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Recruitment 2010 brings you the latest news and reviews of what's happening in the recruitment space. Issue #1 brings a review of JobDeck by Sonru's resident twitterholic. We spoke with Katie Canton from Work Digital Ltd. who launched the product as well as giving it a vigorous test drive. Does it get a heads up or a thumbs down? You decide by reading the short post.

Twitter afficionados within the recruitment industry might well allow themselves to pop the champagne to celebrate the arrival of JobDeck. In a nutshell, it's a marriage of hugely popular social media desktop client TweetDeck, with TwitJobSearch, the first real-time job search engine. According to WorkDigital Ltd., who developed the product, it’ll now be even easier to search social media for job offers, track the latest trends in job hunting, and connecting with contacts across Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and more.

I’ve been using TweetDeck for a good while now and find it excellent with its column layout allowing you to monitor tweets from users you follow, tweets mentioning you, tweets mentioning specific searches you’ve set e.g. ‘interview preparation’ or ‘online video’ without having to necessarily follow all these users. Bascially it allows you to follow conversations without clutter. I haven't been looking for a job in years so i've not used TwitJobSearch but I did attend an exceptional presentation from WorkDigital's co-founder Bill Fisher a few months ago at one of Declan's Fitzgerald's gigs - the Future of Recruitment Part 2 and I must say I was more than impressed.

The Spin:

Well in conversation with Katie Canton, Work Digital’s Marketing/Product Manager a couple of days after the launch on January 25th, she was pretty happy with its coverage in the NYTimes, the Guardian, TechCrunch, WashingtonPost, and 50 other newspapers globally, which vastly exceeded their expectations.  In terms of who is using the product, they’re seeing fairly wide adoption amongst both job seekers, recruiters, and HR professionals. “We expected to see the job seeker usage and are pleased to see HR pros finding value in the product. What I think recruiters are finding particularly useful in these early days, is the ability to easily track leaders in the industry. They can share ideas, keep abreast with the latest recruitment news and technology, and feel connected with recruiters and HR professionals worldwide.. we've heard from a few recruiters that JobDeck is now the first thing they turn on in the morning."

Of course she would say that though wouldn't she so what's

The Verdict:

JobDeck isn’t really hugely different to TweetDeck. Sure it’s got a bit of a makeover with its mahogany branding and the two pre-set columns feeding tweets from ‘Job Search Expert’ and ‘TwitJobSearch’. The job search experts feed provides tips and links of interest from apparently 25 recruitment gurus but I haven’t yet managed to add a few more experts to this feed which means I’d need to set up another column ‘Joy’s job search experts’ which seems a bit counterproductive. Having said that, this column has brought me a few interesting tweets/links to articles that i may never have found so I suppose it must mean I'm happy enough to hang on to it. The second feed provides a feed of jobs posted on TwitJobSearch without the refined search that the site offers, there is some filtering but it’s messy.

In summary, if you’re new to TweetDeck and even Twitter you’ll find it fabulous because it gets you on the road but if you’re savvy and have been using TweetDeck or any of the many clients and apps to organise your twitterverse then this product isn’t going to rock your world. I’ve downloaded now, in fact it just replaces TweetDeck plus those two columns which no doubt I’ll delete if added functionality isn’t issued in due course.