A little bird told me: How to find a job on Twitter
There are plenty of great tales on how not to get a job via Twitter, but surely there must be some innovative ways to use Twitter to find a job.
After some helpful link suggestions from colleagues in my job search, I found TwitterJobSearch, which is in beta, and for good reason.
Finding available jobs was easy enough with its search capabilities, but when I hit the “Sign in with Twitter” link so I could save jobs to my Twitter account and re-tweet jobs without having to leave TwitterJobSearch, it took days of trying before getting it to work.
But once I got it rolling, it was like finding a vacation deal on a travel Web site. Instead of narrowing vacations by amenities, I was refining the job search by salary; full-time, part-time or contract work; tweet frequency and how old the tweet was.
I could also follow the companies that tweet job openings, but for me that seems like a bit too much too follow. I’d rather either search for them or have the openings come to me, as I found is possible through various Twitter job search accounts in a Mashable.com story.
There are Twitter accounts dedicated to providing job listings by field, company, region and more. For example, @attjobs has jobs at AT&T, of course.
There’s also Twellow.com, which calls itself the Twitter Yellow Pages, to find people in your desired career field, and Just tweet it to find other Twitter users with your interests.
One of the first things to do on Twitter is to make it easier for employers to find you. Put your 160-character job pitch in your Twitter bio, use a professional-looking photo or avatar, tweet about your job search, and include a link to your online resume.
After doing all of that, establish yourself as an expert in your field on Twitter. Don’t misrepresent yourself as someone you’re not, but show how you can offer help in your field. I also use it to put links to my freelance work, in case employers are looking for experience in certain areas I write about.
The Microjobs account on Twitter is one spot where recruiters send out job openings. It’s good in that there are plenty of job tweets, but almost too many. I prefer to narrow them by industry.
A better tool is TweetMyJobs.com, which has a Web site and can be followed on Twitter, with tmj_jobs allowing you to subscribe to its job channels. New job openings can be sent to your mobile phone after you specify which cities you want to find jobs in and tell it which job channels you want.
That’s what’s best about TweetMyJobs — it does one of the best things the Internet can do — it narrows the job listings to jobs that apply to you. That should make the job search, if not life, a lot easier.
Aaron Crowe is an unemployed journalist in the San Francisco Bay Area. Read about his job search at www.AaronCrowe.net by: Aaron Crowe
http://www.walletpop.com/blog/2009/06/01/a-little-bird-told-me-how-to-find-a-job-on-twitter/
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