A new website that allows jobseekers to look for a job on the micro-blogging site Twitter could become the starting point for a candidate’s online job hunt.

TwitterJobSearch.com, developed by the UK jobs search engine Workhound, pulls in jobs that appear on Twitter and allows jobseekers to search for them even if they are not Twitter users.

Recruiters and job boards have been quick to see the potential of the service. Workhound director Bill Fischer said that within days of launch more than 40 job sites had got in touch to ask how they could index their jobs on the search engine.

Twitter job postings, like other postings on the site, cannot be longer than 140 characters (a ‘tweet’), which doesn’t leave much scope for information. Using sophisticated software tools and algorithms, TwitterJobSearch identifies what is a job vacancy, visits the destination site attached to it, then adds another layer of context to the tweet so it can be more easily found by jobseekers. The work is done at the back end and doesn’t change the tweet.

“When a jobseeker finds a relevant job tweet, they can choose to be directed to the job post or to follow the individual that posted the tweet,” explained Fischer.

Andy Headworth, owner of Sirona Consulting, is already working with recruitment clients on how they can use Twitter. He told Recruiter he believes Twitter- JobSearch could become the default site for online jobseekers. “We’ve all got used to the big aggregators but this is something different and is in line with the latest fashion,” he said. “If the candidate is there, we need to be there, too.”

Alan Whitford, co-founder of the Recruitment Community Europe network, said that the robust search engine behind TwitterJob- Search means it has “huge legs” as a tool for recruiters. “It isn’t a threat to job boards or agencies, but it will be interesting to see what happens when the corporates move to use it.”



www.twitterjobsearch.com