Employment opportunities via social sites
Jinfo Blog

18th March 2009

By Penny Crossland

Item

In the current economic climate, it was only going to be a matter of time before social networking sites became involved in job searching. And it certainly comes as no surprise to find that the ever ubiquitous Twitter is involved in one new job-related venture. Launched as a beta project at the annual South by Southwest (http://sxsw.com) media and music conference in Austin, Texas, TwitterJobsearch (http://www.twitterjobsearch.com/) is a ‘smart’ search engine that extracts content related to jobs from Twitter, with the aim of creating an ‘online, global resource for job postings’. (http://digbig.com/4ykya) The site was developed by the UK’s largest job search engines, Workhound (http://www.workhound.co.uk), which sees its task as ‘helping social networks evolve from communication tools to become powerful publishing platforms’. Although most jobs seem to link to other job sites, which use Twitter to post openings, Twittersearch does permit searching across all of them and ranks results by relevance and time posted. Currently, users are able to browse seven industry sectors, listing more than 28,000 jobs. Although there is no category for information professional or librarian, there are job postings within the Marketing /Advertising and Media/ Creative sectors, which could appeal to those working in the information industry. Another job site, Jobaphiles (http://www.jobaphiles.com) launched recently as a ‘job-auction website’ in the US. Started by students for job-seeking students, it could be used as a tool for freelancers searching for project work. However, since ‘job auction’ implies that the bidder willing to work for the lowest pay is most likely to succeed in getting work, one wonders if this is not exploiting desperate job seekers in desperate times.

« Blog