I don’t personally know Carmen Hudson. But I’d like to.
I heard her speak at a conference a few years ago and last month caught her presentation at the Social Recruiting Summit. Both times I came away with two thoughts: How am I ever going to remember everything she shared, and what’s the secret to her energy and enthusiasm?
She’s a stylish dresser, says Dave Mendoza, with a special love of shoes and a dream of entering the World Series of Poker. She’s on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and too many more to list. Her blog, PeopleShark, is aptly named for a recruiter who is a recruiter’s recruiter.
A quick Google search — Sorry. In deference to her that should read “A quick Yahoo search” — and you find page after page of listings for her conference appearances, her interviews, her recruiting advice, and, now, her new gig as founder and CEO of Tweetajob.
For Tweetajob, the name says it all. Jobseekers create a profile detailing their work interests and geographic preferences. Recruiters post jobs which are then tweeted to the appropriate candidates. It’s as simple as that.
“We wanted our site to be intuitive, easy to use and understand. Twitter is all about bare-bones simplicity, so that’s what you will see in our front-end and back-end design,” Hudson says, explaining how Tweetajob is different from other similar services, such as TweetMyJobs, an almost identical service that launched early this year.
“Our targeting algorithm distributes matching jobs to jobseekers, sending the tweets instantly. Jobseekers see the jobs in their Twitter timeline, or on their mobile device. Upgraded tweets are also posted to our site, and SEO’d so that they show up in Google search results and they are distributed to other job boards.”
Hudson began experimenting with Twitter while at Yahoo, developing talent communities and cautiously tweeting jobs while trying to avoid spamming the prospects who signed on as followers. Several months she left Yahoo, where she had been senior manager of talent acquisition, taking those lessons with her.
With the same passion that earned her and her team a “Superstar” award at Yahoo and a host of recommendations on LinkedIn dating back to 2004, Hudson built a team and launched the new Twitter service on Nov. 1.
“I was pretty awestruck by the power of Twitter when I first signed up in the spring of 2008,” she told me. “Twitter is an entirely new communication platform, as well as a new style of communication. It’s difficult to see when you log in for the first time, but if you spend a bit of time there, you start to see the possibilities.”
Those possibilities, says Hudson, are broad. “I think we have only begun to scratch the surface of how we’ll use Twitter to recruit. Having competitors will only make us better.”
The next step, she tells me, is for Tweetajob to go international.
“Other countries –- the UK, India, and Australia in particular -– are hungry for a Twitter solution, because so many of their candidates rely on mobile devices for information. Our marketing plan includes wooing recruiters, being part of the recruiting community, supporting events, providing education and insight. It also includes big plans to attract passive and active jobseekers. As a startup, we will rely heavily on social media and viral marketing, of course.”
“We think of about a hundred ideas every day. We have to force ourselves to focus!”