I recently read Matt Alder’s great post “The Job Cloud – Why Twitter is the future of Job Boards“, and had a few thoughts. While it was very interesting to read that he was getting a lot of quality resumes by posting jobs on Twitter, should we take this as an early sign that Twitter jobs is the future?
Twitter is great for some things, but for searching for jobs? I’m skeptical. In fact, I think this is a really backward idea.
The proposed advantage, of course, is that companies can easily post their jobs online for free without paying job boards. Great idea, I’ve long said paying expensive fees for postings jobs is archaic, but why Twitter? Companies have had the opportunity to do this for years using simple RSS. We also have “free” job search engines that can index these sites, like indeed.com and simplyhired.com. So how does Twitter job search help us?
Another thing raises a large flag for me: how do you stop the spam? If Twitter (and the internet in general) has taught us anything, spam will be a big issue. It is easy to simply limit the accounts searched to those of companies, but what about the large percentage of companies which use external agencies? Ok, let’s say we allow those agencies to be apart of the search. Who are the gatekeepers here? The only reason we have job boards today is because it already solved the spam issue, filtering the quality job postings from the spam. How is this model different?
I have a big problem with ideas which see social networking sites and being a free ticket to success. It takes a lot of time, and therefor money, to be successful using social media, and I don’t see Twitter job postings as being any exception.
As an early adapter, you might just have some quality candidates find your way, but as the use increases, so will the garbage. Hopefully I’m proved wrong, maybe I’ve been reading too much Andrew Keen, but I’m just not sold on the idea.
