job type. Jobseekers simply follow the job channels they care about, and then only the jobs that apply to them will show up in their feed.
Another issue that I’m very concerned about is that job openings have a timeframe. Once a job gets filled and removed from a job board, it should not be searchable. If Twitter is to become a “job cloud”, the companies and services that tweet jobs need to be responsible for removing the tweets when the jobs get filled. Otherwise, there will be job tweets with links to pages that say “sorry, but this job is no longer available”. Bad for the company brand, and bad for the jobseeker experience. All the major job tweeters (Monster, Careerbuilder, Hotjobs, twitterjobsearch, tweetajob, etc.) are “fire and forget” with their job tweets. TweetMyJOBS is the ONLY service out there (and we’ve looked) that removes the tweet when the job gets filled/removed. Check it out yourself: Go to any account being managed by the other services, go back a couple months on their timeline, and click on some job tweets. Any company doing an RSS feed to Twitter cannot remove the tweet. The “Social Media Footprint” being left here is analogous to a hiker who drops candy wrappers every 10 feet as he hikes up a mountain. This practice doesn’t help the quality of job tweets nor the jobseeker experience, and is leaving expired garbage on Twitter. Soon we’ll have Al Gore on Mashable talking about “Twitter Warming”…
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