PharmiMike

Just been reading about http://muckrack.com/ – its a Press Release site that pushes your 140 character press releases onto Twitter, for ONLY $50 (minimum). Is anyone actually doing that?

In case you haven’t heard the geeks talking about it, Google launched an important new baby in private in May (09), released it to a select few for testing – Its called Wave, and in essence its a completly new way of communicating in real-time, that has potential to replace email, IM (instant messenger) and more – there, I told you it was important. The concensus seems to be that it will either change the world or fail completely.

There’s a good overview on Mashable here. Suffice to say, I’m trying to get myself onto the beta testing list, to see how the whole thing might impact pharma recruitment.

I also think that Google Wave has thw potential to be a twitter beater, as it provides real time interactive chat. According to the wave website:

A wave is equal parts conversation and document.People can communicate and work together with richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more.

A wave is shared. Any participant can reply anywhere in the message, edit the content and add participants at any point in the process. Then playback lets anyone rewind the wave to see who said what and when.

A wave is live. With live transmission as you type, participants on a wave can have faster conversations, see edits and interact with extensions in real-time.

Its also fully accessible to programmers as it uses an open protocol, so anyone can build their own wave system. 

Its not available to the public yet and wont be for a few months yet, but watch this space.

Recruiting: Enough to Make a Monster Tremble : Businessweek .
http://bit.ly/3TFW7n

I looked at TwitterJobSearch a while back and for some reason it didn’t really register. However, I saw recently that they were anouncing updates, so I took another look.

Firstly what is it?

It’s a job search engine that uses Twitter as its source of jobs. OK, I admit I’m still pretty sceptical about the real value of candidates you get from Twitter, but I thoughht I’d have a look and see how it might help move Twitter one step closer to a useful application.

First Impressions

Its a nice looking 2.0 site. Clean, simple and pretty easy to use. The homepage has one large form field titled, “What do you want to do?” – thats nice. (There is an advanced search too). It also has a large counter showing how many jobs have been added in the last 30 days. (300,000 if I recall).

Does it work for the candidate?

Actually it does seem to. Searching is simple, and filters work reasonably well. However, my first  question was how do they know the location, salary, job type & job title from a simple tweet? More on that in a moment. I searched for Pharma Jobs and was pleased to see a selection of PharmiWeb jobs, from a bunch of my different twitter accounts.

You can search and save jobs when you link to your own twitter account, and you can addyour own profile and links to LinkedIn and other online CVs.

Applying for a job involves clicking a small (cute) icon below the job labelled “I can do that“, then you get a chance to select whether you want a public or private application. Its seems pretty slick.  Job owners are notified by tweet that they have  a new application.

Twitterjobsearch results

Does it work for advertising my pharma jobs?

Well, if you have a twitter account with your jobs, you may already be listed. if not, you can post directly (time consuming) or can provide them with an XML feed, which is where they get their “advanced” detail from I guess. Is it worth doing? Looking at the PharmiWeb stats its hard to determine as any clicks to the original job as they are not campaign flagged in any way.

Beyond Twitter

It looks like they also scrape a bit more detail of the job’s original page which is clever, and also create a list of keywords (presumably keyword matching) Read more…

Now here’s an interesting thing… I was recently looking at Google’s Insight tool. If you dont know, its a tool that allows you to look at search trends over time, and against keywords from 2004 onwards. So, I dropped in “Pharmaceutical Jobs”… expecting to see a steady rise in the numbers of people entering that keyphrase into Google. But, guess what, its actually fallen, and fallen quite dramatically, to 45%  of what it was at the start of 2004.

Google Insights for "Pharmaceutical Jobs"

So then I typed in “Pharma Jobs” and its the opposite story although not quite as dramatic.  So why is that?

My guess would be that:

1. people are increasingly familiar with pharma as the acceptable abbreviation of pharmaceutical
2. more people realise that searching for something as broad as pharmaceutical jobs, doesn’t really narrow their search. Indeed, the number of people who land on PharmiWeb.com as a result of that search is actually pretty small, even though we rank #3 on Google.

Interestingly you can also see that annual variations in search that mirror pretty much exactly, the traffic on PharmiWeb.com. That is, busy in January and around August, dead over Christmas, so I suspect this is pretty universal.

So have a play on the insight tool and you will see that more specific searches are rising, and also that geographically some areas like India are increasing significantly. Use that information when planning your SEO and your adword campaigns too.

Google has anounced they are to be launching their own operating system.  This is significant stuff, as, although its only aimed at netbooks to start with, it will start to eat away at Microsoft’s core business. Its the first real face to face challenge that microsoft has had in this area. Google already has online versions of the most popular “office type” products which personally I’m using increasingly. Desktop versions are planned too.

Read more on the BBC News.

I came across this news aggregator site. They call it a “personal, online magazine rack” and its a  pretty nice way of seeing whats hot at any moment in pharma (or any other topic for that matter), by pulling info in from various blogs and feeds.

• pharma.alltop.com
• biotech.alltop.com
• health.alltop.com

…of course, you can create your own collection and then share that. I can’t see any way of adding your own though but maybe I’m missing something…

There is a widget though… it allows you to post last 5 pharma news items on your website. Of course you have no control over them..

I’ve also submitted PharmiWeb’s news RSS and this Blog’s RSS to them for inclusion… lets wait and see

Update…

PharmiWeb news and PharmiMike news is now included on the alltop pharma channel. cool.

OK,  I posted 5 jobs on TweetMyjobs.com, selected at random from my current top jobs. According to their stats, I recieved the following clicks…

• Senior Manager of Health Economics (50 view, 59 clickthroughs)
• GLOBAL Regulatory Affairs Director (2/3)
• Associate Medical Director (56/59)
• Marketing Project Manager (58/56)
• CRA – Scotland (6/0)

Posting the jobs in the first place, was a manual process, and I found no way of automatically posting them through an API, so long term its not particularly viable.

When you post your job (through the very clunky interface), you  select a preferred channel. They then push the  job out to an appropriate twitter account. They have  ”5000″ channels.  However., many of these “channels” have  only a handful of followers, and you know as well as I do that a good proportion of these will be “twitiots” who are spam or will follow anything in the hope they get their own followers up. You can re-weet too (for a cost), but its not automatic, so you’d need to log back in and re-weet (as I did) .

Overall I’m not that impressed with the experience. I certainly won’t be paying for it. Having said that, I think it’s early days for Twitter recruitment, and I think that it has some way to go before people look at it as a useful way of finding jobs. I dont think any of the people that clicked on the twitter posts actually applied for a job, so  quite franky I have better ways to be spending my day.

Unless you’ve had a better experience….

PharmiMike Rating 2/10

Having been a twitterer (is that in the Oxford English Dictionary yet?) for a while, I cant help noticing that I get a lot of followers who clearly have no interest in me, and are only looking to “expand their following”, as they seem to have that as their objective, either for some “I can show you how to become a millionaire with the secret of the internet they don’t want you to know, but I will sell you for only $50 a month” scheme. This is a shame as it will potentially lead twitter into chaos and confusion. (OK maybe I’m guilty too to a degree) . So how do you try to keep you follows pure. Well, I have a few tests I like to keep in mind when I scan down my daily list of “new followers”:

1. Number of posts: if your follower is following 500 people but only has 1 post, its out.
2. Photo. Is there actually a photo. if they cant be bothered or dont know how to add a photo, they’re out
3. Number of followers: If they have no followers (especially if they are following 500 people), out they go
4. Profile. too many “get rich quick on the internet” schemes, out they go

So I guess, the ratio of those that follow me to me following them is about 20:1, not a good sign for the future of twitter.

If you are still not  sure exactly what Twitter is and what the hype is all about, there’s a really nice introduction on youtube: