PharmiMike

A new multi-posting tool has arrived on the block…

Vacancy Poster is a full featured web application that enables recruiters to post their vacancy simultaneously to multiple job boards. It provides similar functionality to established solutions such as Broadbean and Idibu, but free of charge.

Is this a Broadbean killer? – I’ll certainly be looking into it further.  I will also ensure that PharmiWeb.com is on their list of Job Boards.

http://www.vacancyposter.com/

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…

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.

Another job board powered by Twitter and recycling content that already exists. Nice to see we are in there, but so far I’ve had a single click through!

• twitterjobfinder.co.uk

Another Twitter Job Board

It does make me think more about my Twitter strategy for PharmiWeb. Currently I’m pushing out selections of jobs on various categories (client, region, job) to a number of different twitter accounts, but its getting more and more complicated as I add more, and harder to keep track.  I’m actually not that convinced about the responses or the quality of the candidates we get from it, bu it does constitute “noise” so I guess its a form of marketing!

This one looks reasonably organised, and has a reasonable interface. Largely US based, but currently free to post, but only manually and limited to 5 ads per hour or 12 ads in a 24 hour period.

They have an API (geekspeak for you can get a computer to talk to it) to allow you to query their jobs, but not one for posting jobs. I’ve requested that thet pick up feeds from PharmiWeb.com – we’ll see.

• jobshouts.com

Job Shouts - Twitter Job board

I’ve signed up for some sponsored adverts on the Aggregator Board, Indeed.com. They already pick up our feeds and we get a fair amount of traffic from them that converts reasonably well. Their sign up process was relatively painless and it all goes onto a credit card. Interestingly they request that we put a piece of Javascript code on the “Thankyou for applying for the job” page so that they can track conversions (in the same way that Google Analytics does. Not a bad idea.

I’ll run it for 1 month and see how we get on.

Just came across this site / service which I will check out and review.

• tweetmyjobs.com

Apparently : The world’s largest Twitter Job Board! Currently tweeting over 300,000 jobs!
Over 65,000 followers on our 5,000+ Job Channel network. 6,000+ companies represented.

Push your Jobs to Twitter?

Personally I’m not that impressed. Its clunky and doesn’t do a vast amount that cant be done with a couple of hours of time.

I think I am getting obsessed with RSS feeds. However it occurs to me that you cant do much digital marketing with them. And feed reading is much easier now it is build into most new browsers. (Safari, Opera and Chrome are all good!)

Why use RSS?

What’s Going On
How can you find out what’s going on in your field? Well, I use an RSS reader (actually I use the build in reader in the Opera Browser) to display feeds from a range of sites. that way I can scan down and see what’s new. It certainly saves opening a dozen or more websites. I read feeds for most of the major pharmaco’s PR(where they have them), and a selection of other sites. (reuters, bbc health, Department of Health etc.)

Tell The world
If you have content of your own, make sure its available in RSS! and make sure as many variations as possible are on RSS. Better still, allow your users to define their own feeds. For example, candidates who save a job search on PharmiWeb.com have the ability to read their job alerts as an RSS feed.

This blog has an RSS feed, and so you can subscribe to it and find out when I update it without checking back every day!

Keeping Control of your own RSS feeds
One thing I’ve had problems with is keeping track of the feeds that I generate. Enter Feedburner. Feedburner is one of Google’s goodies that allows you to log and track your feeds, so you can see how many subscribers you have and also modify elements of the feed without going back to your website developers. I’ll do more on Feedburner later, because there are some cool features, but essentially you can add your feed to feedburner and it creates a new XML/RSS feed which you can modify, log, publicise, etc etc. Well worth doing.