TweetMeJobs might have been a more fitting name for TweetMyJobs, a new service that leverages Twitter’s instant, broadcast messaging capabilities to send job posts to anyone who signs up at TweetMyJobs.com.
We say TweetMeJobs because the volume of tweets sent in the few weeks this free site has been up is nothing short of staggering. Mostly, the jobs are coming from Indeed, the jobs aggregation site that itself has maybe three-quarters of a million jobs online at any moment. Using Indeed’s jobs is just to build volume while the concept catches on, founder Gary Zukowski told us. As the number of jobseekers grows, so will the original job postings. Already, about 40-50 original jobs a day are tweeted.
We pause, here, to explain how this works. Jobseekers (and recruiters) need two things: 1) A Twitter account, and; 2) a TweetMyJobs login. It doesn’t matter which you get first. When you register at TweetMyJobs.com you’ll pick a geography and a job category. Actually, you can pick as many as you want. Then wait for the first job to be tweeted to you. The message will be short, since Twitter accommodates only 140 characters. Check the jobs on your Twitter page, or have the messages sent to your phone. Yes, regular text charges apply.
Back to Zukowski, who says the idea of using Twitter as a job distribution channel occured to him a few months ago as he was mulling over various ways of using social media in his own IT staffing and consulting business, EasySoft Solutions. He started building TweetMyJobs about the time the New Year dawned. Six weeks later he had a functioning site, and launched in mid-February. A remarkably short development time for an IT project, but also a cleverly simple one for the masses who have yet to discover Twitter.
Says Zukowski, “We needed to build something a layer or two above Twitter for all those laymen who aren’t there yet.” What he politely means is that jobseekers and recruiters who don’t know a tweet from a Tweety Bird can use the service.
What makes TweetMyJobs different from a job board is the instant notification and the potential for an equally fast reponse. “The differentiator is instant notification,” Zukowski explains, offering up the example of an on-the-go jobseeker who can find out about an opportunity while, well, while on-the-go. Or how about using it in place of the hiring hall, he says.
A few days ago, says Zukowski, the Connecticut State Department of Labor called about using TweetMyJobs to distribute its jobs. Since the original site only offered the 50 largest metro markets in the U.S., he’s been busing adding more geographical divisions, and has expanded into Canada, India, Israel, and the U.K.
From the recruiter’s perspective, if you need candidates now — a staffing order for 30 call center reps or for systems techs — you can get the word out fast and get a response back, even, potentially, in seconds. In fact, by the end of this week, Zukowski will have a profiling feature enabled on the site. Candidates can upload their resume, add whatever else they need, and get a short URL that they can Twitter back when an interesting job gets Tweeted to them.
Everything is free, and what’s free now will stay that way for the forseeable future. However, there is a business model here. Zukowski tells us in time he’ll offer premium features like retweeting stale jobs, bulk tweeting corporate openings, and who knows what else.