It was a cold, rainy day in February; he basically chased me down as I was leaving a conference - I was trying to dodge raindrops. We had an instant connection/friendship that many often feel as a result of active participation in social media. James Mayes stopped me that afternoon in London, this was our only IRL connection. But I was impressed by his wit and desire to interact with as many people, globally, as possible.

I recently caught up with Mayes over the phone following a number of tweets back and forth. Twitter has a tendency to be where I go to get news; it’s my favorite water cooler and James is always hanging around the cooler. Social recruiting / social media has been a part of his life and his business since 1994. You could say, he’s an early adopter. Long before there was a www, there were bulletin boards that allowed for electronic mail, news dispatches and public messaging. This seems to be a precursor to chat rooms, IM and even Twitter.

James had a natural affinity for IT and was an early player on FidoNet. The old infrastructure of FidoNet is still there, hanging around, probably a quiet cooler these days. James seems to have passed through a few recessions, the last one, he spent a lot of time buying computer parts, building PCs and then selling those rebuilt computers to other students. Hey, it paid his bar bill. He somehow managed to exit university with a degree but now needed a career.

He had a great IT background, but he was not quite technical enough to work in the directly in the industry, but certainly had enough knowledge to recruit in the space. He knew the talk and he loved the industry, so, why not? He settled in at a recruiting firm that was later bought out by Hayes, where he worked on bigger accounts and eventually did some consulting that ultimately led him to a position with Alexander Mann, a staffing agency in the UK with more than 1000 employees providing services for clients in over sixty countries. Global, indeed.

Recruiting led James to Project Management which led to some cooler (metaphorical and literal) talk about how to use Twitter to recruit. The problem Mayes see now is that recruiters fail to really build the right network to which they broadcast. “Engagement is the important thing.” Thoughts ran between James and partner, Richard Sutcliffe about how their knowledge could help recruiters put jobs out there. Thus, TweetJobs was born. Several integrations with a decent range of job posting distributors and TweetJobs now has a market presence and can do the same for their clients – helping them optimize tweets, advising on the type of audience to build and how to do just that, creating RSS feeds, and take a serious, upclose look at engagement. Listening at the water cooler, so to speak.

The most incredible part of this story? Officially launched this past May and broke even by August. Yep, broke even in three months. Only in the fastest growing tech arena. TweetJobs knows that Twitter and social media are constantly evolving and they stand at the ready to evolve right along with them. We know that those who don’t, will fall behind. We know this. With an eye on the future, “That is a tough one to call. Clearly, we want to grow and we have investors that would love to see a significant return. The question is how to get it right and not dilute the focus.” This is serious biz to the guys at TweetJobs. Not just talk.

“Twitter is far more discoverable, far more relevant than we know. It is perfect for SEO; this change is a huge differentiator for smaller companies.” It sounds like it levels the playing field a bit. “There is a trust issue in business these days. It is not about protectionism, it’s about trust.” When I asked him about the return on investment for social media, he bounced back with a quote from Einstein that he uses often, “Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts.”

James finished our conversation with one last point, “A number of clients ask me what differentiates us. We are very much a tech enabler. The technology isn’t the advantage, it is how you choose to use it.” It doesn’t get much cooler than that.

by rayannethorn