African Startup Employs Twitter For Job Applications To Screen, Interview Candidates

Twitter may be struggling to elect someone for its CEO vacancy, but other organizations worldwide have used the microblogging site to find and recruit new talent. For example, Mark Essien, CEO of Hotels.ng, has used Twitter to post job applications and interview candidates for positions with his Nigerian hotel booking startup. Through the social network, he's made some top hires, including a head of content marketing and head of finance, CNN reports.

Growing to more than 330 million active monthly users over the last nine years, Twitter has become a prevalent network among celebrities, politicians and brands. While journalists use Twitter as a tool for sharing and discovering news, companies often use their accounts for customer support, and politicians conduct question-and-answer sessions with constituents -- which don't often always go well.

For Hotels.ng and other young startups, the network has become an easy and efficient communications tool for connecting to investors and job applicants. "Social media has been one of the biggest helpers in taking Hotels.ng from an idea to one of the biggest technology companies in Nigeria," Essien told CNN. "[Twitter] also serves as the communication platform for the entire technology community in Nigeria. It's how we meet and share knowledge in the small ecosystem."

While LinkedIn, which hosts virtual resumes and official company job listings, may be seen as the primary social network for business uses, Essien has elected to use Facebook and Twitter as the unconventional recruiting tools for his 2-year-old startup. "Even for startups, for which it is not a great customer acquisition tool, it's excellent for reaching investors and for recruiting, and those are two of the most essentials task for any CEO," Essien said.

It's not all accomplished via 140-character tweets, Essien said. He told CNN he uses Twitter as a "filter system, to ensure that only the people who could at least answer those first questions would receive my follow-up questions via email." The questions for a researcher position included, "Give a real-life situation where median is more correct to use than mean," and "Is it true?: Some people only can make blueprints, some only can execute blueprints. Why?"

Essien's company, which is said to be the largest hotel booking site in Nigeria, is not the first time Twitter has gained notoriety as a job recruitment tool. A famous example in the technology industry is Uber's first hire. In January 2010, Uber CEO Travis Kalani had tweeted, "Looking 4 entrepreneurial product mgr/biz-dev killer 4 a location based service. pre-launch, BIG equity, big peeps involved--ANY TIPS??"

One of many respondents to that tweet was Ryan Graves, now head of global operations for the ride-hailing company, which was recently valued at $50 billion.