Twitter is NOT a Job Board. Please TwitterJobSearch.com, Don’t Make It One

Thu, 19 March 2009, 2:04 pm

Twitter WAS an excellent tool for getting a job the old fashioned way – through word of mouth, networking, and building relationships online. For a few fleeting months, you could go onto Twitter and connect with some really smart people. You could connect with a senior manager, or a drone working the desk at any number of your potential employers of choice. You could build a relationship with a human, and help each other to mutual benefit. It WAS fresh and different. It will now turn into something automated, and dissatisfying.

TwitterJobSearch.com launched very recently. It provides job seekers an easy way to find job opportunities that have been posted to Twitter. That’s not really what it does though. Instead, TwitterJobSearch.com makes it blatantly obvious that there are hundreds of people out there building a mini job-spam empire on Twitter. Clearly, many recruiting firms and job board vendors alike have registered twitter names to game the search engines into believing they are the authority on ChicagoTechjobs, or topjobsinlondon whatever. They load up their twitter accounts with automated feeds from the job board they already have online.

TwitterJobSearch.com

So, riddle me this. How exactly does this make things any better for the job seeker? If TwitterJobSearch.com was aggregating a ton of job related tweets from actual humans working at actual companies and recruitment firms, with actual photo avatars of themselves, THAT would be a great service. Seekers can find plenty of cold, impersonal “job postings” all over the interweb. What they thirst for is the hiring manager at a company who tweets, “We need a marketing mgr to launch a new product for us, RT please”, or the recruiter that says “My client is interviewing for 3 java devs TODAY to build a GPS product by end of Jan, DM me if interested.”

Instead of optimizing FOR all of these automated accounts with “jobs” or “hire” in the Twitter handle, TwitterJobSearch should exclude them on purpose. What do you think?

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Posted in: Interactive Marketing for Staffing Firms, Job Boards, Marketing Strategy, Recruitment Industry, Staffing SEO/SEM
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Read: 12 comments on “Twitter is NOT a Job Board. Please TwitterJobSearch.com, Don’t Make It One”

  • 1 alone 19 March 2009

    wow. there’s twitter exclusive for jobs. amazing! 😀

  • 2 Felix 19 March 2009

    TwitterJobSearch.com does include those single tweets from real people. ex. I just searched ‘Marketing Canada’ and the top 3 tweets displayed were from “actual humans working at actual companies”.

  • 3 Kris Rzepkowski 20 March 2009

    Hi Felix,
    It’s not so much that I didn’t see SOME of that good stuff in the results, it’s that there is far more of the twitter spam in there. I’m glad TwitterSearch.com exists, I just wish it could evangleize more quality human connection over feed bots dumping jobs into Twitter. We’ve got Indeed and SimplyHired that scrape all of the standard job board junk.

  • 4 James Hargreaves 23 March 2009

    Different strokes for different folks – TwitterJobSearch has it’s place and can become a very useful and powerful tool for recruiters, job boards and jobseekers alike.

    I think what you are missing in your article is the fact that Twitter is entirely an ‘Opt-In’ service and therefore you only get the updates in your feed for who you select to follow.

    Don’t want to see the robotic feeds (which you have unfairly labelled as ‘SPAM’)? Then don’t follow them – it’s really THAT simple. You’ll probably never know they are there.

    SPAM is only SPAM if it forces itself on you – the accounts with feeds that go and follow everyone they can find (which I do not encourage or subscribe to) are the closest you’ll get to ‘SPAM’ on Twitter – and even then you have to not follow it back (and even have the ability to block it, if that’s what you desire).

    There will always be the personal aspect of building relationships and interaction on Twitter and there’s nothing that any of these feeds, or TwitterJobSearch itself, is doing to stop that. In fact, TwitterJobSearch is almost a separate entity to Twitter in that it’s a separate platform built around the Twitter search system from my knowledge.

    And that’s where TwitterJobSearch is both useful and flawed at the same time – If you are inclined to use Twitter to search for a job, possibly a very useful and powerful way of searching for a job used in the correct way – particularly in the current economic climate where jobseeking is increasing, then TwitterJobSearch does bridge the gap – however, you still have to go there to search (whereas you could just use your job board of choice anyway, if you’re navigating away from Twitter).

    It is flawed also in that it doesn’t actually capture all the job tweets out there – from feed accounts or individuals – I know of a number of Twitter accounts for jobs that aren’t captured on TwitterJobSearch, but it’s less than a week old, so it’s still in infancy.

    I believe we should applaud the attempt to gather relevant information like this in one place for the people who desire that relevant information.

    I guess my overall point is that TwitterJobSearch – and all those feed accounts (which aren’t actually SPAM) has a place and if you don’t want to use it/follow them then that is up to you – others will find it useful though.

    As for ‘evangelizing’ the human connection, I think the nature of Twitter generally does this very well in itself.

  • 5 Kris Rzepkowski 23 March 2009

    Hi James,
    Thanks for the comments. I do understand what you are saying about the elimination of undesirable content by not following via your personal twitter account. You can have a very effective job feed by following (and not) the sources of your choice. However, this does not apply to Twitterjobsearch.com. You are not asked for your twitter login, so the search results are not filtered at all by who you are following.

    There are different views of SPAM in this world, and I shouldn’t lump them all together. You are right that true SPAM is unwanted push. I was remarking more on undesirable search engine stuffing.

    I agree with you here:

    I believe we should applaud the attempt to gather relevant information like this in one place for the people who desire that relevant information.

    I think it is a really cool idea, and a nice engine which does have some utility right now for finding jobs.I’m simply challenging the idea of what we all think is relevant and useful information, and attempting to add another useful filter to their results.

    You will notice in Google’s shopping results over time, they have elevated truly unique product description and pricing pages over Search engine jamming product sites. Similarly, while twitter accounts that feed Monster postings into a different stream provides some utility, I would argue that you are not getting a job any easier through that route. Getting a job would be more easily facilitated by finding jobs listed by the real humans I mentioned above IMO.

    Fun stuff to watch this space evolve so rapidly…

  • 6 Tim 30 March 2009

    I think its a great idea, the micro-blogging revolution is truly coming to the masses. We developed an independant system last year and are about to launch. There is definately room in this space.

  • 7 Building Your Network of Followers on Twitter | IT Hire Wire 30 April 2009

    […] “IT Job Chicago” turns out 48 job postings. You could give Twitterjobsearch.com a try (which I’m not yet a huge fan of) and get similar results. Job postings on Twitter link to the source of the posting and allow you […]

  • 8 Building Your Network of Followers on Twitter | Daily Career Connection 10 August 2009

    […] keywords “IT Job Chicago” turns out 48 job postings. You could give Twitterjobsearch.com a try (which I’m not yet a huge fan of) and get similar results. Job postings on Twitter link to the source of the posting and allow you […]

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