Why You Might Just Need a Great 'Twesume'

At a time when our digital and social lives play out in all kinds of new forms and platforms (and at all hours) I suppose no one should be surprised that the Twesume -- yes, a 140-character attempt compacting a CV into a tweet -- has arrived on the scene. What's a hiring manager to do with a new "stack" -- or stream? -- of Twesumes? Some are are taking it pretty seriously while others chalk them up as just more social-networking ephemera.

Gerritt Hall -- CEO of New Jersey-based RezScore, an online service for job seekers (and a contributor to the startup advice site Bootstrapper) -- is unsurprisingly bullish on the concept, but offers some compelling data to back that up. With more than 500,000 users -- 20 percent of whom are considered "power users" because they upload their resume constantly, RezScore has to stay ahead of the curve when it comes to Twesumes and other cutting-edge job hunting tactics.

"The Twesume is a cool concept," he says. Why? Too many candidates, he says, oversell themselves with bloated resumes; Twitter's forced brevity can be a blessing for job seekers and hiring managers scanning for the basic, quick essentials. Want to get the attention of a recruiter who's got 200 unopened resumes in his or her inbox? "If you can get your resume down to 140 characters, that’s all you really need," says Hall.

Not everyone agrees, of course. Skeptics argue that offloading job history to Twitter can actually create more work for HR and that Twitter isn't the right channel with which to be presenting yourself as a professional. Regardless, Hall suggests some simple best practices to at least avoid embarrassing yourself. A decent Twesume, he says, needs a few key ingredients:

"As you see," says Hall, "it should be very short. Ideally, you would also actually tweet your Twesume at the company you want to get hired at. The goal is to really make it easy for the hiring manager or the recruiter to find you."

Currently, according the RezScore's statistics, the top industries tweeting their Twesumes are web engineering (accounting for 16.6 percent of all Twesumes submitted) and marketing and public relations (who follow in second place at 12.7 percent). At the opposite end of the spectrum, not surprisingly, are security (0.2 percent) and finance (0.8 percent).

Hall's confidence comes from practicing a little of what he preaches: He has used Twesumes to successfully recruit and hire graphic designers. "We found them to be very high quality. The graphic designers included a link to their portfolio in their tweet making it very easy to find their work and browse through it to see if there was a style match."

Photo credit: Can Stock