I’ll be watching with interest to see how successful Sarah Barnard is with the #twitterjobchallenge as Twitter is jam packed with people trying to get noticed by brands, organisations and people they admire.

It really should only be a matter of time before companies start tapping wholesale into this and advertising jobs via social media in a well thought out and strategic way, or at least start seeing their followers and their networks as a poll of potential employees.

I work as a social media assistant at a media agency. My job was advertised on twitter, for further information I was sent to a blog and I had to apply using social media. Obviously this made sense for my role as it gave me an opportunity to show my skills and understanding of the medium.

The time has come, to expand the Social Media team, here at Total Media, and so, I thought I’d try a slightly different approach to recruiting in for the role. I’m looking to hire a Junior / Graduate Social Media Community Manager.

However, rather than just accepting CV’s directly, I’d like to see potential candidates for the role get creative in their responses.  Ideally, as a candidate, you may already have expressed through one of your existing social media presences why you want to work in Social Media, and what kind of role it is that you’re looking for.

For my application I wrote a blog outlining my views on the industry and its future, got my Twitter followers to give reasons as to why I’d be good for the job. I used Foursquare to illustrate my interests, both personal and professional. I then hosted all of this on a hastily populated website and posted the link on the application blog.

I did all of this from a standing start. I’d been interested in social media for a while and read around the industry. Partly because it had captured the zeitgeist but mostly because I’m a bit nosy, and any platforms that enabled me to get news, views and gossipy tit bits were always going to have me hooked. At the time of my application I had Twitter, Facebook and Foursquare accounts. Id dabbled with LinkedIn but didn’t like it as it felt a bit like walking into a party and shouting your CV at the assembled crowd.

The blog for my job said that submissions shouldn’t include traditional CV’s and should be creative. So, the challenge as I saw it was to standout and show how my interest in Social media could equip me to work in it. I decided it would be a novel ideal to answer the four sections of the job ad using a different form of media. I’m a sporadic blogger and usually only post if something really annoys me or I want to cross post something I’ve written that’s featured on a different site. To show my overall interest in the industry and why I liked it I wrote this blog post. It wasn’t particularly well researched or insightful but I felt it gave a flavour of how and why I’d been bitten by the social media bug.

The next thing on the application was showing why I thought I’d be perfect for it. I decided to take a risk and turn the answering of this question over to my twitter followers and lots of them jumped at the chance to help. I asked them to post their responses with the hashtag  #picksabrina. Luckily, they were all really nice about me so I screen grabbed them and put them on my website. Here are a few examples:

@Kiramadeira: I bet @Lord_Sugar would #picksabrina for her witty yet sharp observations & engaging writing style. @sabfrancis would be hired in an instant

@LordBrownof: I fully endorse @sabfrancis for anything and everything. The wit, charm and intellect of 100 tweeters! #picksabrina

@EmmaBandey: Love @sabfrancis ‘s tweets – great mix of social commentary, witty banter and political nouce #picksabrina

The application also asked “what makes you, you?” To answer this question I turned to Foursquare and spent an afternoon going to and checking in at places to show what I’m interested in and what my hobbies are. I checked in at places as varied as Camden town hall and a tea shop. Foursquare seemed like the perfect platform for this section of the application as it clearly showed the places I like going to and the things I like doing.

The final part of the process was to show what made me unique. I used the fact I’d stood in the local elections as a hook to link to an article that had been written about me in my local paper (The Camden New Journal), my election and my campaign tweets to show the breadth of experience I had outside of social media.

I then built a website to put all of this information on. Now, I’m no web developer and I’d never done anything like this before – this much was clear from the very basic nature of the site.  I mean, I’ve even been known to get a bit confused if I’ve got to many tabs open at once, but having the opportunity to apply for a job in a slightly more interesting way than normal was exciting and I decided to go for it whole heartedly and show how much I wanted the job. What I did was all pretty easy and I turned it around in three evenings after work.

Building a website is probably more than most organisations would expect but as social media becomes a bigger part of what companies need employees to understand and know about, using it to enhance applications can never be a bad thing. I think we’re a while away from non media based companies welcoming infographic CVs but showing that you understand communications both on and off line is probably a good thing.

I hope Sarah Guardian Careers manages to attract the attention of the companies she wants to. It’s becoming increasingly clear that companies need staff that are comfortable in the social space, and able to speak for the brand in a natural way, so looking to their fans and followers when recruiting seems like a logical step.