Twitter, Recruitment and Future

Recruitment through twitter is still in experimental stage. Recruiters around the world are trying it in their own ways and results have been varying. Once in a while we come across nice insightful articles where recruiters explain their learning and also give their view on future of twitter-recruitment.

Recently I came across an interesting article by Matt Alder of Recruiting Futurology .

 First let me explain the basic plot of his article and then I will express my views on the matter.

Here he means to say that - with so many people posting their jobs in twitter , in future all the available jobs from different organizations will be open in twitter world. This will create a huge open access job database(he calls it :Job Cloud) as compared to close access databases of current job boards.The candidate will only have to search with keywords in twitter search or customized job search tools like Twitjobsearch  and find his choice job easily.He is envisioning that some websites will come up which will put the jobs available in twitter in a more systematic way and provide tools to candidates where they can filter and find their required jobs.

Well,Mostly I agree with his opinion.

We all talk about how organizations should start their job channel on Twitter,attract candidates to follow them, keep them engaged through interaction and keep posting jobs time to time.Free job posting.Why to pay job boards for each job posting when we can do it for free? Well, in this whole issue we are ignoring convenience of one very important party here-Candidates. Just imagine with every organization starting their own job channel in twitter, how many channels should a candidate follow to keep himself updated about new suitable jobs? Ain't we expecting too much from candidates? So is organizations posting their jobs in their twitter channel a bad idea? Will their job postings get desired exposure and response?Can they make big follower base?

What can be a suitable soultion for both parties involved - candidates and organisations?

Well ,One solution I can think of  is Twitter job sites like Tweetmyjobs, Tweetajob. These sites post job tweets for lots of clients and they have separate channels dedidated to different skillsets.So a candidate can follow his skillset based channel and get all suitable jobs in his stream.No doubt organisation has to pay to these sites per job tweet, but I believe the charges are pretty less and organisations can get large number of readymade followers for their jobs!

Second Point: Is organizations  posting jobs in their twitter channel still a good idea? 

My answer would be YES. Whenever you post a job in Twitter , it comes into open world for all to see and find out. In future candidates will use Twitter search more and more to find suitble jobs(as Matt Alder says and I agree) , and if you have given proper keywords while posting the job, you will find some customers.Any good response is useful, so no harm in posting. My only suggestion is not to depend entirely on your job channel.

Again, one more issue is regarding threat to job boards from Twitter and other social medias-In my opinion job boards will never die. They provide highly targetted customer-base(who are looking for job) and have got loads of feature that makes process easier for both the parties. And for the recruiters who hate boards because of too many irrelevant responses- what is the guarantee that you will get less or no irrelevant responses from twitter job post? In fact odds are same in both the cases. In my opinion in future job boards should integrate with twitter and start their own skill based channels. While posting a job in board, they should cross post it in twitter with the link. This way twitter can compliment job boards by driving more traffic and maximising the responses.

I would be eager to know your responses. Please share your opinion in comment section.