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Single Tweet Clinches Job For One Lucky Applicant

by Amar Toor on December 14, 2009 at 08:30 AM

Back in the days of yore, everything was just a bit harder. People had to do things like get up to change the channel, walk 10 miles to school (uphill both ways), and spend hours poring over resumes and cover letters before applying for a job. Nowadays, it seems like all you need to land your dream job is a Twitter account and a preternatural gift for 140-character prose.

That is, if your dream job happens to be at BFG Communications, a marketing firm that recently hired someone on the merits of a single tweet. The lucky applicant, Hal Thomas, won the position with the following tweet:

@BFGCom @SloaneKelley It seems that BFG's future could be looking bright! http://twitpic.com/ggkrf More info at http://bit.ly/2aziWg.

The links direct to Thomas's blog and a mock Wired magazine cover (pictured). Sloane Kelley, BFG's content director, claims that Twitter was the "perfect medium" for finding worthy candidates for this particular position, which requires a lot of social media savoir-faire. Using Twitter allowed Kelley to "get a sense of how applicants use social media and, more importantly, how they think." What made the tweet so extraordinary? According to Kelley, it was the self-evident sense of humor, and the way he delved into his own philosophy on social media, via the link to his blog.

It seems like an extremely specific case, and one that we probably won't -- and shouldn't -- be seeing anytime soon. If you're looking for a job in a social media field, what better way to prove your chops than by incorporating Twitter (or Facebook, even?) into the application itself. Resumes and cover letters never tell the whole story, but they do tell a more complete one. While writers submit samples and photographers submit portfolios, those almost always accompany a resume of some variant. And at a time when jobs are especially hard to come by, we'd rather see the few vacancies available going to the people who really deserve them most. [From: MSNBC]

Tags: job application, JobApplication, jobs, top, tweet, twitter

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