You no longer need Twitter to sign up for Job Garden, and what to do if you already have an account (Week 92)
Until today, you had to use Twitter to use Job Garden.
Now you don’t. You just need an email address. This is to make it easier for people to sign up.
That’s a screengrab of the new sign-up page above. Or you can see it for real here.
Why did we make this change? After all, “Sign in with Twitter” is the way Job Garden has worked right from day 1.
Well: we have private watchlists for jobseekers: a way to follow the careers pages of interesting startups, and automatically see jobs as soon as they appear.
But the feedback we’ve heard from these jobseekers — increasingly — is that they don’t want to sign in using Twitter. Why not? Because when you connect your Job Garden account with your Twitter account, you’re also giving us permission to look at your follower list, post under your name, and so on. If you just want a private watchlist, there’s no need for any of that. And we’re uncomfortable holding that unnecessary level of access too.
So now sign-in uses email instead. No more mandatory Twitter.
What about if you want to have a public job board?
For that, yes, we do need a Twitter account. It’s used for your public profile and to make it easy to get the word out about new jobs.
There’s a new area in Settings for (optionally) connecting your Twitter.
But I already had an account on Job Garden! How do I make sure I don’t lose my original settings?
Here’s what to do:
First, sign in to Job Garden using your email. (You may need to sign out first.)
If you already had your email address associated with your Job Garden account, bingo, you’re done. You can stop reading.
If you didn’t have your email associated with your account, it’s going to look like you’ve lost access to your public job board and private watchlist… but you can get them back.
Go to Account Settings (that link only works when you’re signed in) and tap the button “Connect with Twitter”. Once you’ve connected the accounts, if we recognise your Twitter account as one that was previously used on Job Garden but without an email, you’ll see a “Merge accounts” screen like this:
Tap “Merge accounts” to restore your original settings.
If you don’t see a screen like this, but expected to, get in touch! The address is info@job.garden.
This is a seemingly minor change, but it touches some of the oldest, deepest code in Job Garden — so despite the requests, it has taken a while to do. And there might be some rough edges around the site for a while. If you spot any quirks, do let us know.
—Matt
