There’s been a ridiculous amount of coverage lately in the recruiting industry about Twitter’s impact on the space. I am a fan of Twitter and have found it to be an advantageous tool to leverage for specific applications in our business. I also think that it is an interesting and potentially valuable tool for job seekers and employers. But the attention being paid to Twitter in the recruiting business is way overblown and far outweighs its true value in the process of finding a job or an employee.

Before anyone freaks out and dismisses this post with a “you don’t get it” or “you’re an idiot,” I would argue quite vehemently that I do and I’m not. Twitter is a really cool tool in the social media space, and it has definite value for job seekers and employers. There are lots of jobs being distributed into and through Twitter, and job seekers should be spending some time exploring what’s out there via Twitter. Employers and job boards too should be leveraging Twitter as a means to distribute their jobs to a wider, possibly different, audience as well as perhaps more convenient channel (at least for some). But Twitter is no different that any other channel (print, web, radio, TV, mobile, RSS, newsletters, podcasts, etc.) that employers and job seekers should be exploring to improve their chances of successfully accomplishing their respective goals. But diversification across multiple channels is critical, and the notion that Twitter alone is sufficient to achieve success is patently absurd. Even more ludicrous are the recruitment advertising businesses springing up that are based entirely around Twitter.

As just a small test of Twitter, I searched for Creative Director on Twitterjobsearch.com. There were 6,000+ search results.

I scrolled down a bit and clicked on advertischicago’s job for a creative director/Art, and was taken to AdvertisChicago’s Twitter page.

After clicking on the same job again, I was taken to Indeed.com’s page, where I discovered that the job was no longer available on Oddskills.com, the original source of the job listing.

So after 3 clicks, I found that a job that was tweeted about only 2 hours ago was no longer available and that the listing itself had traveled through 4 places. This was the first job I clicked on, and the experience was just as useless as any job search on Indeed, SimplyHired, Monster, CareerBuilder, or any other jobs site that has old, outdated, and duplicative job listings, and/or fake/fraudulent/scam jobs. It took me just one try to find exactly the type of experience that I assumed I would find sooner or later, and that is why I am confident that I do ‘get it’ and that I’m not an idiot when I dismiss the wave of job-related businesses that are basing their entire service model around Twitter.

I was poking around Craigslist today when I came across this Alexa chart of daily pageviews comparing Craigslist to Monster and Careerbuilder. Shockingly, Craigslist (the blue line) has included a chart on its own site which would lead one to believe that it crushes the other 2 mega job boards in terms of daily pageviews.

But what got my attention, in addition to the fact that it’s an Alexa chart which makes the data highly suspect if not outright meaningless, was the date of the chart – August 15th, 2007. For supposedly the most modern, hip, successful, and technologically sophisticated in a neanderthal sort of way of web companies, this seemed woefully outdated (and as backwards as its site design). So I pulled a new chart (monthly pageviews for 12 months ending November, 2008) from Compete.com, a far better source of site analytics.

According to Compete, Craigslist and Hotjobs barely register on the chart of monthly pageviews when compared to Monster and Careerbuilder. I’m no big defender of the mega job boards, and the trends for each of the 4 sites listed above should raise some eyebrows, but I despise even more ridiculous claims of superiority.

1) TechCrunch recently wrote about the worsening situation for daily newspapers and the abysmal 2nd quarter they have had.

2) The Economist reports that daily newspapers in emerging economies are thriving. As Thomas Barnett points out, the logic is that:

The demand for news tends to go up as people enter the workforce, earn more money, invest it and so begin to feel that they have more of a stake in their society. Literacy rates also rise in tandem with wealth. For the newly literate, flipping through a newspaper in public is a potent and satisfying symbol of achievement.

3) Gannett has acquired a majority stake in CareerBuilder by purchasing an additional 10% stake in the jobs classified company from Tribune. The $135 million that Gannett paid places a $1.3 billion valuation on the leading jobs classified company (I’d guess that the math and the actual valuation is probably more complicated than a simple x10, but it has to be pretty close). Gannett now owns 50.8%, with Tribune holding on to 30.8%, McClatchy 14.4%, and Microsoft 4%.

4) With the federal government stepping in to bail out Fannie and Freddie, legitimate questions are being raised about the new definitions of capitalism and a market economy. So, too, should questions about what other distressed industries might be next on the government’s list. The auto industry is surely on the list, but how about the daily newspapers? Maybe their salvation lies in being taken over and further mismanaged by the federal government…

5) ItzBig, an online candidate/job opening matching company, has officially shut its doors. The company was launched just over a year ago with much fanfare and instantly received a great deal of attention, even earning a spot on American Venture magazine’s list of 2008’s Most Promising Startups. Despite the gaudy name, however, ItzBig apparently wasn’t big enough.

Always one step ahead of everyone else, Cheezhead has declared that he has moved beyond ripping Monster, declaring in an early June podcast that he no longer finds it sporting, fun, or even interesting. I still, however, cannot resist. Monster has lost its leadership position in online classifieds to CareerBuilder in large part because the company has persistently neglected its users, always considered short-term revenue to be a far higher priority than long-term revenue and a quality user experience (annoying pop-up ads, job scams, etc.), and failed to transition from a 1.0 job board to a 2.0 job board. Furthermore, the company has made a pile of suspect acquisitions and engaged in illegal activity to enrich its executives through options backdating. It’s been one blunder after another for Monster over the past 5 years or so, and while it may no longer be surprising to anyone that the company is mismanaged and well on its way to being an ‘also-ran,’ Monster remains a large company in the space with decent mindshare (albeit largely negative).

In any event, Monster has been in the news recently with two significant announcements. Monster announced that it was shuttering its social networking site Tickle.com, a company that it had acquired for $70 million in 2004. That’s $70 million in shareholder’s money that they flushed down the toilet. Whether the idea was bad from the start or poorly executed after the fact (I suspect it’s a lot of both), the fact of the matter is that the Tickle debacle is another black eye for Monster. The $61 million acquisition of Affinity Labs will undoubtedly share the same outcome.

Monster also announced this week that it had formed an ad network with 19 newspapers. I am not sure yet how this announcement differs from Monster’s previous announcements that it was working with local daily newspapers (here and here and here). As I have said in the past, these partnerships between print and online media companies make sense in theory in that jobseekers and employers can access and deliver job classifieds across multiple media channels depending on their preferences. Unfortunately in practice, however, neither Monster nor the dailies deliver value to either party. And these partnership deals are miserable for the companies striking the deal. The dailies who sign on with Monster are simply throwing in the towel on a vital revenue stream, and Monster is tying its fortunes to a sinking ship. As the saying goes, mating two dinosaurs does not result in a gazelle.