Oh #JobFairy!

Chances are that you have heard or seen the term “JobFairy” around recently. That, or you don’t spend nearly as much time online as I do (for which I salute you). In case you haven’t, ‘t is simple really: Need work? Have a vacancy? Saw a recruitment add? Slap it onto the twitters and use the jobfairy hashtag. (like this: #jobfairy).

Wot now? Who came up with that!?

Aha. T was Una Mullally, journalist and allround funny woman, who introduced it on Twitter earlier this week. It was picked up rather swiftly by all the digiheads – with around 30 tweets/retweets appearing every hour. I asked her what’s her motivation behind it, and really, it’s as simple as this:

Una Mullally: Mate of mine was looking for summer work so I thought it would make sense to create a hashtag keeping all job-related stuff in one place.

So… Why does it beat other, ordinary job postings on Twitter?

Twitter these days is a very, very busy place. Searching for “jobs” will give you a infinite amount of tweets, ranging from San Fransisco to Tokyo, from hospital emergency work to marketing positions. The jobfairy tag (run it in a search for all the current tweets) will show all tweets relating to Ireland. Lets say, it’s a better, more profound search for jobs, something that helps you find that stupid, tiny needle in the big haystack.
It’s very much just people. Not agencies, not recruiters, not jobsite robots. (As much as I love robots, when it comes to jobsearching, they’re a right pain in the hole!). The posts come from people in real companies, looking for real staff. It’s real jobseekers, using a ‘new’, aggregated medium to advertise their skills. It’s genuine people, posting vacancies, hoping someone else might benefit.
In case you forgot, we’re still in a little bit of trouble, here in Ireland. The climate is gloomy, the jobs are few, so any initiative like this – in my opinion – is better than your average, static, sucky job listings website.
Most interesting companies hide their vacancies, in a dark corner, on their own website, hoping thé right candidate will stumble across it. So, us chumps, hardly ever see them… it this case, maybe another chump saw the vacancy and has the decency to link to twitter, creating more exposure for the ad and hopefully, that right candidate, was just checking their stream and will apply.

But but but, I don’t “do”/like Twitter…

No worries. You don’t even need to create a Twitter account to benefit. Just go to twitter.com, type jobfairy into the search box and all real-time results will show.

Okay, well, that all sounds good. Which jobs has the jobfairy posted so far?

You can have a look for yourself, but for the lazier readers: anything from marketing to chefs, bartenders to sales executives. Graduate and skilled jobs happily combined, not nearly as many “social media/community/buzzword/hype managers” as one would expect. There’s also a fair amount of internships (paid and non-paid) being advertised, make of it what you will, I’m not going to go into the whole “<rant> interns should be paid blahblah such an unfair and disgusting practice yadada <rant>” side of (non-paid) internships. If you are willing to work unpaid to gain experience, good for you. If you don’t, also good for you. (Use hashtag #internfairy for those postings).

Does it work?

Yes. Keeping in mind that it’s only been running for less than a week, it certainly has: 2 filled vacancies and many job interviews arranged. Personally, I think it should keep on running indefinite, as the hashtag allows for such an easy search for Irish jobs on Twitter (referring back to point 1 above). I also think it’s important that people participate: whenever you come across a vacancy, just write a quick description, add the link and tag it with #jobfairy. It mightn’t be your dreamjob, but it sure as hell could be someone’s deamjob. Like Una says herself: Let’s get Ireland tworking!

To end, here’s an artists impression of what I think the jobfairy looks like: