You may have noticed that we keep mentioning our use of Twitter and how it’s a great tool for finding, researching, and getting jobs. We were really skeptical when we started using it - we thought it would be a huge time waster - but every day we’re more impressed with the service. In fact, we’re working on an article about using Twitter to find a job. Don’t wait for us to publish it though. Go try Twitter for yourself, and if you like it and have great software development skills, consider a job with Twitter.
Twitter is a really simple service that started with a simple idea. Unfortunately it’s still hard to explain to the uninitiated. It’s not that most people can’t grasp what Twitter does, but it’s that they can’t understand why in the world you would waste your time using it. The buzz term for Twitter is “micro-blog.” The idea is that you share information in the form of “tweets,” messages that are 140 characters or less in length (that’s not an arbitrary number - it allows for complete integration with SMS systems). For the Facebook fiends out there, we describe it as a cross between Facebook status updates and Facebook walls. The real beauty is in the network, because Twitter allows you to “follow” the updates of anyone (the default is to have your updates publicly available, you can hide them from people you don’t approve). The best part is that quite a few people people who are kind of a big deal are are active users and easily accessible on Twitter. While they may not respond to your e-mails, phone calls, or Facebook friend requests, they’ll reply within a minute or two to your tweets. Twitter has helped us build some great business relationships, and we’re definitely sold on it now. If you’re still skeptical, take now that the mainstream media is singing Twitter’s praises as well. Read this article about Twitter in BusinessWeek and see if you still have your doubts.
Twitter’s biggest challenge to this date has been that their service keeps going offline. That sounds really bad, but it’s because Twitter is too popular - the online equivalent of being sold out. Both their software and hardware are having trouble keeping up with the demand. That means that Twitter is looking for great people to help them improve their service and deal with scaling issues.
Twitter currently has four opportunities in their San Francisco office listed on their Jobs page (be aware that twitter.com/jobs is a user’s profile, not their jobs page) - three of which might be appropriate for new college grads. They are currently looking for an Operations Engineer, a Systems Engineer, and a Front End Engineer. The Front End Engineer job appears to be the most “entry-level” of the three, and the Systems Engineer job is best suited for candidates with a Master’s Degree in Computer Science. From the looks of the job descriptions, which are quite detailed, these jobs require a lot of experience and know-how. If you’re going to apply, you better have worked on some impressive projects during your free time or at the very least been an academic all-star.
Right now, the way to apply for a job at Twitter is to send a killer cover letter and a resume to jobs@twitter.com. We think that Twitter should require job applications to be submitted via Tweet and kept under 140 characters instead.
We love Twitter. Please go help them make it better. They offer a fun startup atmosphere with fewer than 20 employees and everyone gets free iPhones.
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Nice Willy! Found your blog from a twitter entry, although we share Recruitings Networking on Ning too!
We, too, think that twitter can be a great job search tool and have just launched a basic twitter tool that finds the highest paying job in a specific vertical and send one tweet an hour. see workhound.co.uk/twitter or simply follow http://twitter.com/StartupJobs to see how it works for startup positions.
Cheers,
Bill
Marketing at workhound.co.uk