Introduction
When we last left off, I had just founded TechIsHiring and now had to figure out how to get TechIsHiring into a state where people would be interested in using it.
Construction starts
So there were two main concerns I had early on. Outside of the few people who may have voted on the poll or had seen my tweet about the hashtag, no one knew what TechIsHiring was. The second concern was the value of the hashtag itself. The hashtag had no more or less nothing in it so why would anyone want to check it consistently much less contribute to it? While adoption was a problem (and one I continue to struggle with), I felt increasing the value proposition of the hashtag was the best thing for me to do.
So how do I do that? Well just go find job seeker tweets and job tweets and quote-tweet them with #TechIsHiring. I would do this at least once, Monday thru Friday for the next 8 months.
Very early on in TechIsHiring’s life, I made the conscious decision to refrain from retweeting tweets I didn’t have permission to do, something I continue to try to do to this day. If anyone follows me has seen this from me AT LEAST ONCE:
At this point, it might as well make a business card out of it, it’s probably more recognizable than I am. I’ve definitely received a few criticisms for this though nothing really malicious. For me, even though it’s technically public domain, it’s really about respecting other people’s space, virtual or otherwise. This is just an attempt to uphold that philosophy as best as I can.
The actual TechIsHiring account came a few months after I started posting the hashtag regularly. I knew I needed an account for the hashtag to be more effective and a bot to consistently retweet the hashtag but honestly was dragging my feet on it. It wasn’t until John Croston really pressured me into creating the account did I really go and do it. The bot came quickly after, mostly because I didn’t want to have to retweet everything myself. I ended up poking through a few bots that were already implemented and just adapted one I was satisfied with to retweet the hashtag. Learned a fair amount about Twitter’s API playing around with it and about Heroku when I finally got it deployed. The early version wasn’t great but the cobbled together code did what it needed to do so I didn’t complain too much. Here's a link to the repo of the first TechIsHiring Twitter bot: https://github.com/chadstewart/Tech-Is-Hiring-Twitter-Bot
So now I had a place where people’s tweets would live. It wasn’t branded at all and wasn’t pretty but at least it was something.
Gaining momentum
Once the TechIsHiring account got made and the bot was actively retweeting posts, it was significantly easier to see how the hashtag was growing. Growth was slow but steady, fueled mainly through my consistent posting to the hashtag with valuable posts. Growth stayed this way for a few months until close to the end of the year 2021.
It started with me initially hosting a Twitter Space to ask about what TechIsHiring could do to better serve the community. Twitter Spaces had been open to the public for maybe a month or so and I felt it was an active way for me to engage with the community and get feedback. Ironically, I didn’t get too much feedback to push the hashtag forward but I ended up realizing that Twitter Spaces might be a great way of engaging with the community in general. So I started hosting Twitter Spaces more regularly, focusing on topics that I thought people would be interested in talking about. More and more people would come into the Twitter Space and we’d have great discussions on these topics. Then other people started reaching out to me.
The first was Brian Douglas of Open Sauced and GitHub. He had reached out to request that I come to speak in some of the Twitter Spaces he wanted to host. Not only would he host the Twitter Space, he also agreed to put up the TechIsHiring hashtag in the space. Why this was important was because when Twitter Spaces are shared, the hashtags in them are automatically added to the tweet they are shared in. This was the first time I really learned of the power of being tied to a strong event. Both TechIsHiring’s engagement and my own engagement grew as a result of these Twitter Spaces.
The second was actually a few months later with Sham and Temz of Tech__UK. They came from Clubhouse to host job hunting Twitter Spaces like they had done previously. Sham actually was the person who reached out to me mainly to leverage the TechIsHiring hashtag. They began hosting the same type of job searching Twitter Spaces like they did in Clubhouse but they were now added the #TechIsHiring hashtag to their space. That each time that space would happen, it would get retweeted constantly and each retweet would have the TechIsHiring hashtag. It technically was kind of spammy but it was extremely effective in getting engagement for the hashtag. So much so that there was a point where TechIsHiring was trending on Twitter. It was absolutely amazing!
These were some of the things that really grew the hashtag to what it was today. While these events were important, I think the most important attribute was just my own dedication to the hashtag and to trying to get valuable posts into it.
While not directly related to the hashtag’s growth, TechIsHiring started releasing a newsletter every week. This newsletter focused on promoting interesting jobs, job seekers and other interesting advice and information from the hashtag for that week. The idea actually came from Veni from Diversity Tech when I reached out to her on how to grow TechIsHiring.
Growing pains
So while TechIsHiring has experienced a fair amount of growth, that growth has come with some challenges as well. One of the main challenges of running a hashtag, especially one that is being powered by a Twitter bot that is indiscriminate about what it retweets, is spam. Early in TechIsHiring’s life, spam was simply not a problem though that was also because engagement was still low. As the hashtag’s popularity grew, the tendency for spam did too. For the hashtag itself, it wasn’t too much of a problem and honestly is something that can’t really be solved but for the account that is actively retweeting #TechIsHiring tweets, it was problematic but also solvable. From a technical perspective, what needed to happen was to have some form of banned or restricted list and those on that list would not get retweeted. The initial version was crude and was a pain to manage but got the job done initially. That was eventually updated to be significantly more manageable. If you’re interested in a deep dive of how the TechIsHiring Twitter bot got updated, check out this article: https://dev.to/chad_r_stewart/migrating-the-techishiring-twitter-bot-42fm.
Next time, we wrap up and talk about the continued success of TechIsHiring and some of the things I've learned from this experience!
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- If you’re looking for jobs, I’d highly recommend checking out @TechIsHiring on Twitter, LinkedIn or TechIsHiring's new website https://www.TechIsHiring.com/ for posted jobs and other resources!
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