Nearly 300 followers signed up for Jobsite’s Jobs-by- Twitter service in just a few days of its unofficial launch. The service delivers targeted ‘tweets’ to users of up to 140 characters containing relevant job listings. Jobsite chief executive Keith Potts told Recruiter that it will monitor user behaviour to decide how to refine the service.

“We’ll do the same as we do for everything — find out exactly what the user behaviour looks like,” said Potts. “We’re data junkies and analyse everything to the nth degree so we will find out, for example, if a user is engaging with the site 10% more than an email or a web user.”

With Jobsite sending out over 1m emails a day for its jobs-by-email service, Potts said the company is always looking at new ways of disseminating highly tailored content. “Email can be difficult because of spam filters. SMS is another way but it doesn’t link very well into the web,” he said. “Because Twitter is a web application and uses the http protocol, it is easy to put the unique url in there and say ‘we’ve found you a new job’. So as soon as a job comes in, we can tweet it out to the relevant people.”

Potts wants to wait for user analysis before commenting too specifically on developments. But he believes Twitter’s ease-of-use and immediacy will increase the interactivity of potential candidates.He also believes it will help tackle the challenge of finding passive candidates. “Among the latest followings, latest news, latest sport and latest industry news, you can get a message that crops up to say ‘there’s a job here’,” he said. “At the moment we’re in a candidate-rich market but there are always candidates who are hard to find — and passive candidates are the holy grail for a recruiter.”

The Jobs-by-Twitter service will eventually also be rolled out to sectorspecific and regional job boards run by Jobsite.

Dominic Sumners, managing director of Online- MediaExperts, an agency that specialises in online recruitment, said that while there has been a lot of “talk and nonsense” about Twitter, Jobsite’s offering plays to the site’s strengths. “This does seem to be a logical and grounded application,” he said. “It’s not perfect but they [Jobsite] will get traffic and feedback and learn from this. It could develop into something quite powerful.

www.twitter.com/jobsitejobs
www.onlinemediaexperts.co.uk

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