X, formerly Twitter, has taken the next step in its foray into the recruitment space, offering access to the beta version of its hiring service.
Late last month, the company’s X Hiring feed invited users to get in early on the new tool, which was launched in July, urging companies to “Unlock early access to the X Hiring Beta — exclusively for Verified Organizations.”
X offers these organizations the chance to “organically reach millions of relevant candidates,” by featuring “critical roles” on their profile.
Along with the announcement, X owner Elon Musk injected his customary cocksure controversy, responding to a tweet by X user Ian Zelbo that asked, “Is there anything worse than LinkedIn?” with a scathing response: “People send me LinkedIn links sometimes, but the cringe level is so high that I just can’t bring myself to use it, so I ask for the resume or bio to be emailed. We will make sure that the X competitor to LinkedIn is cool.”
But commentators are not so sure. Acknowledging that it was very early in the process and the offering was likely to evolve, Chad Sowash of the Chad and Cheese podcast, which covers HR issues, said, “It still feels like Facebook Jobs all over again.”
He added that on the desktop version he had to look twice to see where the “very muted” jobs carousel was, and that the CoinBase account, by way of example, had just three jobs on the carousel.
Sowash pointed out that there was no search functionality, with the offering being “fairly primitive compared to what we’re used to.”
“LinkedIn has much more content, context, experience for my profile than any other out there and they still do a sh***ty job on trying to get me relevant content. Twitter doesn’t even have close to the amount of information — career information, jobs, pathing, those types of things. I don’t see how they’re going to pull this off,” he said.
“I personally think this X Hiring thing is going to go the way of the dodo, much like Facebook Jobs did.”
Sowash compared the move to Musk’s Tesla’s impact on the electric vehicle industry, describing it as an opportunity for competitors to up their game, even if X’s recruitment tool is not a serious industry player in itself.
“The get-in fee to be a verified organization is $10,000 a month,” he told listeners. “The price point is so low, it’s not going to pay off. He needs to try to gain back hundreds of millions of dollars that he’s lost in ad revenue and this isn’t going to do it.”
Co-presenter Joel Cheesman did, however, express understanding of Musk’s reasoning and predicted that the service may enjoy some take-up, thanks to the power of the brand name. “If advertisers are leaving in droves and there’s no hope of them coming back any time soon, to go after LinkedIn is the smartest thing to do in terms of getting money fast,” he said.