the cleverness of twitterjobsearch.com - maybe

I had a fascinating evening last night following the cleverness of twitterjobsearch.com and the owner who is workhound which is out of the UK.

I started doing some twitter searches which led me to a few twitter profiles that were just pumping job postings from job boards. I started clicking on them and the screen would flash with a page from twitterjobsearch and then it would be redirected to the posting on the job board where the job was aggregated from. Ok, now my attention is a 100%

Unless I am wrong and I often am, it is the first example of a vertical search company really putting a major effort into job distribution on Twitter. I say major because a lot of work went into setting up their strategy.

On the workhound twitter strategy site, they say you can get over 400 twitter job feed directories. When you dig a little into those feeds, you see that each feed is not presented as the kind of rss feed you would expect but rather a twitter profile serving that feed into twitter. Here is an example for healthcare and here is an example of one for recruiting

When you click on a category feed, the feed presents itself as a twitter profile and each category twitter profile has the same description in top right of the page. Maybe that will all change when they go live on Monday. It’s also interesting that almost none of the twitter profile feeds from workhound have a significant amount of followers and readers so it’s really new or they have been real quiet about it.

What blew me away about it all was the amount of work that had to go into building this front end distribution system. I mean, they would have had to set up a separate twitter account for each profile/feed.

Pretty wild stuff. It was a night of learning for me and though I don’t think I could ever muster the energy to set up something so detailed like what workhound has done. I bet we see a lot more of this type of thing coming sooner rather than later.

William Fischer is the person who put this together and here is his profile on RecruitingBlogs.com.

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Permalink Reply by Louann Goebel on March 13, 2009 at 5:44pm

Just joined this site and have enjoyed reading your blogs any advice for new bees, I recruit for a company for call center positions

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Permalink Reply by william fischer on March 17, 2009 at 10:59am

An excellent bit of investigative reporting and smart guesswork about our pre-launch product.

We just went live about an hour ago. And instead of just using job feeds we are actually looking at all of the millions of tweets every day. We're using contextual search algorithms to read each tweet to identify job postings. We then follow the links (spider the URLs) to grab additional info. I think this makes us the first semantic search engine for twitter and the first search engine to go "beyond the tweet."

In practice, we think that this can transform twitter from a communication to a publishing platform -- Person tweets "we're hiring" with a link to the job post to his friends. To individuals who know him this is valuable but outside of his immediate network the info is useless. By using contextual search techniques and by going beyond the tweet, someone who is not directly related to them can know who is hiring, where they are located, what the job is, and how to apply, all from a two word tweet "we're hiring."

Cheers,
Bill
@williamfischer

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Permalink Reply by Slouch on March 17, 2009 at 11:23am

I have a lot of ideas about this as well so maybe one of these days we should have a conversation. let me know.

william fischer said:

An excellent bit of investigative reporting and smart guesswork about our pre-launch product.

We just went live about an hour ago. And instead of just using job feeds we are actually looking at all of the millions of tweets every day. We're using contextual search algorithms to read each tweet to identify job postings. We then follow the links (spider the URLs) to grab additional info. I think this makes us the first semantic search engine for twitter and the first search engine to go "beyond the tweet."

In practice, we think that this can transform twitter from a communication to a publishing platform -- Person tweets "we're hiring" with a link to the job post to his friends. To individuals who know him this is valuable but outside of his immediate network the info is useless. By using contextual search techniques and by going beyond the tweet, someone who is not directly related to them can know who is hiring, where they are located, what the job is, and how to apply, all from a two word tweet "we're hiring."

Cheers,
Bill
@williamfischer

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Permalink Reply by Dennis Smith on March 17, 2009 at 11:36am

Very cool and interesting. I'm giving a presentation on April 1st about recruiting and twitter - I would like dig in to this a lot more and then include a slide in the ppt. If there's 2-3 bullet points you'd like me to include with regard to twitterjobsearch.com, please let me know.

Thanks William,

Dennis
dennis@wirelessjobs.com

william fischer said:

An excellent bit of investigative reporting and smart guesswork about our pre-launch product.

We just went live about an hour ago. And instead of just using job feeds we are actually looking at all of the millions of tweets every day. We're using contextual search algorithms to read each tweet to identify job postings. We then follow the links (spider the URLs) to grab additional info. I think this makes us the first semantic search engine for twitter and the first search engine to go "beyond the tweet."

In practice, we think that this can transform twitter from a communication to a publishing platform -- Person tweets "we're hiring" with a link to the job post to his friends. To individuals who know him this is valuable but outside of his immediate network the info is useless. By using contextual search techniques and by going beyond the tweet, someone who is not directly related to them can know who is hiring, where they are located, what the job is, and how to apply, all from a two word tweet "we're hiring."

Cheers,
Bill
@williamfischer

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Permalink Reply by Alexander Fedossov on March 21, 2009 at 9:17pm

Check out jobtweet.de and let me know what you think. We started our semantic twitter job searchengine one week before TJS. ;) We serve the german market but it is also possible to search for international jobs.

Alexander

@jobtweet_de