If I belonged to a football team, a fraternity, or an office of 20-somethings, I’d use Twitter to “tweetup” with my friends. It’s not the place to find a job – is it?
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten, an Internet entrepreneur based in Amsterdam, recently posted a job listing on Twitter that caught my eye:
Wanted: CTO type for new secret project. PHP, MySQL, CakePHP knowledge important. Money + shares.
“People always know people and telling it to 450 people makes sure that the word gets out,” explains Boris, who has openings for three ventures at the moment and lots of evangelists among his connections. “And – don’t tell – [Twitter] is a cheap way of finding people too.”
Boris says he’s more likely to find partners rather than employees on Twitter, and that his blog yields even better results. He also holds unique live events such as bowling tournaments with US and Dutch techies in an effort to expand his universe of connections.
But Boris fears that if the secret gets out Twitter won’t be as effective anymore. “Once everyone starts doing it Twitter will be unreadable because of all of the commercial requests,” he says.
“Each social network has its own crowd, etiquette and advantages,” says Boris. “I use different ones for different purposes,” he explains, such as checking a social network profile before talking to someone new.
As someone who recruits talent in both Silicon Valley and the Netherlands, Boris is attuned to changing attitudes and best practices. “Job boards are not very interesting in my social circle – among other entrepreneurs,” he says. “In fact, I don’t even regard them as a serious way to find people.”
If you’re looking for a job on Twitter you still need to know the right people. A search on the keyword “recruiter” yielded only 75 responses – a drop in the bucket compared to LinkedIn or Facebook. Looking at Twitter from Boris’ perspective, the site is arguably a ‘green field’ for job seekers and employers.
Let us know if you find success or failure using Twitter for your job search.
Twitter helped me get 3 solid job offers. I’ve never had more success during a job hunt.
http://socialmediabutterfly.co.....ob- offers
we just launched a twitter job search aggreagator that finds the highest paying jobs in several areas and send one tweet an hour to followers. it can be found at http://www.workhound.co.uk or to follow the startup job finder just go to http://twitter.com/StartupJobs
hope your readers find this useful.
cheers,
bill