Job Searching with Social Media For Dummies
Overview
Harness social media to land your dream job
For anyone looking for a first job, exploring a career change, or just setting up for future success, social media sites are proven platforms for facilitating connections, demonstrating passions and interests, and ultimately landing the job. Job Searching with Social Media For Dummies enables you to harness the power of the Internet to research and identify job opportunities, and then create a strategy for securing a position.
Job Searching with Social Media For Dummies features in-depth coverage of topics such as: creating effective online profiles and resumes to sell your strengths; maintaining your online reputation and understanding electronic etiquette; using the power of personal branding and
building your brand online; avoiding common pitfalls, such as jumping into filling out a social media profile without a strategy; getting to know Twitter, the only real-time job board with literally thousands of jobs posted daily; using social media sites to uncover opportunities in the "hidden job market" ahead of the competition; and much more.
- Takes the mystery out of Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn
- Offers advice on how to brand yourself online
- Includes coverage of the latest changes to social platforms and websites
If you're a recent graduate, changing careers, or have been away from the job-search scene for a while, turn to the trusted guidance and expert insight of Job Searching with Social Media For Dummies.
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About The 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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job searching with social media for dummies
CHEAT SHEET
Social media is a crucial component of the modern job search. To perform a successful job search using social-media tools, however, you need to know more than how to accept a friend or connection request or post a status update. You also need to know how to get your online profiles noticed by hiring managers, build a job-attracting LinkedIn profile, maintain your online reputation, and much more.
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A new breed of job board has emerged. The Internet has evolved beyond bulletin boards, and no one reads newspaper classifieds anymore. Social-media networks provide much more value and personalization than just reading information on forums. The new online job boards, including the ten listed here, take advantage of today’s technologies, social networks, personalization, and gamification.
Job Searches
Here are some of the major differences between today’s job search and job searches of the past. The rules have changed a lot in the past ten years, so don’t rely on what worked for you earlier in your career or the tips your old dad gave you.
The first page of Google has become your new résumé
Recruiters are now using Google searches to find talent instead of paying for job-board or talent databases like they used to.
Job Searches
LinkedIn is one of the most powerful tools to help you redefine yourself and move your career in a new direction. Taking your career in a new direction is a bold move that requires framing your proven skills for a whole new purpose. Identify your transferable skills, and then consider the following three ideas for using LinkedIn to advance your career change.
Job Searches
Humans are visual creatures. That includes hiring managers, so consider including a profile picture to help improve your chances of landing a job. In a matter of milliseconds, people draw conclusions, make assumptions, and form opinions about others based on how they look. The way people look, of course, shouldn’t have anything to do with our eligibility for a position, but it often does.
Job Searches
Your professional headline appears just below your name as well as on every communication you send in LinkedIn. Job seekers should pay close attention to the headline to improve the chances of landing a job.
It’s the first thing someone reads when your profile shows up on a search results page. It defines who you are and what you can do for an organization.
Job Searches
The summary section of your LinkedIn profile appears just below your activity at the top of your profile. If hiring managers make it as far as your summary, they’re essentially asking you to tell them more about you. So here’s your chance to make an impression. Whatever you do, don’t bore them. Only after reading your summary do hiring managers look at your experience and education.
Job Searches
If you buy only one item to help you with your job search using social media, that item needs to be a computer or a tablet PC (a smaller, hand-held device with a touch screen). The good news is that every year, the cost of computers goes down. In fact, you can have anything from a desktop computer to a netbook (a small laptop) for less than $300.
Job Searches
Adding narrative conflict to your video résumé allows you to capture the attention of your audience very quickly for your job search and keep them interested until the end. In narration, one thing happens after the next, in story form. With narrative conflict, you’re telling a story about a transformative event.
Job Searches
You can’t build a profile or an online résumé with the following add-on tools, but they do each provide different types of job searching functionality that can help you enhance your online presence and attract more potential employers. These tools augment your online reputation and help you paint a clearer, more engaging picture of who you are.
The soundtrack to your video résumé defines your job candidacy more subtly and more powerfully than any other video production technique. When you think about the soundtrack for your film, keep these suggestions in mind:
Vocal music takes away from a script. In most movies, the music with words usually plays when no one is talking.
Job Searches
As you begin interacting with people on social media during your job search, becoming a valuable source of information to them, you grow what’s called social equity. Social equity is like having money in the relationship bank. You keep depositing to that bank every time you do a good deed, such as retweeting, commenting on blogs, or helping someone make a valuable connection on Facebook.
Job Searches
Despite the craziness of Craigslist, it’s still a marvelous place to find up-to-the-minute job postings. In fact, if you were to walk into a business and ask the hiring manager about the first place he would post an ad for a new job, without much thought he’d likely say, “Oh, I’ll just drop it on Craigslist to get some résumés in the door.
Job Searches
Whether you’re networking with people on LinkedIn during your job search, commenting on a blog, or chatting more casually on Facebook, follow these guidelines to be sure you don’t annoy people:
Don’t ignore the unspoken rules of the network you’re using. For example, LinkedIn is a professional network, so don’t share private information on it.
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Any inconsistency in a candidate’s job application raises a red flag for recruiters and hiring managers and they end up putting it in the maybe pile at best. Inconsistencies to watch out for are saying you do one thing on your résumé and something else on your LinkedIn profile.
More subtle inconsistencies can happen in your personal image.
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By displaying your skills, qualifications, and abilities, a résumé used to indicate whether you could do a particular job or not. In the previous century, when most jobs were hands-on and less about what you know, answering the question “Can you do the job?” was good enough.
But now that most jobs are knowledge jobs and business is so much more complicated than pushing buttons, employers need more rounded information on candidates.
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Since the beginning of work, people have gotten jobs from their friends and family. Networking has always been the best way to get “in” with an opportunity.
Do you remember the movie The Graduate? In a scene during a dinner party, the main character is accosted by his father’s business friend. This gregarious older gentleman puts his arm around the younger main character and says, “Plastics, my boy!
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A domain is the website address you use to get to a site. And for job searching purposes, you may need your own domain. Google looks at the domain name when calculating a website’s relevance to a particular search.
So if someone is searching your name and you’ve used your name as the domain name of your résumé website, the chances are quite high that your site will show up in the recruiter’s search results.
Job Searches
For most people, the best part of producing video is getting to play with all the toys. It’s okay to make a job searching fun. Assuming that you’ve thought long and hard about your script, your setting, and your attire, choosing the appropriate gear is the next important step. With the following tips you can get the gear at a very affordable price!
LinkedIn is the highest-leverage tool for any professional at any stage in his or her career or job search. However, the more online profiles you have, the better your chances are of getting found. Think of using online profiles like casting a net to catch fish.
You want to facilitate the possibility of a recruiter finding you and reaching out to you.
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A paper résumé may live only in your portfolio, but an online résumé can live anywhere during your job search — and, therefore, be discovered by just about anyone. If you can make your online résumé show up on a recruiter’s Google search, then who knows what possibilities may open up for you.
To get your résumé found on Google, you need to practice search engine optimization, or SEO, which is the art and science of making websites appear on a search engine’s first page.
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Choose your Twitter username carefully if you want to be seen by recruiters during your job search. Your name appears only in your Twitter profile, but your username (what you go by on Twitter; also called a handle) is attached to every tweet. Your username is also the domain name for your profile.
When picking a username, remember that its length eats away at your 140-character message.
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Keep in mind that you’re not expected to join every single networking site that comes your way to find a job. Remember Google Buzz? No? Exactly! Before joining a site, think about what you’re trying to accomplish and what your strategy is.
For example, if you’re looking for an international job, then consider some of the more internationally focused networks.
Job Searches
When you are searching for a job, remember that any online information can and will probably be seen by potential employers. Enter ZoomInfo. ZoomInfo doesn’t just aggregate information about you into a single personal record (unlike Spokeo). Instead, it allows you to manually claim your profiles.
In other words, some artifacts that show up in search results may be about you and others not, so you can claim the ones you want in order to create a more rounded profile of yourself.
Job Searches
There’s something to be said about simplicity. This next batch of websites leverage design (color, photos, and layout) to communicate your brand. Though they’re sparse on detailed information, sometimes employers just want a quick snapshot of who you are.
These websites are great as personal portals for your domain name.
Job Searches
Social media is probably one of the most hyped-up technologies you can use for a job search today. And often, things that get a lot of hype also come with a lot of misunderstanding. Companies, as well as individuals, have made some very damaging mistakes because they didn’t take the time to really understand social media.
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If you’re interested in a posted opening for a specific position, chances are you already know the job requirements because they’re usually included in the job listing. But doing additional research on the role and responsibilities of your target company and the job you desire is still a good idea.
After you understand what hiring managers are looking for, think about your résumé script with the intention of directly answering that need.
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Most organizations have multiple job openings at any given time, and chances are you’re a good fit for more than one of them. If your video résumé targets a specific position, company, or hiring manager, make that clear in one of two ways:
Use subtitles to display your desired position on the screen. If, for example, you’re interested in a marketing job, you can use a subtitle that says something like, “Looking for a marketing position with your company” or simply “Interested in the Marketing Communications Specialist opening.
Job Searches
When you write online to use social media in your job search, you’re not just writing for people; you’re also writing for robots. Imagine the Internet is a large village of both people and robots. Whenever a person says something in this village, the words float through the air. Pretty soon, a robot grabs those floating words and takes them to a processing plant with millions of other words.
Job Searches
When choosing e-mail addresses or usernames in social media profiles, retaining a consistent personal brand is important for your job search. Always opt to use your full name. Avoid kitschy e-mail addresses like [email protected]. These are off-putting to potential employers. Instead, find a way to use your full name as your e-mail address.
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Perhaps you have a long list of words to describe yourself that’s perfect for branding yourself during your job search. That’s great, but a hiring manager doesn’t have the time (or the interest) to sit down and read through your list.
You need to winnow down all those great, descriptive words into a short list of no more than three in order to create a memorable sound bite.
Job Searches
Values — those fundamental principles you believe in — are what drive your decision making, at least when it comes to the big stuff, like job searching. For example, if you value sustainability, you probably aren’t going to choose to work for an oil company. Knowing your values makes it easier to establish goals, make career choices, and most importantly, make decisions about what you want your brand to be all about.
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After you have a clear picture of industry trends and what’s going on with your target company during your job search, turn that research into a clear list of issues you think said company’s hiring manager cares about and how you can help address them. Consider creating a chart to help you.
Company
Position
Hiring Manager
Similarities
Goals/Initiatives
Problems (Business & Personal)
How You Can Help
The first three columns are pretty self-explanatory.
Job Searches
You have literally thousands of options to choose from when building your own website during a job search, from premium HTML templates to raw code. But the key to your job search is to spend as little time doing the back-end stuff and as much time networking as possible. Here are three easy solutions for building a custom website for your job search.
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Your Facebook profile can be made visible to people who haven’t joined your network yet. If you fill it in correctly during a job search, then nosy hiring managers and recruiters can learn more about you.
Your profile info also helps Facebook find new people to suggest you add to your network. The more accurate you are in your profile, the more accurate Facebook’s suggestions are for who else you can connect with.
Job Searches
Every successful blog relies on an editorial calendar. An editorial calendar is a list of all the topics you plan to cover while job searching (via text, audio, or video) over a defined period of time.
According to ProBlogger’s Darren Rowse, here are four reasons you need a content plan:
To combat writer’s block: You don’t want to be stuck on publication day with writer’s block thinking, “Here’s another day I didn’t post, and I still can’t think of anything to write.
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It’s your job to determine which new social networks are worth putting the time and creative energy into. Obviously you want a return on the time you put into this. Just remember that adding new networks to your online presence can only help you.
Google +
Some people love Google+ (G+), Google’s social networking site.
Unlike LinkedIn, Facebook wasn’t designed for professional networking and job searching. Consequently, seeing what companies are in your network and creating a more robust professional presence isn’t native to Facebook. That’s why several companies have developed Facebook applications designed to fill this need.
You will want to have the appropriate privacy settings if you plan to use Facebook for job searching. To access Facebook’s privacy settings, simply log in, click on the lock icon at the top of the page, and click on See More Settings. You can then change settings that control who is able to look you up, see your personal information, see your timeline posts, and many more specific options.
Job Searches
Demographic information about target companies and potential hiring managers can help you during your job search in crafting a powerful value statement later on. When writing marketing copy, such as your value statement or even profile information, being able to visualize your target audience is often helpful.
Job Searches
The best way to grow your Twitter network for job searching is to find other people with the same interests as you. After you post your Twitter profile, your bio, an image, and at least ten tweets, follow these steps weekly to grow your list:
Use Twitter’s Find People features. On your Twitter home page, click on the #Discover link on top, and then choose the Who to Follow link to see who Twitter suggests you follow, browse by topics, and import your Gmail and LinkedIn contacts.
Job Searches
As you begin listening for your job seeking campaign to figure out what your target hiring managers care about, make sure you’re up-to-speed on industry trends by reviewing the latest industry news. (This advice is particularly helpful if you’ve been laid off for a while.)
The news industry has shifted away from quarterly trade rags to real-time, user-generated content and research online.
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Although seeing a broad view of the industry is a great start, to land your dream job you need to understand the needs of a specific company and a specific person in that company.
Sure, you can read annual reports and browse the About us sections of your target companies’ websites, but both of those options have their downsides: An annual report takes months of production to get published, and corporate websites can take weeks to get updated, which means the info you have on that company may already be outdated.
Job Searches
If you’re reaching out to a hiring manager who has a job open that you want to fill, you may find this person unwilling to talk with you until after you’ve followed company procedure and actually applied. Either the company is strict about its internal processes or the job opening is so competitive that employees are overwhelmed by people seeking advice.
Almost every city has an entire hidden job market that’s accessible only through Twitter. Even if you never send a single tweet, you can still take advantage of this underground market. Here are the four ways people post jobs on Twitter:
Local recruiters often post their job openings on Twitter first in order to test the level of interest and determine whether to post them to a job board later.
Job Searches
Facebook is a great tool for putting yourself out there during a job search. When people say, “I only use Facebook for personal networking,” a good response, “What’s more personal than getting referred into a new business opportunity?” After all, who else would feel the most comfortable putting their neck on the line for you than your closest friends and family?
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Twitter is a great job seeking tool for generating a hiring manager’s curiosity about you. The short bursts of interesting content directed at your target company can leave people wanting more and with the impression that you really know what you’re talking about.
A great way to generate some curiosity is to send a hiring manager an @reply message.
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When you first start a blog for job searching, it can sometimes feel like you’re talking to a wall. Don’t worry if your page views are low or no one bothers commenting on your posts. Just remember that every website is vying for traffic and that many people are in the same boat you’re in.
What really matters for you, as a job seeker, is that when people of importance see your blog, they get a good feeling about you.
Job Searches
Job seekers of earlier generations had one main tool at their disposal: the résumé. But thanks to the hundreds of social media sites out there, you have access to a lot more tools that can aid you in your job search — if you don’t become distracted.
If you’ve ever spent hours on Facebook by accident, checking out what your friends are up to, then you know just how easy it is to forget all about why you got online in the first place.
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Having an edge will make you more visible during your job search. When the barriers to blogging went down along with the economy in 2009, websites like www.bsfshouldhire.me and www.twittershouldhireme.com started to appear, but the strategy of creating such a site isn’t very creative or compelling anymore. However, these campaigns do offer the following lessons that are applicable when applying to a job at a company with a well-known brand:
Growing a social media following is easier when applying to a big company with a brand name.
Job Searches
If you are successful in your job search using social media, you should consider using your newfound expertise to help a fellow job seeker. Helping others simply feels good, gives you a sense of hope and self-confidence, and shows that you’re the type of person who gives back to his community and network. Here are a few ways that you can give back:
Send an e-mail to a local job-search group and offer an hour of your time to look at people’s résumés.
Job Searches
During a job search, you may realize that you have people in your social media network who you met once, months or years ago, and then rarely hear from. Then, out of nowhere, they send you (along with hundreds of other people on their list) an e-mail with their résumé attached, asking for job opportunities. It’s not very compelling, is it?
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Social media is pretty empowering to you as a job seeker. Think about it. Thanks to Facebook and corporate blogs, you can gather all kinds of research about companies to determine which positions you really want to pursue. LinkedIn allows you to see how you may be connected to people who work at your dream companies.
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Don’t get bogged down in keeping up with the seeming constant changes of social media, just keep focused on your goals and how these tools can help you achieve them.
For people just beginning to use social media to advance their careers, a common complaint is that it changes so much. For example, they often cite the most recent Facebook privacy change or LinkedIn’s new user interface.
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Spokeo is one of the most popular search engines that human resources (HR) departments use. If you’re seeking a job at a larger company, chances are the hiring manager will put your name into this tool for any last-minute background checks.
Spokeo pulls your name and other contact information from a huge database of public records to put together a demographic profile of you.
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Ten years ago, you would have had to pay hundreds of dollars for the information about jobs that’s freely available about companies on LinkedIn today. Every year, LinkedIn augments its features in the direction of turning company profiles into rich sources of information.
Using LinkedIn, you can follow changes in a company and be alerted to promotions, layoffs, and new hires.
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Many hiring managers maintain Twitter accounts to recruit job seekers. Following these managers on Twitter, reading what they have to say, and then ultimately interacting with them can put you ahead of the other candidates for a job.
When people have Twitter accounts, they often link those accounts to their LinkedIn accounts.
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Recommendations in LinkedIn allow you to send or receive professional references and display them on your profile in a trustworthy way. You need at least three recommendations to have a complete LinkedIn profile.
The recommendations section is the one part of your profile that you don’t have full control over because you have to rely on other people to write these recommendations for you (which makes them more reliable).
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Members of your LinkedIn network can vouch for any of your skills by endorsing them. Each skill in your profile can have endorsements, which look like a teeny-tiny icon of the Endorser’s face next to your skill on your profile.
In contrast to recommendations, endorsements don’t require thoughtful responses, complete sentences, or specific details.
The widespread adoption of social media and has been the catalyst for personal branding’s strong comeback. And because you are probably going to use social media in your job search, personal branding is something you need to pay attention to.
In the 12 years between Tom Peters’s 1997 influential article in Fast Company that introduced the idea of personal branding and the heavy dose of personal branding literature in the early 2000s, personal branding was relegated to MBA types who had obscure notions of corporate branding, a public profile to worry about, and a budget to pay for PR.
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After you grow your LinkedIn network to about 150 connections, which is roughly the tipping point for a powerful network during a job search, and complete your online profile, LinkedIn can be an extremely powerful tool for finding people with whom you can conduct informational interviews.
Don’t try reaching out to new people until you’ve completed your profile.
You may not realize it, but Twitter can help you find a job. When Twitter first became popular, the instructions for posting a tweet were simply to answer the question, “What are you doing?” Some people took this question literally, leading to such gems as “I’m taking a shower” or “I’m having coffee with breakfast.
A personal brand is the culmination of your actions; it’s an image that is useful during a job search that marks you as a specific, well-defined package of abilities, talents, and experiences. It is you, outside and inside, in the sense that you’re unique. Personal branding has a lot to do with the emotion people feel when they think about you but is rooted in self-reflection and integrity.
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LinkedIn now offers you greater flexibility with what types of content you can add to your profile to help your job search. In addition to the standard Experience, Education, and Additional Information sections, you can also add the sections in the following list to reflect achievements and experiences. To add sections, just click on the Recommended for you section on you profile display.
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Getting a referral for your job search isn’t always as easy as it sounds. What do you do when you ask a former boss or co-worker for an online referral and he says, “Why don’t you write it up for me, and I’ll paste it into your online résumé”?
Apart from letting him know that his attitude is a bit outdated, you can always explain that you’ve already written several versions of a recommendation letter and you’re concerned about them sounding the same.
Beyond just avoiding being annoying online, you can do some powerful things to become an outstanding networker for your job search using social media. In the end, you want your interactions with others online to grow your career and help you stand out from the crowd. Here are some pointers to keep in mind:
Be genuine.
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Blogs can be effective tools for a job search. Blog writing differs in many ways from other forms of writing, which is mainly due to the fact that most readers scan online content and don’t spend loads of time on any given web page. Also, readers are bombarded with catchy titles and flashing links that draw their attention away from your content.
The end of your video résumé is very important for your job search. Hiring managers tend to remember the last few moments of your video as they review candidates for a position, so make sure your video goes out with a bang. If you manage to make an impression and enable the hiring manager to get in touch with you, chances are good that you’ll get a call back.
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When you search for a job using social media, it is almost inevitable that you will make contacts and even introductions on LinkedIn. Follow these guidelines when crafting your message to your target hiring managers:
Lead with something in common or how you found them. A common group, school, or interest is a great way to show that you’ve done your homework and helps hiring managers put their guard down.
Not everyone is lucky enough to have a unique name like Ashton Kutcher. People with unique names are lucky when it comes to job searching and can much more easily rank in Google and build an online reputation. However, if you have a common name, like John Smith or Sarah Jones, don’t fret. You can still differentiate yourself online.
Twitter is a great tool for finding job openings in your local area. You'll find job recruiters and hiring managers tweeting about jobs they're trying to fill. Here's how you can find them on Twitter:
Head to Twitter Advanced Search.
In the field named This exact phrase, enter the name of your town or city.
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What do you do if you haven’t heard back from a hiring manager after a week? Keep in mind that a nonresponse or a slow response may have nothing to do with you. Before you jump to any conclusions, consider some of these possibilities:
The person may be very busy.
You may have picked the wrong person to talk to about the opportunity.
Remaining objective about your personality and career can be a difficult task during a job search. This problem doesn’t relate only to job seekers; even long-employed professionals struggle with really knowing what they’re good at and what they need to improve on. But a tool called 360-degree feedback, or multi-source feedback, allows a subject to receive honest input from his peers and managers.
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Many organizations persist in using outdated applicant-tracking systems (ATS) when hiring job applicants. An ATS electronically handles the whole recruitment process, from sorting large amounts of résumé information to providing a platform for recruiters to leave notes and hand off candidates.
Chances are you’ll have to apply online using one of these systems at some point.
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When using LinkedIn to make your first contact with a hiring manager during your job search (and chances are you’ll use LinkedIn to do this), never, ever, ever invite a hiring manager to connect with your network as your first communication.
Many professionals guard their first-degree connections on LinkedIn very carefully.
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If you have a comfortably large LinkedIn network (any number larger than 143) and don’t require the gung-ho networking of a LION, then you can afford to be a bit more catlike in picking who you connect with. (Cat doesn’t stand for anything but is just a more careful way of growing your LinkedIn network.)
Strictly speaking, LinkedIn prefers that you connect with only people you know.
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Ultimately, you want an informational interview to be a fun, relaxed experience for you and the person you’re talking to — which means you may not want to have a list of ten questions ready to fire off. Instead, you may want to just enjoy the conversational flow. Although that’s a great strategy, you still need to round all the bases and get the info you set out to get.
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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).
You may have broken your goals down into small chunks and gathered everything you may possibly need for your job search using social media, but if you don’t practice good time management, all those efforts may be for nothing. If you haven’t yet experienced how easy it is to while away the hours on a social media site, it can happen without you even realizing it.
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As a job seeker, your primary focus is to stand out of the crowd and be seen. When it comes to LinkedIn Groups, participation is mandatory. Spend five to ten minutes a day cruising your top three groups and interacting with people in one or more of the following ways:
Comment on other people’s posts. On the group’s page, look at the Latest Discussions as well as the Most Popular Discussions.
After you find people during your job search who you think can provide you with some insight into an industry, company, or opportunity, you’re ready to take the next step: contacting them to ask for an informational interview. However, reaching out to someone without first thinking about your messaging is a mistake.
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A guest blogger is someone whose articles are published on someone else’s blog. You might consider this is your search for a job. Many bloggers struggle with creating enough content to fit their editorial calendars, so when a guest blogger reaches out with quality content, a lot of bloggers are happy to publish the guest’s article.
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Knowing who’s viewed your LinkedIn profile can be a very powerful tool for your job search. For example, if you give a presentations, then later notice an attendee viewed your profile, you might be able to reach out to that person and build a new business relationship.
You can use this tool to find and communicate with recruiters who’ve viewed your profile but didn’t reach out.
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You can use Google Alerts to your advantage when job searching. Google Alerts is a service from Google that sends you e-mail notifications whenever a topic you’ve specified gets mentioned online.
Here’s how this feature works: Google’s robots scour the web at an incredibly quick pace, finding new content, analyzing it, and indexing it.
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Stating your name is an important aspect of the video résumé and job search, but the question is how to introduce yourself in a way that’s memorable or unique. Many video résumés start with the standard “Hello, my name is…” approach. This approach isn’t terrible, but it’s not a great way to get someone’s attention, either.
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The power of networking for your job search, on- or offline, isn’t simply who you know but also who the people that you know know. A lot of opportunities can come from those second- and even third-degree connections. If you look back at your own career, you’ll find that your friends and/or colleagues are the ones who introduced you to other people who were of great help to you.
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You don’t need to read a book about social media to know that you should always thank someone for his time after a meeting. Showing your appreciation via social media is a great way to add value back to your contact. Consider offering your info source a Twitter recommendation (assuming he has a Twitter account).
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You should spend some time and energy developing your value statement for your job search. How does this help you on social media sites? Your value statement translates to your social media presence in three ways:
Headlines
Profile summaries
Profile pictures
If you’ve done your keyword research and written your value statement, all you have to do is copy and paste that statement into your online profiles.
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Twitter is considered the most popular real-time open network. This means that as items are published, they are immediately available for viewing. And you don’t need to “follow,” “connect,” or “request” to see them, making everything posted on Twitter open for you to read.
For job seekers, this is great news because it allows you nonhierarchical access to huge amounts of job information, including postings directly from employers and recruiters.
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Twitter may become one of your favorite activities, posing the danger that you may spend more time on Twitter to the detriment of important job-seeking activities. So the following simple, ten-minute checklist can help keep your Twitter activities on task while maximizing your time online. Feel free to modify the list as you get more comfortable with the routine.
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Contactually is a personal CRM system you can use during your job search. It is based on the idea that each of your contacts can fall into a bucket or category. Each bucket can be set to a certain frequency for follow up.
By integrating with most major e-mail and social media providers, the system automatically tracks your communications with your most important contacts and reminds you to follow up with them when your relationships are in danger of going cold.
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Use Google AdWords, the search engine's pay-per-click advertising tool, to attract the attention of specific hiring managers and decision makers. Adwords enables you to take up an ad on the search results page of any keywords you choose. You can use a similar technique on the ad networks of Bing, Yahoo!, Facebook, and even Twitter.
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For years, LinkedIn users complained about the weak contact-management features the platform offered their job searches. So in 2013, LinkedIn released its Contacts product for both the website and for mobile devices. If you haven’t started using it yet, you’re missing out!
The Contacts feature lets you:
Set contact reminders.
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LinkedIn has opened its code up to developers who want to help augment the site for job seekers. Many of their new innovations are useful during a job search and have happened internally.
LinkedIn Today
LinkedIn Today is a social-network-empowered news reporting service. You see a mini version of LinkedIn Today as the very first screen at login as well as in your e-mail inbox (if your settings allow).
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The Skills & Expertise area in LinkedIn is a place for job seekers to highlight what you are really good at and what areas you’re currently working on. When you add a Skill to this section, you’re quickly helping your reader understand what you can do, not just by adding more descriptive keywords but also by adding another dimension to your profile.
Technology has grown to a point where job boards can actually know what kinds of jobs you’d be interested in based on the personal information you submit. So-called semantic job-board services allow you to do just that. With a profile on these services, great jobs get hand delivered to you.
WorkFu
WorkFu acts as a matchmaking service between job seekers and employers.
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After you’ve applied for a job with an organization, you still have some work to do. Remember that at least 16 other people are likely to apply for the same position (according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics); in some cases, up to 300 people may apply for one position (according to some job boards).
Although you may be qualified, your application may not even be looked at.
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An online résumé can be searched and discovered by job recruiters looking for talent, so having several of them increases your odds of being found. (Receiving a random call from a recruiter who found you online and who was so impressed that she wants an interview is a very nice feeling!) The beauty of online résumés is that you don’t have to be a web designer to enjoy their benefits.
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If you’re a visual job seeker, then you appreciate infographics and other graphical ways to display linear information. There’s some evidence to show that some recruiters like this as well because they can pick out what they want to find very quickly. Just select the one that uses a layout you prefer.
Vizify.com surveyed over 300 hiring recruiters to find out exactly what information they want to see about someone in the first few seconds.
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Using social media to help aid your job search can be a grueling, and sometimes painstaking, long process. Try using tips and guidelines to help make the best use of your time.
When you know the basic elements of blog style writing, you can put them all together into a strong, easy-to-write formula. You could break it into chunks and write ten blog posts in one sitting.
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Think carefully about what you want in your Twitter bio if you’re hoping to grab a good job. Google uses your bio to index your Twitter account, so those 160 characters may be the first splash of information someone gets about you. For that reason, think of your Twitter bio as a sales pitch. People decide whether or not to follow you based on what they read in your bio.
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It can be difficult to write for your job search using social media. Not everyone enjoys writing. Some people are just unable to adapt to a new style of writing to match online mediums. Blog writing is different than book writing or report writing, for example. The good news is that you don’t have to write to publish online content.
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Who should you ask for a recommendation that will best help your job search efforts? That can be difficult to identify, at times, especially because online recommendations differ from written recommendations. Because online recommendations are much shorter than traditional ones and take much less time to write, employers expect you to have more of them.
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You want people calling you out of nowhere during your job search because they thought of you when a job opened up. So what can you say that really makes you stick out? Try using blue ocean strategy to figure that out.
Blue ocean strategy is a way of differentiating yourself in a competitive market by changing the rules.
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In order to improve your chances of getting found during your job search, start collecting and using keyphrases (a string of two or more keywords together). Because companies like to have high search-engine rankings, too, you may have a hard time competing with Fortune 500 enterprises for certain keywords. Compile a list of at least ten powerful keyphrases.
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Facebook constantly changes its user interface. Many of those changes go unnoticed but can seriously affect your privacy during a job search. Of course, the most visible changes get the most media attention, but what about those minor feature updates that not many people discuss? Some of these features are mostly unknown but can have a huge impact on how you use Facebook.
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Some non-English-speaking countries have adopted other professional networks as alternatives to LinkedIn, and in some cases, professionals in some countries use only these networks. If you’re pursuing a career overseas, make sure you sign up for at least one of these networks. All these networks use a freemium model, meaning they allow you to sign up and use basic features for free.
In many ways, job seekers have to bend to the will of the companies they want to work for. “Fill in my long and ugly online application” or “Wear an uncomfortable suit so everyone in the office knows you’re the candidate.” Even our use of LinkedIn comes primarily from employer expectations. And for the most part, job seekers accommodate the employer.
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Social media is a crucial component of the modern job search. To perform a successful job search using social-media tools, however, you need to know more than how to accept a friend or connection request or post a status update. You also need to know how to get your online profiles noticed by hiring managers, build a job-attracting LinkedIn profile, maintain your online reputation, and much more.
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As your online presence grows, so do your chances of getting discovered by a job recruiter and receiving an unsolicited call. The more engaged you are online, the better off you’ll be in your search for a great job.
But where exactly do you start when you’re looking to expand your online presence? Getting yourself on Twitter and Facebook, if you aren’t already, is worth your time.
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The Internet is a wild and unstructured place. After surfing around, you may find yourself trying to remember who you contacted in your job search, where you read this or that. You may even forget what networks you’ve joined, which is a real problem when you’re trying to conduct a job search in today’s social media–heavy environment.
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If you have lots of information you need to keep up on for your job search, consider using RSS feeds. Really Simple Syndication (or RSS) feeds are a way of pulling the news from multiple websites into a single feed reader. RSS feeds allow you to read all your news sites in one spot. Essentially, instead of exploring different sites for the news, the news comes to you.
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If you’ve already joined the LinkedIn Groups that your targeted hiring managers belong to, then you’re probably aware of how being part of such industry groups helps you stay informed of topics your targeted hiring managers are concerned with.
Another way to find industry-related LinkedIn Groups worth joining is to do a group search.
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Finding info sources on Twitter for a job search isn’t that different from finding news about a company on Twitter. After all, if someone is talking about your target company, chances are that person has a deep connection there as well.
Large companies tend to have multiple Twitter accounts, and many of their executives tweet.
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A LinkedIn Group is a collection of professionals connected around a common theme. This can be valuable in your job search. A group's main function is to facilitate discussions and networking within a trusted environment.
The two kinds of LinkedIn Groups are open groups, where membership isn't mandatory to participate, and closed groups, where you need to join to read discussions and network.
The average time for keeping a job in the United States is two years, which means you may be packing up and looking for a new boss every couple of years. In the traditional job-search paradigm, you’d simply restart your networking, résumé writing, and other job-hunting efforts at each interval. However, these days, such a start-stop approach is inefficient and impractical.
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Before you can set achievable goals for your job search, you must know where you currently stand. The best way to assess your position is to step back and critically analyze what the situation is and what you bring to the table.
Grab a sheet of paper and go through the following reality check before creating any goals related to your job search:
List all the skills you have and can bring to the table in a work situation.
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It takes years to build a strong social network during a job search. The longer you stay away from professional networking, the more career momentum you’re bound to lose. And you can’t afford to lose any momentum — unless you don’t mind starting from scratch every time you start looking for a new job.
Here are some ways you can keep up your networking momentum without getting in the way of your new job:
Find the right mix.
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Only about 3.5 percent of job postings ever make it to job boards. So guess how most hiring happens? If you’re thinking through social networking, you’re exactly right. Most jobs, no matter what country you live in or whether you’re a senior executive or an entry-level worker, are a direct result of networking.
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Linking (also called hyperlinking) is a way to reach another web page from the one you’re currently viewing and can help your job search efforts. You simply click the link and you’re there. People who work with SEO for a living know that when Google sees a link on a referring web page, the destination web page is supposed to be related to the link itself.
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Just being on LinkedIn during your job search may not necessarily be enough to make you easy to communicate with. If you were to ask an economist whether the economy is driven by large corporations or small midsized businesses (SMBs), most of them would tell you it’s the SMBs.
The problem is the SMBs don’t have the same budget for talent acquisition as their larger counterparts.
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Google is a pretty sophisticated robot. If you suddenly dump all kinds of new content for your job search with your name online, Google is likely to call foul. To avoid problems, make the process of building your online reputation methodical and consistent over many months. Don’t expect to see results right away.
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Your value statement is what you tell people about yourself while job searching. Some people also call this the elevator pitch because you should be able to deliver it in about 30 seconds, or the amount of time it usually takes to ride an elevator.
You should use the same value statement when you write about yourself online as you do when you meet someone in person.
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Because Twitter offers a real-time look at the popular topics and issues, you can use it to uncover current industry trends during your job search. These industry trends can help keep you updated on important topics to guide your job seeking efforts and prepare you to participate in relevant conversations. Use the following techniques to get started:
Find industry-specific conferences.
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Just as building your online reputation is an ongoing process, so is maintaining that reputation over the course of your career and job searches. When you monitor what people are saying about you, you can find inaccuracies before they spread, which gives you a chance to address problems quickly. Monitoring also helps you discover when people are saying good things about you so you can thank them.
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If you’re an illustrator, designer, or some other type of creative professional, then you’re probably frustrated at how limited LinkedIn can be for showing off your skills. All LinkedIn profiles look the same, and LinkedIn’s profiles don’t allow for an exciting exhibition of a creative portfolio — a fact that can be annoying if the quality of your work is a key factor in what makes you unique in the market.
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Many career coaches would say that the best chance for you to land a job is by having a strong supportive network of friends and professionals. These tools will help you stay in touch and even grow your network, thereby increasing your chances of getting hired.
Connect.me
The mini-profile you get on Connect.me is a social business card with your photo, headline, and some social media links.
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Not everyone in your contact list is created equal. Some people help you meet interesting people, others are great professional contacts during a job search, while others offer you great advice and act more like mentors. By designating different categories of contacts, you can better organize them to help you keep track of whom to contact when and why.
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Once you begin your journey of job searching using social media, you will find yourself with lots of information. After about a week of researching target companies and the hiring managers within those companies, you may find that you have way too much information to keep in your head. Ultimately, you need some kind of system for organizing all the data you accumulate about people.
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New companies have popped up that are specifically focused on helping you repair and maintain a positive online reputation during your job search. Of course, their services cost money. You can do the same things yourself, but if you’re the type who’d rather throw some money at the problem, here are some options.
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You can use LinkedIn to find the hiring managers that you want to follow and, well, spy on during your job search. After finding these key folks, you can begin gathering information about them that you can use to connect on a more personal level. When looking at a hiring manager’s profile on LinkedIn, pay careful attention to the following elements:
The school he went to: School spirit can be a great topic to break the ice.
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Facebook is more about posts than it is about profiles. Your most important message during a job search is your last post. Literally. Eye tracking studies show that most eyeballs spend the most time reading the last post on someone’s timeline.
The Facebook timeline is your venue for communicating with your network and letting people know who you are and what you’re looking for.
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If the technical aspects of producing a video résumé seem overwhelming to you, seek out some professional help during your job search. You can likely find several freelance videographers in your area. Most charge anywhere from $50 to $150 an hour, but the good news is that an hour of their time is all you need.
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If you have worked in a creative industry like design or publishing and are searching for a job in that area, you probably have a stack of projects you’ve worked on or contributed to. Take a look through your stack and pick the best samples. Then upload them to Behance, Carbonmade, or FigDig.
These portfolio-building sites are for creative professionals.
Google’s search results page is of the utmost importance during your job search. It has become more and more multimedia oriented over the years. A results page used to be a simple list of links to websites, but now you can choose from images, videos, maps, and social networks. So when you post photos of yourself, you’re increasing your likelihood of ranking in Google.
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If you went to business school or gave presentations for past jobs, you probably have plenty of PowerPoint slides hanging around. You can repurpose these slides by posting them on SlideShare, a slideshow-sharing social network that can get you ranked in Google. Not only does SlideShare have hundreds of thousands of fascinating presentations to learn from, but it also lets you share your slideshow directly on your LinkedIn profile.
If you have any video footage of yourself in a professional capacity, consider posting it online to help your job search. Why? Because YouTube, a video-sharing website, is the second-largest search engine in the world. Vimeo, another video-sharing site, seems to rank even higher than YouTube, according to BrandYourself.
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For Google, content is still king. If you have written materials from past jobs or from your time at school, you’re sitting on a gold mine of content that can help you rank. The best thing you can do with these materials is publish them on high-ranking content-sharing sites or blogs. However, before you can publish your golden nuggets, you may have to tweak them so they’re most effective.
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When you begin collecting the results of feedback, you will want to put it into your personal brand for your job search. You may notice that who you think you are isn’t exactly lining up with who other people think you are. For example, you may think you’re confident or shy, but others may see you as arrogant or aloof.
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Searching for a job can be a frustrating process. Whether you think so or not, you’re an expert at something. The shift from armchair specialist to outspoken expert is really just a mental shift. As long as you educate, inform, or even entertain your audience, your blog is read-worthy. With social media’s acceptance, everyone can have his or her day in the public spotlight.
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The easiest way to rank yourself in Google during your job search is to generate your own content. Building your own website or writing your own blog provides content that gets you ranked — but only if you use your name in the appropriate places.
If you don’t want to build your own website or write your own blog but still want to rank in Google, here are some other tricks you can consider:
Customize your LinkedIn domain name.
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Before you begin to build up your online reputation for your job search, you need to know just how much work to put into it. Consider this first part reputation triage. You determine what your current reputation is, and then you align it to your priorities.
For example, when you search for your name, you quickly discover how many folks share your moniker.
Search engine optimization, or SEO, is the art and science of getting found, which you definitely want to happen when you’re job searching, when someone searches a term in a search engine like Google.
LinkedIn uses a search algorithm that delivers results partly based on keyword density; that is, what percent of the time that keyword appears among all the other words on the page.
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The domain name, or URL, is the web address for a website. For a job-seeking blogger, the domain name is the defining business card; therefore, it needs to be memorable.
Choosing a good domain name is closely related to choosing a title for your blog. Imagine that you’re at a networking event and someone asks what the name of your blog is.
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Sending your contacts an interesting, valuable, and consistent newsletter can keep you top of mind and active in your network during a job search. When done tactfully and with care, these professional (and sometimes personal) e-mail blasts can reconnect old contacts and build stronger relationships.
Don’t send a mass e-mail to your entire contact list from Outlook or any other e-mail client.
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When you’re conducting a job search using social media, obviously your ultimate goal is to land a job. But the reality is that you aren’t going to achieve that ultimate goal without setting smaller, intermediate tasks to help get you there one at a time.
Just think about it for a moment. You can’t have “get a job” on your to-do list without feeling some anxiety.
Job searching is almost a full-time job. And if you were running a small business from your home or apartment, you’d need a home office. So why not set up a home office to run your job search? Doing so helps you stay focused during tasks and reminds your family that you’re not just playing around on the computer; you’re busy finding work and can’t be disturbed right now.
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Before you can start posting content to your blog for your job search, you need to make sure your blog looks attractive enough so that when people visit the site, they stick around long enough to read, watch, or hear what you have to say instead of scurrying off to another site simply because they can’t stand your fascination with neon colors and flashing banners.
Certainly LinkedIn is a great tool to have at your job-search disposal. But not all industries are evenly represented there, and so it may not be for you. In some cases, using LinkedIn for some jobs can be a waste of time. In other cases, having a profile is essential.
It’s up to you to decide.
According to research done by Dan Zarrella, the most connected profession on LinkedIn is recruiters.
Your personality goes a long way in helping you stand out in your job search. You know the old saying: Someone else will always be more experienced, more educated, or more qualified than you are, but there’s never going to be another you.
Don’t fall victim to the common notion that in order to be professional, you have to whitewash your personality.
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Some people simply don’t do well on camera. If you fall into this category, all hope for your job search isn’t lost. You can still demonstrate your presentation skills and professionalism with a slideshow commercial, which entails presenting your story audibly and supporting it with images and words.
You can use common slideshow software, such as Microsoft’s PowerPoint or Apple’s Keynote, to put together a commercial for yourself.
Many video résumés are a single shot taken with someone sitting in front of a camera going on and on about who he is. These videos look amateurish. To avoid this fate and visually spice up your video résumé, try adding some B-roll. B-roll entails cutting away from the main footage to secondary footage.
A video résumé that uses B-roll may take you, say, to someone introducing herself outside her house, to her piano bench in the next scene, and then to a desk chair to complete the talk.
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Personal branding — the art of communicating what makes you unique — has been around for a long time and can be used in your job search. Everyone has a personal brand, even you, because everyone is unique. But not everyone is good at expressing this differentiation. Those people who are seemingly irreplaceable prosper in any economic situation.
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Motivation is the driving force that propels people toward a goal. And motivation during a job search using social media, especially if you’re unemployed, can become a real challenge. Mounting bills, unanswered job applications, and other common job-search stresses make mincemeat out of motivation sometimes.
If you find yourself unmotivated, don’t feel discouraged or start thinking you’re lazy or lack ambition or will.
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Google isn’t perfect when it comes to searching the social web during a job search because it doesn’t deliver many results from real-time content such as Tweets, less-popular blogs, and frequently updated news sites. The danger is that these more obscure sites can still damage your reputation despite their lower Google rank.
A brand, by nature, is a very abstract thing that you need for your job search with social media. Even companies struggle to put their brands into concrete terms. So this isn’t an exhaustive list of what a brand is. However, the concrete examples demonstrate how your brand can manifest in your life.
In-person brand elements
How people perceive your brand when they meet you in person is based on the following elements:
The way you act: Your actions are very much part of your image.
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When job seekers discover keywords, they usually experience an aha moment that helps them grasp the importance of using nouns and incorporating search-friendly keywords in their online résumés. For example, a job seeker called herself a volunteer coordinator. After some research, she discovered that the more popular way of describing what she did was services coordinator.
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As you start the process of writing your value statement for your job search, you may find yourself either stuck or unhappy with the results. Following are some tips to help you think about the writing process in new ways:
Use as many keywords/keyphrases as makes sense. Write as many keywords in your value statement as you can without losing the flow of your sentences.
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Video has become the number one activity on the web. Why not use that to your advantage for your job search? When people see that play button, they are compelled to push in. In just a few seconds of video, someone can learn more about you than reading a three-page résumé.
Images and examples of your work can have the same forward momentum.
Just like résumé writers, who help you with the content of your résumé to improve your job search results, certain tools and services can help you make that content look amazing. And considering that someone is probably going to view your résumé on a computer screen, consider breaking away from the three possible templates available in MS Word and use any of the following.
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Because most job searches follow a set pattern, using software to track your social media contacts and your steps on that path makes a lot of sense. Enter job-search organization tools. Not only do these babies help you organize the many moving parts, contacts, and job applications that are part of the job search, but they also allow you to store your data after you get your job.
Whether you’re applying to a particular job opening or just reaching out to hiring managers to explore possibilities, the results of your efforts won’t always go your way. If you don’t get the job or if hiring managers don’t want to talk to you, it’s probably not your fault.
Don’t take it to heart. Instead, look at what you did well and what you can improve on.
Spending a little time within the Settings panel is worthwhile when you’re using Twitter to help you with your job search. Head over to the triangle drop-down menu next to your username on the top-right corner of the page and click on Settings.
Personalize your profile background
You can personalize the look of your Twitter account by uploading background images and collages.
After a while, you may grow tired of micromanaging your Twitter network for job searching or of finding enough content to send at just the right times. That’s where Twitter automation tools can come in handy. Just don’t use these to replace real human engagement.
Rather, if they can help you shed a few minutes from your online time, then go for it.
TweetMyJobs is a great career-management company with plenty of traction in the U.S. employment marketplace. With more than 1 million job postings every month — including jobs from companies such as Starbucks, Kmart, and Comcast — TweetMyJobs leads the way in tweetifying the job market.
The site has been reviewed in the Wall Street Journal, on CNN, and in BusinessWeek.
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As your Twitter connections grow, your timeline moves faster and faster, increasing your chances of missing critical pieces of information, job postings, and relevant industry news. That’s where lists come in. With the lists feature on Twitter, you can drag-and-drop certain Twitter friends into categories. Each list only displays tweets from its members.
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Every major metropolitan city has a human-resource industry wherein recruiters build a list of possible candidates to place into possible jobs. More and more, these recruiters are turning to Twitter to post jobs and recruit talent. Follow these steps to find your local recruiters so you can monitor real-time job postings:
Go to any Twitter user directory and type the following into the search box: “recruiter, [your city]” or “executive search, [your city].
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Showing genuine passion can reassure a hiring manager that you are who you say you are during your job search and that you’ll be as enthusiastic in six months as you are now. This means that you need to know what your passions are and find a way to constructively channel them. Having a firm knowledge of your passions helps you infuse your personal brand with authenticity and energy.
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LinkedIn’s status update feature allows you to post a short message to share with your network during your job search (first- and second-degree contacts only — in other words, the people you’re directly connected to and the people they’re directly connected to). The functionality of status updates on LinkedIn is very similar to that of Facebook and Twitter.
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Because more than 4,000 niche job boards are available on the Internet, many job seekers don’t even bother trying to find them. The task just seems too daunting. Yet, very often, these niche boards hold the key to the best job postings.
Why do these boards offer the cream of the crop? Think of it this way: If a fresh, young company must choose between paying $600 to a major job board only to get tons of spammy résumés or paying a cheaper $60 to niche boards to get targeted résumés, it will likely choose the second option.
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With the hundreds of online interactions you’re likely to engage in during your job search, keeping a record of all the e-mails exchanged between you and a particular contact, how you met, and any follow-up you should do is incredibly helpful. You may need to review these things in the future to help further your current search.
The unique limitations of online video make producing high-impact content in your video résumé even more imperative for your job search. Consider this: Hiring managers spend an average of just one to three minutes watching their top candidates on-screen. If you don’t get to the point within the first ten seconds, they won’t bother to finish viewing your film.
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This batch of tools rides a current trend of displaying large amounts of data in a visually appealing way for your job search. Humans can consume a huge amount of data very quickly when it’s displayed in a graphically logical way, and infographics are entering mainstream media. Well, you can do the same with your professional history.
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Staying up-to-speed with social media during a job search can be frustrating, even for people who work in the industry. New technologies are emerging every week, and existing companies are merging, splitting, and adapting quickly. As a job seeker, you certainly don't need to be on top of the very latest, but knowing what's out there can help you find new and creative ways to manage your career.
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Everything you tweet becomes public domain. Remember that when using Twitter for your job search. Potentially thousands of people may read your tweets, and not all those people are kind, supportive social media enthusiasts like me. Having some street smarts goes a long way.
Never share personal information that can be used against you or that can be used to impersonate you, such as the following:
Your birth date
Your phone number
Your address
Your mother’s maiden name
Details about your children
When you’re going on vacation or leaving your home
Potentially damaging images or information about yourself
You’re using Twitter to get a job.
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If you’re quite advanced in your job search, then you probably already have a masterful grasp of your industry. That means your primary focus is finding just which company you should work for.
Lifestyle at work and away from work
With at-will employment, declining loyalties, and the average job lasting two years or less, lifestyle has become the most important deciding factor in finding new work.
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If you’re already on LinkedIn and Facebook, have multiple online résumés, and own your own domain name, you may wonder why on earth you should bother with another social network. You certainly don’t have to use Twitter, but most people really enjoy using it after they get started. However, you can judge for yourself.
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Typically, the hardest step in getting started with Twitter is figuring out what on earth to say. Job seekers learning to use Twitter frequently say that their biggest fear is not knowing where all that content is going to come from. Don’t worry. If you can carry on a conversation, you can tweet. Here are some ways to find content easily:
Follow industry blogs: Compile a list of industry-relevant blogs to read weekly.
Instead of uploading your video résumé to the 20-plus available video-sharing sites one at a time for your job search, you can use a content distribution system. OneLoad is a great choice.
After you create your free OneLoad account, you can upload your video, description, and tags. From there, OneLoad lets you choose which sites you want to syndicate to.
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Choosing the right people for your network is important during a job search. If someone follows you, you’re not obligated to reciprocate. Indeed, every day more and more spammers and schemers are on Twitter. Some people @reply your username just to make sure your read their spam message or click their spam link.
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It may not be immediately apparent why you need Facebook for your job search. At first, Facebook was used almost exclusively for personal reasons among college students. Soon, complications arose: What if your mom wants to connect with you on Facebook and sees your party pictures? If your ex-girlfriend wants to connect, what will your wife say?
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Why is LinkedIn so important to your job search? Put yourself in the shoes of a hiring manager in today’s economy. Your company is going through tough economic times. Your HR department has been drastically downsized, and you’re being asked to find and recruit talent to fill your open positions — a task that you aren’t even compensated for.
Your job search will go more smoothly if you have a good résumé. When you read articles online, do you tend to pass over large blocks of text? If so, then you’re like most people who have a hard time sorting through dense paragraphs on a screen. The truth is that most people scan online content most of the time.
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After you’ve chosen a development platform for designing your online résumé, you can get down to the business of job searching and figuring out what to write and what pages to include.
Your goal is to present a more rounded and colorful picture of your professional career than what can be found on paper. Don’t just copy and paste your résumé text onto a website.
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