CareerTweeter

Honestly, if I were a chic, I think I’d have a major creepy crush on Charles Darwin. Forget Freud & Einstein & the woman with the short hair from The New Inventors. These are all low-hanging fruit compared to CD. The man challenged the way we view the world. And all because he left us with a little idea called evolution.

Ask my kids, I’m an evolution freak. I reckon I can put just about any aspect of animal behaviour and experience in terms of their lowest common denominator – the need to survive through reproduction and adaptation.

And I can feel another such analogy coming on. Every aspect of my life is so ensconced in the web, that it’s difficult for me to view it in terms other than organic. Before my very eyes, over the past decade, it has morphed from a black hole for porn, into an integral aspect of how we conduct ourselves professionally, personally and emotionally. In evolutionary terms, it has responded to its need to survive by adapting, and it has successfully reproduced. Think about the forefathers of the net we know today, fax, email, that funny ‘You’ve Got Mail’ messaging you see in movies from the late nineties, where the fonts are big and colorful, and everyone has a weird user name. Back then, we would never have considered using the functions of the net for anything other than basic communication.

If it had remained at that, the net would have been torn to shreds by some other highly evolved predator.

But it didn’t, it adapted to society’s need to have information faster, and deeper. By deeper, I’m referring to hypertext. It also responded to the growing requirement to control and interact. New Age spiritualism has a lot to answer for in this regard. Just visit any second-hand bookstore and you’ll see the copies of self-help manuals from the nineties, screaming out that you ARE in charge of your destiny, you are not a victim and you create what you harvest.

So, this brings me to my rant about social media. It’s a term that virtually didn’t exist a decade ago. This decade, these are the most important two words in recruitment.

Word-of-mouth is the old-fashioned way of talking about the kind of phenomenon where folks tell each other about stuff and the info passes down the line. And this used to work in small communities where people had limited choices about where to shop, what to think etc.

But we’re in the grip of globilisation, baby. To operate in 2009, we need an informed opinion on a myriad of topics and issues. We can shop for products anywhere in the world, and have them on our doorstep within a week or two. Our businesses, they don’t just service the people in the local community, or our own country, for that matter. The tentacles of the web are far reaching. And they’re continuing to evolve in order to reach further.

In the face of such rapid changes to the way we operate in the commercial and private sphere, the net has responded through the evolution of social media.

And I’ve adopted this new species with fervor. Yes, @geoffjennings has the twitterbug. And I can’t imagine recruiting without it. It provides an immediate stream of up-to-date content, unlike job boards that sometimes take waaaaay too long to update. It’s interactive; jobs can be clicked on, RT’d (retweeted) to others and commented on in real time. And, finally, it’s a hot place to promote the recruitment industry and thereby become a source of info for the job seeker. It’s hard to go back to regular surfing after this. The content of the web can be infuriatingly outdated. Job seekers are too time-pressed to know anything but what’s current. (Hint. Download TweetDeck and have all your content streamed in through this desktop application.)

Twitter is the new Google – the new and improved spawn of the original search engine.

Here are five ways Twitter will help the way we find jobs:

1. TweetFeeds
Jobs will be RSS fed into Twitter profiles. Twitters can then choose which job content they will follow based on location, industry type etc. Example: @GamerJobs

2. TwitterSearch.
All Twitter content is searchable here. Tweets use # tags for keywords. Search the latest jobs content as it happens.

3. TweetSmart.
Employers/Recruiters will have an opportunity to tweet their industry knowledge. Jobseekers have the ability to research who they follow.

4. TweetStream.
Jobseekers can have a drip attached to the latest job content. Example @ITJobsMelbourne
Currently they trawl job boards once or twice a day.

5. TwitterOutplacement.
These services are well suited to Twitter. Experts can tweet their wares to the needy en masse (and aren’t we seeing that masse growing. In fact, yesterday in the States it grew by 75000)

Just as it would be ridiculous for us to imagine dinosaurs being fully functional in the world as we know it, so too it is difficult to find validity in the old ways of the net. The new breed is here.

Social media.