Tweeting your way to a new job

I recently opened a Twitter account, and discovered to my dismay that yes indeed, 90 percent of the Tweets that come through are completely useless. There are Tweets about sporting events, and oh, wasn’t that a great game yesterday. There are Tweets about what Twitterers are eating at their favorite restaurants, and Tweets about how they drank too much and Tweets about their hangovers and the amounts of vomit they produced. There’s very little point to it all. Should you choose to follow me on Twitter, I promise not to bore you with 140-character notices on how I just mowed my lawn.

Other more interesting uses are being found for Twitter, however. While most are spending their Twitter time letting me know that their favorite jeans no longer fit, a few have started to transform Twitter into something truly useful. In particular, several employers and prospective employees have found it to be very useful in placing people in jobs. Until now, Twitter’s functionality as a job placement tool has been largely informal, but with some anecdotal success. It was only a matter of time before somebody put a more formal structure around it.

Just this week, a popular job board called JobCircle.com announced a new product to help companies use Twitter to recruit employees. JobCircle’s “Social Media Recruitment Pack� lets companies create a private-brand Twitter job channel, which lets them send out information (still with the 140 character limit) on job openings in real time.

QVC is one of the first companies to use it, and there will no doubt be many more to come. For job seekers, go to the Twitter page at http://www.jobcircle.com/twitter, and subscribe to a job channel—there are several channel based on region or by industry. Clicking on a channel takes you to the relevant Twitter website, where you just click “follow� to get notifications. Pretty simple, and the advantage is that you’re immediately “in the loop� and can get information on the job ahead of everyone else (that is, until everyone else jumps on the same bandwagon).

Of course, outside of JobCircle’s Twitter job tool, the functionality works both ways, and if you are already on Twitter and have a large following, it never hurts to send out the occasional Tweet to let people know you’re looking.

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