Job Searching with Social Media For Dummies
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Sometimes hiring managers can be hard to track down when you’re trying to land a job. If you’ve exhausted all your warm approaches, like introductions on LinkedIn, tweets on Twitter, or referrals on Facebook, then it’s time to roll up your sleeves and go gonzo.

Currently, LinkedIn InMails get a higher open rate than regular e-mail (although with all the spammers now, that may change soon). So take advantage of this by trying a LinkedIn approach before sending a cold e-mail.

For many job seekers, you’ll find that you don’t have an option to send an InMail. You’re either not connected to the person enough or you’ve used up your monthly quota. If you’ve found someone you really want to talk to and are stuck, follow these easy steps:

  1. Look at the person’s profile and note which Groups they’ve joined.

    If you can’t even see the person’s full name, let alone their full profile, no sweat. Just copy their full job title and paste it into Google. If the job title is unique enough, they usually are, then the first result will be a nonrestricted version of the same profile.

  2. Join one of the groups they’ve joined. For best results, join the group most relevant to your career aspirations or industry.

  3. When you’re in the group, you will be able to send as many free messages to anyone else in the group, including the hard-to-reach hiring manager. And the cool thing with this approach is that now you have something in common to lead your message.

Should this LinkedIn Group method still prove unsuccessful for you, then pick one of the following cold approaches:

  • Look the person up on ZoomInfo. This website provides you with e-mail addresses.

  • Find someone else’s e-mail address from the same company to learn the pattern. It might be first initial.last name, or last name.first six characters of first name @company.com. Whatever the pattern is, try it out for your contact. The easiest e-mail to find is the PR person. Google the company’s name and “PR” as a start.

  • Check the Whois record on the website. Every website has a Whois record, the person responsible for the domain name. Use a Whois Lookup service to uncover the company’s e-mail pattern.

  • Call the front desk of the company and ask for the e-mail address. Gatekeepers don’t like to give out phone numbers but seem willing to give out e-mail addresses if you’re polite enough.

  • Visit Google to see if your target company’s e-mail pattern is listed.

About This Article

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About the book author:

Joshua Waldman, MBA, is an authority on leveraging social media to find employment. His writing has appeared in Forbes, Huffington Post, Mashable, and the International Business Times. Joshua's career blog, CareerEnlightenment.com, won the About.com Readers' Choice Award for Best Career Blog 2013. Joshua presents keynotes, trainings, and breakout sessions around the world for students, career advisors, and professional organizations.

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