Via Twitter, lots of you have been asking us “what’s this #twitterjobchallenge, then?” Allow me to explain.
But first, a little context. It all started when the Careers team was sat around engaged in deep discussion about the theme for our next Careers Talk podcast.
“Desirability of the public sector, despite cuts?”
“Nah”
“Jobseeking on Twitter.”
“Oooh, yeah.”
The Twitter idea was actually inspired by Ulrike Schulz’s recent blog, Can Twitter help me land my dream job? We decided we wanted to explore, in more detail, just how good Twitter was for looking for work and creating job opportunities, in what podcast that will be coming soon calls ‘how to use Twitter to find a job’.
But, first we had to think about the conflicting evidence of how effective Twitter really is when it comes to careers. Because, while Ulrike plugs away admirably, using Twitter to put herself in front of employers and immerse herself in her chosen industry of advertising (with some impressive success, I must say), a survey has just been released that suggests social media job-seeking might not work for everyone.
Research from recruitment consultancy Robert Half claims “social media is a fail whale for recruitment”.
The survey found that 52% of chief financial officers said their companies have not used any social media for recruiting.
But, as discussed in our recent podcast, we’re not entirely convinced that chief financial officers are the ones plugging away in the HR departments. Plus, there’s still that remaining 48% that do use social media to target people.
It was at this point that my colleague Harriet Minter had a brainwave and the #twitterjobchallenge was born.
Her idea was to to use Twitter to find out which employers are really paying attention to jobseekers on social media and involve graduates in the process.
So we started by asking our esteemed graduate blogger Sara Barnard to take the challenge.
All she had to do was:
• Pick five employers
• Use Twitter to convince them to give her a job
• Tell us who responded and how she did it
Then we opened it out to our followers, and anyone else who happened across it on Twitter.
Actually, although I’ve used 400-odd words to explain it, that’s it. Try to convince an employer, your top employer if you like, to give you a job using Twitter. And share your experiences with us, of course.
You can also keep up with how the challenge develops by signing up for our weekly newsletter. We’ll be posting updates via that too.
Good luck.
