If you've never used Twitter before, here is a reason to start today!

That ultimate geek fest called "South by Southwest Interactive", better known as SXSWi, is happening as I write this. This is where the most technologically advanced among us usually trek to Austin to find and share new ways to "meet up, socialize and consume media".

Yesterday at this conference, Workhound announced its launch of their Twitter job search engine (www.twitterjobsearch.com) that will list all the jobs that have been "posted" in one way or another to the platform.

This is big news and here's why: although there have been over 1.3 billion tweets posted to Twitter, there was no really effective way to draw together, with any coherence, information like job postings from recruiters, executives or whoever. Workhound, UK's largest search engine, has solved this problem by developing specific contextual search engine algorithms to tap into these random bits. As a result, you can now get massive job posting information on Twitter.

I tried it out by going to twitterjobsearch.com and typed in "Sales Manager San Franscisco". This drew 7747 responses.

I next tried "Executive Assistant San Francisco" and received 2654 responses.

"Project Manager Chicago" received 3480 responses
"Project Manager Portland" 3481 responses.

You can further focus your searches by date, title, skills and job type for any search you perform.

This is a huge advance over previous Twitter search capabilities that you would have had on search.twitter.com. For example, my search there for "project manager job New York" yielded only 3 responses. My search for " project manager job Chicago" yielded absolutely NONE.

Here are a few things I noticed:
The most relevant jobs appear near the top of the search results (similar to a Google search). The postings further down appear to be out of the geographic region selected.

The page continually updates by adding more listings to the page as you move the scroll slider bar to the bottom of the page.

As if this weren't enough, here are some really great things about this:

You get job listings that aren't necessarily seen on the conventional job boards. These are from recruiters as well as companies. I also noticed many from CareerBuilder's ChicagoTechJobs and NewYorkTechJobs on my particular searches.

I guarantee that this will be even more relevant as companies cut back on their recruiting advertising budgets and place more emphasis on social media like Twitter and Facebook. This capability will only hasten that outcome. I pity Monster and CareerBuilder's account reps.

You can scroll through the listing and find individual sources (like ChicagoTechJobs, JobShouts, Career Advisor, etc) and select them to follow. That's one way to find their newest postings.

The other, easier way is to subscribe directly to the feed of the particular search that you set up (like Project Manager Boston or whatever). That way you'll get continual updates of any and all new postings as they occur.

This is a beta version so there will be some bugs to be worked out, but it also means that there will be a succession of improvements and enhancements to come.

If you've never used Twitter before, here is a major reason why you need to jump in and tap into this huge ocean today. The nice thing here is that it's free and you don't have to be signed up on Twitter, although, after this you'll probably want to sign up and set up your profile.

Joe