Harold the Barrel's Blog 30th July 2009

Only a short Blog entry on this occasion (can't give all you people in Blogland TOO much of a good thing, can we?)

Another little paean of hope.

Not only are things looking a tad more promising for yours truly, but I have had several conversations with some pretty prominent recruitment/selection consultants this week who are all saying the same thing.

THINGS ARE STARTING TO LOOK UP.

The number of positions appearing at senior level are starting to show the results of the "churn" that occurred at the start of the year. That, added to an increase in organisational confidence, means that businesses are finally starting to press ahead with the recruitment plans that have been gathering dust on shelves since the middle of 2008 (and maybe earlier).

I fervently hope that those of you in the same position as me start to see some activity and that your phone starts ringing.

One plea...... The Law of Sod will say that the consultant who gets you the job you're looking for will be someone you have never spoken to before. If that happens, please don't forget the ones who have actively championed your cause over your months in Gordon Brown's Barmy Army.

I, for one, have a list of people who will be receiving a nice little bottle of El Vino Collapso through the post when I get back into paid work. (I also have a list of people who will never have their calls returned ever again. Especially when they come to ME looking for work).

You will be very pleased to know that the first list is considerably longer than the second. THERE ARE A LOT OF VERY GOOD, KIND AND DECENT PEOPLE IN THIS WORLD. NEVER FORGET THAT.

Have a great weekend and....

COME ON ENGLAND!!!!

Harold.

Politicans that still don't get it...

So David Cameron has become a trending topic on Twitter - a clever'ish marketing plan to get there or just a really bad mistake.

Sure, swearing on radio in the morning is a mistake first of all, but is it the kind of mistake that he planned all along to look cool and 'down with the kids'?

In my opinion it's really another example of people not getting new technology. David Cameron needs to understand the good that Twitter has done over the past 2-3 years, especially in the last few months. I'm not even talking about the people that have got jobs through twitjobs - theres a whole world of issues that have actually been delt with and brought to life through twitter. The Hudson plane crash, the Iran elections, Michael Jackson death and literally 100's of other causes, news events and issues that used twitter to get them 'seen' and heard.

I'm sure David Cameron is not calling users of Twitter 'Twats' ( and has since appologised )



Below is the video of the interview embedded from the Absolute Radio YouTube site - Please leave your thoughts, comments and observations below.







http://TwitJobs.co.uk - Jobs Fed Into Your Life

How would you pitch your CV?

What if you had 3 minutes to pitch yourself..would an audio commentary of your CV help?

Certainly for certain industries this would be great - imagine being able to hear a sales persons pitch before even reading their CV. But then would it be a way to discount too many people - or an extra screening tool that will help?

Video CV's have been around

http://TwitJobs.co.uk - Jobs Fed Into Your Life

This past week on twitter...

Last week twitter launched it's "how to guide" for businesses looking to get a grasp on using twitter for the first time.

Hopefully this will give more people understanding on how to use twitter for business purposes and eventually have more people using it in a positive way.

The other good news from last week is that twitter deleted a whole load of spam accounts which, in time, will hopefully make the whole experience that little bit sweeter.

The bad thing about twitter right now is the auto dm/spam features, and although there are some tools around to clear this up for us its another big "well done" to twitter!

Speaking to a lot of business owners and marketing professionals using twitter, spam is a problem - hopefully now, at least this problem has had the volume turned down a little.

http://TwitJobs.co.uk - Jobs Fed Into Your Life

UK Recruitment Consultants - What do you think?

We get a lot of feedback from jobseekers saying good and bad things about recruitment consultants in the UK -

But, we want to hear from you - what are your experiences? Good or bad - have they done an exceptional job for you, helped you back to work, or left you feeling worthless?

Lets use this - even mention names if you like, and compare peoples experiences.



http://TwitJobs.co.uk - Jobs Fed Into Your Life

9/10 25-34 yr olds using social network sites in the UK

An interesting report published today from comscore shows an amazing 9/10 25-34yr olds in the UK visited a social networking site in May 2009. (report here)

Maybe - you're thinking, well actually thats no so amazing...thats probably about right. If you were, then maybe now your thinking wow thats a lot of traffic!

It is - here is an extract ->
Top 10 Social Networking Sites in U.K.

Of the 36.9 million people in the U.K. age 15 and older who accessed the Internet from a home or work location in May 2009, 29.4 million visited at least one social networking site, representing an 80-percent reach and a 9-percent growth versus year ago. Facebook.com ranked as the most popular social networking site with 23.9 million visitors, followed by Bebo.com (8.5 million visitors), Windows Live Profile (6.9 million visitors) and MySpace Sites (6.5 million visitors). Micro-blogging site Twitter.com grew more than 3,000 percent during the past year to 2.7 million visitors in May 2009. - Source Comscore July 2009.

WOW!



http://TwitJobs.co.uk - Jobs Fed Into Your Life

Largest in the world vs Twitter...

(Click to enlarge)


Is it unfair to make this comparison? - or does it just show that social media is becoming more powerful than some people thought?

Or is it all just the latest 'thing' that will fade out and die?

For me.. It's always been here, its not new. Remember chat rooms and forums - by far the most popular places to be 10 years ago. Now with facebook, twitter etc - how you incorporate your business into social media will be the difference between winning and losing in the long run!





http://TwitJobs.co.uk - Jobs Fed Into Your Life

Changes to Our Website

TwitJobs - Changes to our website -

Today we've made some improvements to our website which should help people quite a bit. First of all we've put some of our latest and most recent job postings on our home page with direct links to the actual job descriptions. This keeps the same 2 click application process dead easy - and helps promote some of our most recent jobs too.

Also we've updated some of the stats on our site - you can see when you click on 'post jobs' there is more up to date information about our presence and how we appear on other social networks, as well as some of our popularity rankings.

We're also adding more functions to our site over the coming days and weeks to make it even easier to use and share information through RT's and across multiple platforms.

Enjoy for now!


http://TwitJobs.co.uk - Jobs Fed Into Your Life

Another reason for TwitJobs

Another reason for posting jobs through TwitJobs broadcasting network...
Click to enlarge


*image added 20th July 2009.


http://TwitJobs.co.uk - Jobs Fed Into Your Life

Heres some interesting stats for you -

You can see here (click to enlarge image) the real growth since March 2009 for two of our profiles on Twitter (TwitJobsUK & TwitJobsMedia)




http://TwitJobs.co.uk - Jobs Fed Into Your Life

Changing the face of job sites?

This is something that we really set out to do from day 1 - and with everyones support it is changing peoples lives.

The hard thing to do in the UK, sometimes is offer something different. Many people have set ways of doing things that have worked. So why change? Change is another topic thats hard for people, if it's not broken why fix it etc... well many people have tried before to alter a perfectly respectable model.

You post jobs on a website, people visit the website and then apply for the jobs. Its called a job board - it's certainly nothing new and here you can see its been around for a long time (1993) which is, believe it or not, 16 years!

So whats TwitJobs and social media going to do to change the face of job sites? Well, we have a job board too, its pretty similar to the other job boards out there in terms of what it provides. For employers, they can post jobs to our site and candidates can then apply for the jobs - easy huh? But thats not whats different.

Also, whats not really that different is the fact we can broadcast jobs and links to other sites hand in hand. For instance - we can broadcast/tweet jobs from our site (our job board) and also 'compete against ourselves' by also broadcasting links to other businesses career pages, and specific landing pages of their choice. Thats unique, but not changing the face of job sites, so what is?

SOCIAL MEDIA. I've been working in social media for a number of years now, and have worked on many projects for many large and small clients around the UK, Europe and the USA and the one thing that makes any social media campaign successful, is...ready? Sharing.

Sharing information, sharing links, sharing photos, sharing videos, sharing experiences. No social media project or campaign would ever work if there was no sharing involved. It just does'nt happen. It's like a viral campaign that never goes past the first person.

TwitJobs is using one of the most sharing communities on the web Twitter.com and jobs are not only being fed into peoples life stream, but people can share amongst 100's/1,000's/10,000's of their followers instantly.

Imagine, if you were on a job site, lets say it was TwitJobs for instance, and looking at the job board you saw a brilliant job, but it was'nt for you. Would you email it to a friend? Possibly. Would you email it to 10 friends? probably not, would you email it to all your email contacts? definately not!

With Twitter, Friendfeed and Facebook as key examples - its incredibly easy and instinctive to re-tweet or share links/information/stories and jobs amongst your followers without a second thought. The way of thinking is reversered - and you're now thinking, "this might be good for one person who happened to tweet about digitial media earlier". Suddenly that broadcast has been re-broadcast to 1,000's of more people that could see a benefit - and the chain of re-tweeting continues...

TwitJobs has a lot more planned to really do a lot more to bring job sites into the social media age - who knows, some of the larger job sites might start taking twitter more seriously, and using it as a interaction platform rather than just a "feed"

But as a London based business that has grown from an experiment and zero followers to over 34,000 followers in almost exactly 4 months, over 50 jobs constantly advertised on the site, more jobs added every day - and most importantly people are getting into work by using our service. That gives me incredible satisfaction and desire to keep on building, adding new services and increasing our exposure to continue to be the largest social media job site for years to come.

Hope you can enjoy the journey with us.


Jason
Founder/CEO



http://TwitJobs.co.uk - Jobs Fed Into Your Life

Some Twitter Do's and Dont's

New to twitter?

We've already posted on our site a little information on how to get started with twitter - heres a few more do's and don'ts for our favourite broadcasting channel!

DO
Upload a avatar - It's really useful for people to see who they're talking with, or whos involved in the conversation. This could even be a company logo or text of the company name - all that is ok, just don't leave it blank. As far as job seekers go - think about it, if you are contacting a potential employer directly via twitter, change your picture from that lads night out in Brighton!

DO
Add a bio. It doesnt have to be all the possible characters that fit the space, just tell people a little about yourself, your business or what you enjoy doing. It really helps people make a connection with your identity - whether that is your brand or yourself.

DON'T
Auto DM - This is one of my personal pet hates. Auto DM is when someone starts following you they set up (using a third party app) an automatic direct message to welcome you to their network etc. Take it from me, I see around 2500 of these a week and spend far too long deleting them, making sure that i've replied to real people through dm. But even if your not going to get 2500 per week, (which many people wont) the whole thing is just very inpersonal. By all means write a personal introduction, include the persons name so they know its not automatic, and that it means something.

DON'T
Go Crazy! - By "Don't go crazy" I mean keep your quantity of postings to a reasonable level - nobody wants to see a load of junk in their stream every 10 seconds (and twitter limits postings to around 100ish - depending on who you are - an hour).

DON'T
Try and buy followers - This is the harsh truth. There is only 2 ways to get quality new followers. Ready? - Right, 1st engage, interact and discuss. Twitter is a conversation, a broadcasting network and real time information - using the tools the best you can with the knowledge you have will get you more exposure and more followers over time. 2 - Become famous. - Be very wary of 'buying' followers - it's what everyone wants - increased popularity. But remember - quality over quantity.

DON'T
Call yourself SlickyRicky69 - Well unless your looking for a job as a porn star! - Seriously though, if you are contacting prospective employers, think about your first impression. Thats the text they'll see - then they'll see your name, click your profile and read about you (or perhaps visit your website/blog). Think about that journey for the person checking you out. Are they going to see the best of you?

Ok, quite a bit of useful info here, oh one more thing...

DON'T
Write using abbreviations. Not only is it annoying for some, but cn lk vry unprofessional.

Jason





http://TwitJobs.co.uk - Jobs Fed Into Your Life

Job Requirement - Twitter Followers

Quite an amazing post that caught my eye on twitter recently - how an American company 'Best Buy' (one of my favourite places to hang out!) is requesting that applicants for a job it is currently advertising for has a minimum of 250 followers!

Thanks to @Jangles for this great article ->

http://www.nevillehobson.com/2009/07/08/job-requirement-twitter-followers/


Jason
Founder/CEO

http://TwitJobs.co.uk - Jobs Fed Into Your Life

LinkedIn Group

Since our linkedin group started just a few weeks ago, over 200+ people have joined and started talking about social media and job seeking, as well as jobseekers sharing advice and help and of course all our latest jobs.

You can join here, we'll approve you :-)
http://www.linkedin.com/groups?gid=2010548&trk=hb_side_g


Jason

Founder/CEO TwitJobs

http://TwitJobs.co.uk - Jobs Fed Into Your Life

Timeline

Considering we're a new job site that decided to launch in one of the worst economic times known to history, you'd think from the outset that success stories might be something a bit hard to come by.

Well, its quite the reverse really- considering many job sites are closing down in these tough economic times, we are going from strength to strength.

Just have a look at our timeline of achievements ->

March 16 2009 - TwitJobs Launches
April 2009 - Over 6,000 followers aquired in the first 3 weeks of being on Twitter
May 2009 - Our first candidate gets employed through using TwitJobs. They applied on the bus to the job centre!
May 2009 - Now posting jobs on Facebook and Linkedin
June 2009 - TwitJobs starts to offer Free CV Review service
June 2009 - Over 20,000 followers on twitter, along with 1000 through plurk, linkedin, facebook, friendfeed and tumblr
July 2009 - Over 60 jobs live and posted on our site, many of which are exclusive and only being advertised on TwitJobs
July 2009 - TwitJobs Blog Launches
July 12 2009 - Over 32,000 followers on twitter and another 2,000 on friendfeed, facebook and linkedin

Quite a bit going on for sure!

We have'nt even talked about where we're opening next! - Our site http://twitjobs.net/ opens for business soon with USA jobs - you can follow us on twitter now and join the other 5,000+ that are waiting for us to post jobs!
@TwitJobsUSA
@TwitJobsTX
@TwitJobsNY
@TwitJobsMA
@TwitJobsNV
@TwitJobsAZ
@TwitJobsCA
@TwitJobsIL

And if you're a little lost with our uK profiles on twitter, here they are too:-

@TwitJobsUK
@TwitJobScotland
@TwitJobsLondon
@TwitJobsMedia
@TwitJobsFashion
@TwitJobs_Sales
@TwitJobsCreativ
@TwitJobsIT
@TwitJobsMarktng
@TwitJobsRetail
and
@TwitJobsGrad

As we get more jobs we will add more market places into these categories - but if you would like to suggest a category or start advertising in a specific category, please contact us at jobs@twitjobs.co.uk - infact you can get in touch with us about anything at that email address, or of course just send us a message in the social media world - we try to reply to everyone. (You may have to send a DM more than once, as we get literally 100's per day).

So as we continue to improve our service and work with more partners - keep checking back for all the latest TwitJobs info. We'll be updating this blog as often as possible.


Jason
Founder/CEO

http://TwitJobs.co.uk - Jobs Fed Into Your Life

Intro

Hi - and welcome to our blog.

We've been working on so much over the past couple of months and so pleased to have finally got our blog live now.

We've also got some great contributors to our blog so that you get varied opinions and information from different types of people, from jobseekers to hr directors, graduates, social media experts and just about everyone else in-between.

Our goal is to have regularly updated, informative, thought provoking information for people to constantly be able to refer back to and become a truely vaulable information resource.


Jason

Founder/CEO TwitJobs



http://TwitJobs.co.uk - Jobs Fed Into Your Life