I just saw a tweet from someone I'm following saying that some employers are using TwitterGrader as part of an employee evaluation process. I went over there to check it out, and frankly I'm disturbed that anyone would use this kind of thing for such an important decision as to whether to hire a candidate. For reference, my grade is 82 out of 100. I think this would give me around a B or something like that, but what is this, really.
There are 6 criteria:
1 - Number of followers. Kind of meaningless, because on the one hand, I follow several public figures for various reasons. These kinds of people usually don't follow back. Other people, like me, just nearly always follow back. Totally arbitrary.
2 - Power of followers. Your score goes up if you have important people following you. It's a popularity contest, but really, because I happen to have a few famous people who followed me back, does that make me more employable? I don't think so.
3 - Updates. Really? I'm ADHD, and I use quite a few tricks to maintain focus. One of those is using twitter to direct a short distraction so that I can get back to the task at hand. I also use twitter to "yell at squirrels." Of course, I keep it more clean than my locked down Facebook account, but still, it amounts to little more than 140 character rants. Other times I tweet something that I see as worth while, but does this make me more employable? Personally, I think this makes me look more like a crazy person.
4 - Update recency. see #3.
5 - follower to followee ratio...Again, arbitrary. If I follow lots of public figures, my ratio will be quite low.
6 - Engagement - things like retweeting. Mostly retweets seem to be tweets that are particularly clever. I guess this might fall in to an employability category, because getting people to repeat what you just said could be seen as a leadership quality.
It's kind of a cool site. It lets you rank yourself against other twitter users, and see how good you are about being a citizen of the twitterverse, but to use this as a ranking for employability is absurd, closing in on offensive, and indicates an extremely shallow interviewer. I won't say I'd never work for someone who would do this, because you gotta work, but I think that anybody who would stoop to this level needs to seriously evaluate what they're doing. Employability should be about proven experience, what real people think about the candidate, and what a candidate can provide to the company.
Unless you're up for a job as a professional blogger or online public relations coordinator, a person's twitter persona is irrelevant.
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