I was already fascinated by the power of social media, but then I read the headline, “How a middle-aged IT guy from Peoria tweeted his way into a writing job on Late Night with Seth Meyers,” and I was stunned. A man named Bryan Donaldson operated a Twitter account with the handle @TheNardvark. It was filled with jokes he couldn’t say around the workplace, and it quickly garnered thousands of followers. One important follower was Alex Baze, the head writer and producer for Late Night with Seth Meyers, but Donaldson wasn’t aware of the opportunity on the horizon. Baze kept a list of his favorite tweeters, so when it came time to hire a new writer for the show, he turned to Twitter.
“If I go to somebody’s Twitter, I can see what he’s been doing the last two years — you get a much more complete sense of how he writes," he says. "It’s like you get to flip through somebody’s comedy notebook.”
"Twitter has democratized the process," Seth Meyers says. "We used to look at smaller samples, now you can look back and see what a person thought was funny for the past calendar year."
In this way, Twitter has become the modern writing sample. Gone are the days when employers would look at a resume and a well-written college paper (Meyers didn’t even know where Donaldson was from or what his job was). Now, employers are looking to social media. I discussed this phenomenon in a previous blog post where I invited future employers to check out my Facebook page and other social media accounts. In my post, I highlighted three criteria that employers look for on social media.
- If the candidate will be a good fit
- A candidate’s qualifications
- Their creativity
Through the Twitter account, Baze thought Donaldson represented these criteria, so he was offered the job.
“He still seems a bit dazed by the rapid, unexpected turn his life has taken. ‘I still don’t understand how this all works yet, this whole business,’ he admits, ‘I’m just starting out. But I gotta believe that the people who are not located in New York or L.A. have an equal voice now on the internet, so they’ll be easier to find.’”
For a long time, the Internet has served as a place for you to find jobs, and now, for the first time ever, it may become a place for jobs to find you.