3 Twitter Tools to Accelerate Your Job Search

According to the 2010 JobVite Study, Twitter is one of the Top 3 social media sites for employers and recruiters to use to identify and source potential job candidates. Twitter is also a platform for someone in a job search to find job advice and job openings.

My Top 3 Twitter Tools for a Person in Career Transition

1) Hashtags: Hashtags has the # sign preceding the words. Most commonly seen is the #FF / #FollowFriday where people on Twitter recommend some of their favorite people with whom they follow on Twitter.

Essentially, hashtags create a filing cabinet. Type a hashtag in the Twitter search box and you will arrive on a page that is filled with tweets containing that hashtag. I recommend for people to find the most commonly used hashtags at a website called hashtags.org. You can type in your keyword and find the most commonly used hashtag for that keyword. If you are looking for an IT job, you could type #ITjobs in the Twitter search box and yield job postings for that particular career track.

2) TweetMyJobs: This website is a  job board for Twitter.  TweetMyJobs reports that they have had 1.6 million+ job postings from Twitter in the last 30 days. Pretty overwhelming, right? The beauty of this job board is that you are able to enter in your search parameters and zone in on jobs within a certain geographic location or even a company. While hashtags are good to understand and use, Twitter job boards such as TweetMyJobs makes locating jobs of interest on Twitter a snap.

3) Joining Chats: When you are launching a job search, many people have questions – i.e. best formats for resumes, what is personal branding, how to prepare for an interview, etc. Twitter has career professionals who have chats that occur on a scheduled basis. Some of the most common include #brandchat, #jobhuntchat, #careerchat, and #hirefriday. Go to Twitter and enter in the hashtag, i.e. #jobhuntchat, on the scheduled time it meets. You will need to enter this hashtag at the end of your question or comment for it to appear real-time in the Twitter chat.

Additionally, you can type in hashtags, such as #jobseekers, #jobsearch, #resume, #resumewriting, and more to see tweets that contain advice, links to articles, blog posts, resources, and more.

Twitter is a fertile ground for forging networking connections through chats and identifying potential job opportunities. Learning how to utilize the tools available through Twitter will facilitate your job searching efforts and may be the door to open for new possibilities. In my next article, I will show you how to set up for your Twitter profile on the new Twitter platform that has recently launched, giving you critical information that you need to fast-track your success with Twitter.

Kristen Jacoway is the founder of Career Design Coach, providing professional speaking, training, and one-on-one consultation focused on next-generation career marketing services. She wrote the book, “I’m in a Job Search-Now What???” and the book has frequently ranked in the Top 100 in its’ category on Amazon.