Gary Zukowski

President and CEO of TweetMyJOBS
By Paul Merrill, How to Geek On

I’ve addressed the question “What is Twitter?” for my readers here.  When asked, “what is Twitter,” how do you respond?

Even though Twitter was the word of the year last year, I still have to explain

They call it a micro-blogging platform.  I call it a micro-press conference.   You have an audience that is listening to what you say; when you do your status updates hear what you’re saying.  So, your audience is only as big as your list of followers.  Through Twitter and other services they can see your messages.

But, in a nutshell your message goes instantly to the people who are listening.

Now there are a lot of companies such as TweetMyJOBS and companies in other industries that are building services and intelligent layers on top of Twitter to do a variety of things.  That’s REALLY where the value of Twitter comes into play.  The fact that it’s an open solution, where you can tap into their API and pretty much control most of Twitter’s functionality through an API enables you to do a whole variety of things.  What we’ve done with TweetMyJOBS is effectively distribute jobs from corporations and vertically market to jobseekers.

What is TweetMyJOBS?

We’re tweeting jobs to people who are interested in a specific job function and in a specific geographical area.  We’ve gone out on Twitter and built out over 7,700 vertical job channels.  We call them job channels.  In essence, they are Twitter accounts.  We manage those accounts.  Every one of them is the intersection between a functional job type and a geographical location.

So, for instance, you’re in Raleigh.  We have 71 different job channels in Raleigh for whatever job function they might be.  Sales, Marketing, IT, Healthcare, Nursing, Manufacturing, Transportation… all the ones you would expect people to be looking for.

Companies get to take all their job postings – we grab them electronically.  We distribute them, based upon their function and location to the correct job channel.

Then from a jobseeker’s standpoint, they only need to subscribe or follow the accounts or job channels that apply to them.

So if you’re looking for a sales position in Raleigh, you subscribe to the sales channel in Raleigh and all you’re going to get in your Twitter feed are Raleigh Sales jobs.

How much does it cost a job seeker?

Absolutely nothing.

Our model is to charge corporations for the distribution of their jobs on Twitter and manage their job posting including their brand.

We’re trying to promote social media as a good platform for jobseekers.  So we don’t want to put barriers in place to prevent that.

How much does it cost an employer?

It depends on the size of the company and the number of jobs they expect to post.  You can post a job on our site for as little as two dollars for a one-day posting.  Or you can go up to a 30-day posting for $20, which is still cheaper than any board out there.  Craigslist is $25 for a posting.  Monster is $400 for a posting.

Most of our corporate clients are large, brand name companies: Sony Electronics, McDonalds, Netflix and AOL.  They like us because they can send all their jobs to us to distribute on Twitter.

The statistics say that only 30% of corporate job openings make it to job boards.  They can’t afford to send them all.

Instead, we charge them one flat fee and take them all.

How many employers use TweetMyJOBS?

1200 companies currently have posted job openings… about 300,000 jobs.

Have you measured the effectiveness of TweetMyJOBS for jobseekers?  How does it compare to traditional job boards?

We measure everything we have access to.  We measure the number of clicks we get from the jobs we’ve tweeted.

Many employers want us to direct the jobseekers to their job portals, so we’re not always able to measure the application of that jobseeker.  A lot of the companies can track that the applicant came from TweetMyJOBS and track them all the way through to hire.

We’re working on that and will be releasing some numbers soon.

Why did you start TweetMyJOBS?  Where did the idea come from?

It was the convergence of a lot of ideas.  I’ve owned an IT consulting firm in Charlotte since 1996 so I did a lot of recruiting.

In the Fall of 2008, I was asked to do some research on social media.  I stumbled upon Twitter, which I really hadn’t used very much.  I saw that they had an open API.  My Engineering mind said let’s structure this.  Then I wanted to wrap a business model around it.

About the same time, a developer in Charlotte approached me and said, why don’t you start tweeting your consulting openings out on Twitter.  That was the spark.  I thought, maybe we could do every consulting job in Charlotte, then, why not all jobs in Charlotte and then why just Charlotte?

In 2009 we started developing, launched in March of 09.

Why base your business on another business that doesn’t make a profit yet (Twitter)?

Twitter knows the value of their service is in the data.  The fact that Twitter is the only platform in the world that has real-time accessibility to live data that can be trended and analyzed on a global scale is valuable.

News stories come out on Twitter first.  You hear it on Twitter 1-2 hours before networks pick it up and Twitter can sell that data because it’s fresher.

Twitter actually turned a slight profit because of the Microsoft and Google deals they made last year.

I think Twitter is biding their time.

Investors were willing to invest $100M for 10% of the company.  They’re betting Twitter will turn a profit or that it will sell for billions of dollars.

How’s business?  Has revenue grown in the last year?  How much?

It’s been great.   We didn’t really start making money until July or August of last year.  As most startups do, we gave a lot away for free in the beginning to generate interest and traffic.

We’ve signed a lot of Fortune 100 companies that are looking for a social media solution.  The latest ones are Sears, Kmart, UAV (makes the predator drone), McDonald’s, etc.

Revenue is starting to come in.  Like most startups we’re spending it as fast as it comes in on Marketing, Advertising, and PR.  But it’s definitely growing.

Where do you see TweetMyJOBS going?  Acquisitions?

Acquisitions are a logical step for us.  The platform is there, the customers are there, and this tool is probably the most effective on Twitter right now.

It probably would be a nice extra bullet on a larger corporation’s product line.  So that’s definitely an option and we’ve spoken to several companies about that.

The other option is to go get some investors and really blow this thing wide open.  So that’s an option as well.

We haven’t committed to either option.  We’re in a good place right now.  We’re the market leader on Twitter for recruiting solutions.  We tweet more jobs, we’re global, and we have more channels than others.

There is a draw back to using Twitter for something like this, that is, typical job boards persist postings over longer periods of time.  TweetMyJOBS doesn’t really do that.  It seems I have to be looking at Twitter at the moment a channel produces a job in order to “catch it”?  Further, if a company has a position open for a longer period of time… how does that work?  How do job searchers get a persisted list of tweets from a channel and how long is that list available?  Isn’t the ephemeral nature of Twitter a drawback as much as it is a feature?

Great question.  One of the challenges we had was exactly that.  If you follow a bunch of people you get a lot of tweets.  If you go out to lunch you may never see a particular tweet!

One thing we do is, we built in “retweet”.  It’s not the same as a retweet on Twitter.  It’s a refresh of the original tweet on Twitter.  We pull the old one out and put a new (time stamped) one in.  So that will show up on the top of your Twitter feed again.

Do you loop tweets about jobs on the channels?  (Using Hootsuite or something like that?)

No, it’s our own technology.  One of the big things we thought about (and we’re pretty much one of the only one’s who’s thought of this) is persistence after the job gets filled.  When the job gets filled we take it down, out of the Twitter feed.

We clean those out.  Every job we have is a live job.

Have you thought about tweeting jobseekers to employers?  If so, can I have like, a couple percent of the equity in that venture?

(Laughs) We have the ability for jobseekers to upload their social media profile, which includes all the links to their profiles, whether it’s LinkedIn, Facebook, MySpace, Skype, their Visual CV or whatever.  You can store that in your public profile on TweetMyJOBS.

We have a special channel on Twitter called TweetMyResume.  We assemble a tweet for you of a link to your profile and we’ll tweet it out on TweetMyResume.

It’s free for jobseekers.

Where do you see this going past Twitter?  FacebookMyJobs?  BuzzMyJobs?

We keep track of all the new things that are coming out.  We’ve looked into Buzz.  It has a way to go.  Google makes cool products, but its still in Gmail.  So it’s not like we’re going to be able to tweet jobs to Buzz because it’s a Gmail-based platform.

Each of the social media products out there has a different purpose.  They are almost like verticals.  They each have value for your social media presence.

To me, Twitter is the best platform for tweeting jobs.  I don’t see Facebook taking the place of that as far as tweeting jobs effectively.

We are looking into other platforms.  Mobile is a big one.  There will be a lot more business applications being done on mobile.  We’re looking for some mobile solutions for that and it will probably extend more sophistication to the mobile user.

Is Twitter ingrained into your life yet?  How so?

I’m not a Twitter user who tells people what I had for breakfast, but I do use it a lot.  Everyone here uses it a lot for building brand.

If you follow me (@GaryZukowski) or TweetMyJOBS’ account (@TweetMyJOBS) you’ll see that I give out a lot of career advice.  I use it to keep in touch with people; I use it as a communication vehicle.

I can’t go an hour without checking my TweetDeck.

How much do the employees at TweetMyJOBS use Twitter for work?  How is productivity different when Twitter is introduced to the workplace?

It’s more for branding and marketing and monitoring the marketplace.  I like to see what is going on in social media so I follow Mashable.  I follow my competitors; I look for news regarding TweetMyJOBS.

Is social media as big a shift as the Internet revolution?

I do.  There are a lot of skeptics out there.  People think “oh, they’re just talking about silly stuff out there on Twitter.”  There were a lot of people out there in the early nineties saying, “why would you want to have a web site?  Who’s going to go to my website?  Why would I want to sell something on the Internet?  No one is going to put their credit card out there like that.”

Bill Gates was the most famous of all.  In 1993 he came out and said, “Why would any one want to use the Internet?” (The actual quote was, “Internet, we are not interested in it.”) You would think Bill Gates, being one of the most intelligent, insightful, and innovative people in the technological world would have known better, but he didn’t.

There is a revolution going on with social media today that will change the way we live and operate and we’re either going to embrace it and integrate it into our lives, or we’re not and you’re going to miss out on a lot of ways to make your life better.

Businesses that don’t engage social media to start selling products out there, to engage customers, and for potential job seekers – they are going to lose out.

Companies that were late to the Internet lost a lot of market share to the small upstarts that embraced it.

Where do you see social media going?

Beyond branding and sales, it does allow you to be much more interactive than websites.

Its engaging, its instant engagement with people.  It should bring people together; you should have a much better sense of whom you’re dealing with.

I tell clients, if they haven’t searched for a position in the last 2-5 years they’ve got some of catching up to do.  Things have changed so fast in the last few years, not only do we have email and 3G connections on our phones and GPS devices, but now we’ve got Twitter following us around and foursquare and etc, etc.  Where do you see this going?

I think it’s making a much more technologically advanced workforce.

The ones who embrace this technology will be the ones who succeed in this workforce.

I talk to a lot of jobseekers and I spend a good deal of time talking about personal branding.  That is a philosophy in and of itself, but the tactics involved in building a personal brand are to use social media tools to build that brand.

If you haven’t searched for a job in 2-5 years, you really need to do some research into personal branding and social media.  Those are the tools employers are using to do reference checking these days.  You have to go out and Google search yourself.  You’ve got to find out what’s being said about you that you may not know.  Then you’ve got to build your profile online, because it gives employers a much better flavor of who you are, than a black and white resume.

What’s a job search in 2015 going to look like?

It will be much more interactive.  You’ll see more video interviews.  I see it being a lot more interactive.  There are a lot more efficiencies companies can use to do a much better job of vetting their candidates rather than a traditional background check and interviews.

References are already nearly a farce.  What candidate is going to give bad references to a company?  So you’re starting to see companies not requiring the references because you can go to social media tools and find out whom they worked with last.

It will be a lot more interactive, a lot more electronic.

Is TweetMyJOBS hiring?  What positions?  Should my readers and clients consider TweetMyJOBS as a destination job?  Why?

We’d love to hire as many people as possible.  We’re still a small company, self-funded.  We have the bandwidth to handle the business coming in right now.

I think this year will be a tremendous opportunity for growth.  If that happens, by all means we’ll be hiring.  Right now we don’t have openings.  When we do, TweetMyJOBS will be the first place we’ll post it!

Does TweetMyJOBS do all its hiring and advertising of positions exclusively through TweetMyJOBS?  (Eat your own dog food?)  Has it been effective?

Most hiring has been friends and colleagues, which at the end of the day is the best way to find people.

We haven’t had to post a job yet.

How are you building TweetMyJOBS?  What type of person are you looking for in building this business?

Sales, Marketing, Advertising, and some admin.  What you have to have to build this type of company is mostly on the sales and marketing side and the technology.

Ruby on Rails is the technology we’re using.

How would you describe the company culture at TweetMyJOBS?

We’ve tried to define our culture.  Cool people, serious business.  We have a lot of fun with what we do everyday.  We try to add elements of humor to what we do in blog postings and such.  It’s a good environment.

What’s next for TweetMyJOBS?

We’re building out clients.  We’re trying to capture as much of the US market as possible right now.  We also have plans to go into the UK and European markets as well.

The UK and Europe is not as big a user base for Twitter yet, but it’s coming.

We’re also building our product base for the jobseeker and for the employer as well.

Congrats on your success this far.  Thanks for your time and thoughts.  Do you have any last thoughts or insights for our readers and their career transitions?

It’s a tough market.  Keep at it.  The big thing is to differentiate yourself from other jobseekers.  Studying Personal Branding outside the resume will give you a leg up on the competition.

Many thanks to Gary and TweetMyJobs for the interview.  Thanks to TechJournal South and TechMedia for running the abbreviated version.  Paul Merrill is a Career Coach specializing in working with the technically gifted.  When you’re ready to get your job search unblocked and on track, contact him here.