Whether you’re proactively looking for a job or just want to be aware of any opportunities out there, Twitter is a great source of job offers.
In this post, I’ll share an effortless method to easily receive job alerts in your Gmail, directly from Twitter.
Although probably not as consulted as the likes of LinkedIn or AngelList, Twitter is a source of job vacancies. Many Twitter users regularly tweet out their most recent available positions:
We’re looking for a top notch sys admin who likes playing around with Deis, kubernetes, and a huge amount of traffic. Remote ok. DM me.
— Alex MacCaw (@maccaw) September 16, 2016
This post will show you how to receive an email whenever a job vacancy is tweeted, and our story begins very simply.
It begins with a search.
For this exercise, we’ll try to come up with a minimum viable advanced search whose results should deliver the most relevant tweets.
In other words:
This Sean Bean meme is spot-on: the wider a search, the less accurate its resulting data.
To achieve the results you want, you can either use Twitter’s advanced search form or write your own expression (alternatively, check this complete Buffer article).
Please note that you can also save an advanced search on Twitter. However, this means you’ll have to access the platform to use that saved search.
On top of that, the disadvantage with doing so is timing, which is often of the essence in job searches. By the time you’ll find a relevant tweet while scrolling down a saved searched, it can be already too late (or irrelevant).
Be happier with Zapier.
Apart from a Twitter account, make sure you also have a Zapier account set up as well.
Let’s begin building our Zap (a Zap is basically what we call a Zapier automation in these parts of the galaxy).
Step 1: establishing our criteria on Twitter
After choosing Twitter as your starting app, select “Search Mention”:
The important step is “Edit options”, where we establish our search conditions.
Here’s an example:
I’m following Boromir’s advice, and trying to do more than simply searching “jobs”.
Basically, I’m trying to obtain tweets:
- Containing “we’re looking for” and [“Lisbon” or “remote”], or an identical search in Portuguese.
- That are not retweets.
- That are irrelevant.
Zapier allows you to preview a sample tweet so that you can test and preview the data to see if it’s really what you want:
Step 2: send tweet to Gmail
After setting up the Zapier authentication for Gmail, you’ll need to build the corresponding email that delivers the tweet.
Zapier is very intuitive, so I’ll skip the initial setup this time, but leave a comment if you run into any problems, though.
You’ll be able to define To, Cc, Bcc, From, Reply-To, etc., but the email body is where we’ll add contain the information we want (note: it accepts HTML!).
For our example, the field configuration looks like this:
Ultimately, this will send out an email like:
That’s it. You can later improve that email template, adapting it to your own taste.
Do you use other similar automations?
This post only shows a small example to realize the potential of pairing a solid Twitter search with Zapier’s formidable capabilities, and not just within a personal setting… if you’ve ever done any online marketing, you can imagine the possibilities.
If you use any identical tools (like IFTTT, for example), feel free to share them in the comments below.
Disclaimer: this post is not paid content or anything of the sort. I *really* just love the product.
One of my first remote jobs was found via twitter. I din’t had such a great system, but it truly is a source of work. Love your post. Keepgoing broda!
Gracias!