Ten percent of us are out of work.

And all of us can imagine how we would feel if we lost our job. There is a sense of loss, grief even, akin to losing a family member or a divorce, experts say. At best, the out of work person is frustrated, maybe even angry. At worst, he or she is demoralized, with his self-confidence and self-worth permanently affected. No one understands yet the long term impact of a workforce that approaches their future work in such a negative manner.

Even though we all might want to help these job seekers, we don’t know how. Sure, we help a few network into our own little network circles. In workforce centers, church basements and Starbucks all over America, people are trying to figure out how best to find a job. We want to work. You feel for them, but what can you do?

Well, here’s an idea for you. It involves this blog, Twitter and the power of social media. To make it fun, I am calling it a contest.

First, the backstory. As many of you realize, we are in the job employment space. Being a small company, we lack the resources to buy Super Bowl ads like our competitors. We have to be better and do better. Our LINKUP idea is our better idea. Seriously. It is the best place to look for a real and available job on the internet. Our traffic is building quite nicely…mostly because job seekers are thrilled to have found it, and publications like TechCrunch, PCMag, and others have written us up. But most job seekers have not yet found it. In tough times, the default seems to be one of the big job boards. Advertising does that. You can change that, if you want to help these people…but you have to lead them by the hand somewhat.

Here is how you can help. It is easier than you think.

  1. First, you have to be on Twitter. If you are not yet, go to twitter and sign up. It is free and easy. Here is a simple guide to Twitter that you may find useful.
  2. INSTEAD of twittering what TV show you are watching, twitter a real job opening to your network of followers.
  3. All you do is go to LinkUp. And…being as creative and fun as you can be, do a search for a job that you think your followers might like to see. Here is the homescreen; remember you can put almost anything in the search box because we are looking at the most robust job descriptions directly from company websites, so if your word choices match, we will show you THOSE jobs. In the example below, I entered “social media and 401k” because the fictional job seeker might want to work in social media and have a company with a 401k program.picture-9
  4. The results will look like this:

    5. picture-101

  5. Go to Twitter, and twitter about it. Here is what my Tweet looks like:
    picture-12
  6. The more times you do it, the more creative you are, the more likely someone will RT your tweet (especially if you ask them to), and somewhere, someone will look and start their own job search.
  7. In summary, you are showing people what kind of jobs are currently available, you are not sending them to a website that will spam them, or charge them for access to the job, either. In effect, you are taking them by the hand, and showing you care by giving them some ideas of jobs that are now open. Your followeres will LOVE you for the goodwill you are showing. The more times you do it…the more likely it is that someone will find a job….BECAUSE of you. How cool can you be?
  8. Leave me a comment here if you are going to do it. Use my name @glhoffman or @linkup on your tweets, so we can track just how many times you tweet, get RT’d and so on. If you need the characters, you can leave those names off…the main thing is to help jobseekers.
  9. Just think how many people will be helped if @chrisbrogan, @oprah, @ashtonKucher, or @guyKawasaki would do this. Maybe they will see your tweets and decide to help out.
  10. As far as prizes.…I will write about you glowingly on my blog in the future. The most unusual as well as the most creative will get mentioned. True success stories from job seekers is what I really want to hear. Let’s get started, the ‘contest’ ends Sunday night at midnight.