Interview with Tweet My Jobs founder, Gary Zukowski
I’ve addressed the question “What is Twitter?” for my readers here. When asked, “what is Twitter,” how do you respond?
Even though Twitter was the word of the year last year, I still have to explain
They call it a micro-blogging platform. I call it a micro-press conference. You have an audience that is listening to what you say; when you do your status updates hear what you’re saying. So, your audience is only as big as your list of followers. Through Twitter and other services they can see your messages.
But, in a nutshell your message goes instantly to the people who are listening.
Now there are a lot of companies such as TweetMyJOBS and companies in other industries that are building services and intelligent layers on top of Twitter to do a variety of things. That’s REALLY where the value of Twitter comes into play. The fact that it’s an open solution, where you can tap into their API and pretty much control most of Twitter’s functionality through an API enables you to do a whole variety of things. What we’ve done with TweetMyJOBS is effectively distribute jobs from corporations and vertically market to jobseekers.
What is TweetMyJOBS?
We’re tweeting jobs to people who are interested in a specific job function and in a specific geographical area. We’ve gone out on Twitter and built out over 7,700 vertical job channels. We call them job channels. In essence, they are Twitter accounts. We manage those accounts. Every one of them is the intersection between a functional job type and a geographical location.
So, for instance, you’re in Raleigh. We have 71 different job channels in Raleigh for whatever job function they might be. Sales, Marketing, IT, Healthcare, Nursing, Manufacturing, Transportation… all the ones you would expect people to be looking for.
Companies get to take all their job postings – we grab them electronically. We distribute them, based upon their function and location to the correct job channel.
Then from a jobseeker’s standpoint, they only need to subscribe or follow the accounts or job channels that apply to them.
So if you’re looking for a sales position in Raleigh, you subscribe to the sales channel in Raleigh and all you’re going to get in your Twitter feed are Raleigh Sales jobs.
How much does it cost a job seeker?
Absolutely nothing.
Our model is to charge corporations for the distribution of their jobs on Twitter and manage their job posting including their brand.
We’re trying to promote social media as a good platform for jobseekers. So we don’t want to put barriers in place to prevent that.
How much does it cost an employer?
It depends on the size of the company and the number of jobs they expect to post. You can post a job on our site for as little as two dollars for a one-day posting. Or you can go up to a 30-day posting for $20, which is still cheaper than any board out there. Craigslist is $25 for a posting. Monster is $400 for a posting.
Most of our corporate clients are large, brand name companies: Sony Electronics, McDonalds, Netflix and AOL. They like us because they can send all their jobs to us to distribute on Twitter.
The statistics say that only 30% of corporate job openings make it to job boards. They can’t afford to send them all.
Instead, we charge them one flat fee and take them all.
How many employers use TweetMyJOBS?
1200 companies currently have posted job openings… about 300,000 jobs.
Have you measured the effectiveness of TweetMyJOBS for jobseekers? How does it compare to traditional job boards?
We measure everything we have access to. We measure the number of clicks we get from the jobs we’ve tweeted.
Many employers want us to direct the jobseekers to their job portals, so we’re not always able to measure the application of that jobseeker. A lot of the companies can track that the applicant came from TweetMyJOBS and track them all the way through to hire.
We’re working on that and will be releasing some numbers soon.
To read the entire article, please visit HowToGeekOn.
Many thanks to Gary and TweetMyJobs for the interview. Thanks to TechJournal South and TechMedia for running the abbreviated version. Paul Merrill is a Career Coach specializing in working with the technically gifted. When you’re ready to get your job search unblocked and on track, contact him here
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