Job Postings: The Automated Twitter Bot Set to Change the Job Search Market

Published in

Entrepreneurship Technology Class Blog

10 min readApr 14, 2018

Created by: Ray Henry, Komil Rehill, Sunny Bhamra

The job market in Calgary is abysmal. With the deterioration of the oil and gas industry — Alberta’s primary source of income — not only are individuals being laid off from their jobs, but it makes it very difficult for new graduates to find entry level employment. Job hunting can be very demoralizing. According to a survey conducted by Workopolis, 80% of individuals had to apply to at least five jobs just to secure one job interview. That means, that individuals are receiving a 20% chance at an interview and an even slimmer chance of receiving a job offer. Not only is job hunting demoralizing, it is also very time consuming and tedious. According to an article from Time.com, it can take over six weeks (43 days) to complete the job search process.

As new graduates, the fear of finding employment is weighing heavy on our minds, and we have set out to assist individuals in cutting down the length of the job search process. Thus, we would like to introduce: Job Postings.

Job Postings is a Twitter bot that scans Tweets from a specific radius for pre-set keywords related to employment. Companies commonly use the terms “We’re hiring” or “Now Hiring” when posting Tweets encouraging their followers to apply. Job Postings scans Twitter for these keywords and will Retweet all relevant postings, every 15 minutes, so that users have quick access to job postings within their area. Job Postings uses Twitter’s geo-search technology to stay within a certain radius limit, so that there is a level of accuracy and relevance for each Tweet, and ensures that it is in the region of the follower.

Functionality: Why did we choose this?

As senior-level university students, we will soon enter the workforce. As mentioned above, it can be challenging to find employment while living in a city like Calgary, where layoffs are more prevalent than hiring. Therefore, we decided to build a Twitter bot that locates jobs postings within the Calgary area from companies that have used the specific keywords that match our search criteria. We have called this bot, Job Postings.

We soon realized that Calgary would not be the only city in Canada suffering from the economic downturn and decided to look at unemployment rates throughout the country. From our research, we determined that we would need to develop 9 Twitter bots, including 7 of the highest unemployed cities in Canada. According to January 2018 Statistics Canada results, the following cities, were ranked for highest unemployment rate: St. Johns (8.4%), Calgary (7.6%), Saskatoon (7.4%), Edmonton (7.2%), Sudbury (6.8%), Halifax (6.8%) and London (6.5%). We also decided to include Toronto and Vancouver, even though they are not on the list, as they are metropolises within our country. As these two cities attract a lot of young individuals and are attractive in the job market, we thought that it would be interesting to see how their job postings compared to the others on our list.

The functionality of our Twitter bot is to provide a tool for individuals in various Canadian cities that consolidates and creates a hub for all new job postings. Ultimately, the goal is to make Twitter a competitor in the job search industry. Our Twitter bot will ease job searching on Twitter and allow for all job postings in the area to be available to all followers. Currently, individuals are using tools like LinkedIn, and other search engines (Workopolis, Monster, Indeed) to search for jobs in their area. This process is very time consuming and not accurate. Many times, jobs that are posted on these search engines have already been filled and they have not been updated. The Job Postings bot eliminates the chance of job postings being outdated as they are refreshed and Tweeted out every 15 minutes. In order to eliminate the possibility of outdated job postings, we intend to hire a temporary social media manager to connect with companies on the relevance of their postings, this will be discussed further in our creation process.

Creation Process: How did we do this?

The creation of the Job Postings bot was quite simple. However, it has taken a lot of testing to get it to where it is today.

We began by researching ways on how we could automate a Twitter account with minimal human involvement. We decided to choose a software called Zapier to create Job Postings. Zapier is an online automation tool that connects apps. Users can connect two or more apps to automate repetitive tasks without coding or relying on developers to build the integration. Users are able to move info between web apps automatically, so that they can focus on more important work. This software is easy enough that anyone can build their own application work flow with just a few clicks (Bloom, n.d.). Zapier was the most convenient software for us to use, as it has a free version for Twitter that allowed us to create “zaps” within the desired regions of Canada. To set up a zap, it is necessary to set a trigger and an action.

Setting Up a trigger:

We began with Calgary. To create a trigger, Zapier asks you to select the application that you would like to use. Once we selected the Twitter app, it asked us to select the type of trigger that we would like to create. As Twitter is a very integrative social media that has a lot opportunity for manipulation and customization, there are many triggers to choose from. When taking this into account, we determined that it is important that our Retweets are specific to the location we are targeting, therefore, we created a Search & Geo Mention trigger. This type of trigger allows for our Tweets to be triggered from the mention of a search term in a specific geo location.

After the type of trigger is selected, Zapier asks you to connect to the Twitter account that associates with the trigger being created. After the Twitter account is created, it is now time to set up the Twitter mention. To set up the Twitter mention, Zapier requires the following fields to be included:

1. Search Term: these are the terms that the Twitter bot will search for when the zap is active. For our zap, we used the terms “we’re hiring”, “now hiring” and “new job posting”

2. Location: in order to make the zap region specific, Zapier asks that you include the latitude and longitude of the area that you are targeting. To find this information, enter Google Maps, search the area of interest, and right click. From there, select the option that says “What’s here?” and it will provide you with two numbers. The first number is latitude and the second is longitude. Ensure that any relevant plus or minus signs are included in the value.

3. Radius: Zapier also asks for the desired radius that the zap should target. For this, we decided to search the size of each city (in km) and set each radius to the city limits. This filters the job postings, so that they are more relevant in terms of proximity to each city. If an individual wants to see job opportunities in another region, they would simply have to follow that specific Twitter account.

The next step is to test the relevance of your Tweet. This allowed us to confirm that the search terms we selected were actually being used by companies and would generate results.

Setting Up an Action:

To set up an action, Zapier asks you to select another app that will be used to carry out the action. In this case, we have again chosen Twitter, as the purpose of our bots is to Retweet on their respective pages. Next, we selected the specific Twitter action that we would like to use. For the Job Postings bot, creating a Tweet is the appropriate action.

After selecting the Twitter account that you want your posts posted on, it is time to set up the macro Tweet that will be posted before the Tweet that is generated from the keywords selected in the trigger section. We have chosen the following statement as an introduction to each of our Tweets: “ALERT: New job opportunity in [Insert Specific City]! See Tweet from:”. Zapier also provides multiple customization options, however, for the sake of simplicity, we have only decided to use the “Shorten URL” option.

The final step in creating the action would be to test out the Tweet that is created. This test Tweet will go directly to the selected Twitter account and be visible on the page. Once you have confirmed the success of the Tweet, it is safe to turn on your zap. Turning on your zap will completely automate the Retweeting process and minimize human effort. On the free version of Zapier, which is what we used for our beta testing, zaps run every 15 minutes and will mass Tweet all Tweets that match the search criteria created in the trigger. There is also the option to force run the zap to Retweet everything found before the 15 minutes is up.

The Result:

In just 3 days, we have successfully Retweeted hundreds of job postings and generated a healthy following for the time frame. We have created multiple Twitter bots that are assisting individuals in their assigned regions, by consolidating Twitter job postings faster than ever before.

As no beta testing runs smoothly, our team has complied some critical areas that we will focus on to improve the usability of our Job Postings bot. We have discovered that Zapier does not allow us to hyperlink the company’s Twitter account in our tweets. We have also noticed duplication of Tweets within our postings, and lastly, the free version of Zapier limits the number of zaps and tasks that can be used per month.

Regarding the hyperlinking of Twitter accounts and duplication of Tweets, we have decided to mitigate these obstacles temporarily by hiring a social media manager to both manually edit Tweets to include a direct link to companies’ Twitter pages and to delete any duplicate Tweets that might occur. Our social media manager will also be in charge of engaging with any follower questions that may arise on our page. It is important for us to keep engagement high and have a very quick response time, so that our page maintains valuable to users. We have decided to keep our social media manager to manage the engagement across all our Twitter pages, however, we will be working with developers in the foreseeable future, to update our system, so that hyperlinks to companies are automatically generated for all Retweets.

For now, it would also be a viable option for us to invest in a paid subscription of Zapier. We are only in the third day of beta testing and have already maxed-out the allotted number of tasks for a free account. For the time being, until we are able to generate the means to create our own automation software, we are willing to invest in either their “Starter” or “Professional” subscription plan, depending on the volume of Tweets coming through our page.

· The Starter Plan: For $20USD a month, this option includes the opportunity for 20 zaps at a time and to allot 1,000 tasks per month. We would also have access to premium pass and the ability to set up multi-step zaps. However, the starter package does not include the option to auto-replay tasks. With this option, zaps would run every 15 minutes.

· The Professional Plan: For $50USD a month, this option includes the opportunity for 50 zaps at a time and to allot 3,000 tasks per month. We would also have access to premium pass, the ability to set up multi-step zaps and auto-replay tasks. With this option, zaps would run every 5 minutes.

After collecting more data from our beta testing, we will be better suited to determine the best option for our company.

What’s Next?

We feel that Job Postings is a useful tool for the job searching process, and with further development, we believe that millions of Canadians will benefit from our services!

Job Postings: The Automated Twitter Bot Set to Change the Job Search Market

Functionality: Why did we choose this?

Creation Process: How did we do this?

The Result:

What’s Next?

Links to the 9 Twitter accounts

Written by Ray Henry