Name: TwitterJobSearch
Quick Pitch: TwitterJobSearch.com is the first social media job search engine. We use semantic intelligence, link-crawling, and crowdsourcing to track recruitment offers.
Genius Idea: Twitter has been deemed as potentially disruptive to a number of existing industries, from the dissemination of news and information to eventually challenging Google in search. But giving the online job boards a run for their money? That’s what the aptly named TwitterJobSearch is attempting to do by searching Twitter and pulling out the Tweets that it believes to be job listings.
Like other job boards, TwitterJobSearch lets you either browse for jobs in categories – like accounting, sales, or IT – or simply search the company’s index. The quality of the results varies a bit based on what you’re looking for. For example, a search for “financial account” yields nothing but job opportunities, while searching for “blogger” includes some non-job related tweets, but is still generally pretty good.
Each job listing – which is really just a tweet – lets you view the job by linking you to the posting (presuming it was linked from the tweet), save the job with a TwitterJobSearch account, and either retweet it or follow the user that posted it. The site has some more advanced features too that make it even more competitive with traditional job sites – like being able to filter jobs based on salary and drilling down to job type (full-time, part-time, or internship).
Considering the obvious limitation of Twitter – that it’s just 140 characters – TwitterJobSearch’s ability to dissect tweets and produce job listings is quite impressive. According to the company, “Over 180 thousand offers of employment in the last 30 days have been posted to Twitter and indexed by TwitterJobSearch," making its listings fairly comprehensive and comparable to other job sites.
The reason this could be disruptive to the existing job sites is pretty clear. Posting a tweet is free, whereas posting jobs on sites like Monster and HotJobs costs money. Not only do your followers – often a highly targeted audience – see the listing, but it can also now be picked up by aggregators like TwitterJobSearch. It’s certainly another interesting application of Twitter that will be exciting to watch.
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