Job Searching with Social Media For Dummies
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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. Here are some guidelines for writing web copy:

  • Title every page. When people land on your home page, they should know instantly that it’s an online résumé.

  • Include headlines to help your reader scan your site quickly. Use at least two levels of meaningful headers: a title (Level 1) and subheads (Level 2 or 3).

  • Link to other pages on your website. For example, your professional summary may have the call to action, “Contact me.” Link the words contact me directly to your Contact page.

  • Present one idea per paragraph.

  • Use bold and italics on key phrases to make scanning easier.

Your résumé website should summarize your résumé on the home page and then offer more detail in the subpages. Following are the pages to include on your résumé website:

  • Home: Use your home page to make clear that this site is a résumé and to punch up your key selling points. Think of this page as your extended professional summary. A hiring manager should take one glance at your home page and know what you’re all about.

  • Résumé: Here, outline the elements of your résumé with links to the corresponding subpages. The subpages can go into more detail. Example subpages include:

    • Work History

    • Education

    • Skills

    • Volunteer Work

  • Social Networks: If you haven’t found a way to display links to your social networks in other locations — for example, via a static sidebar — you should have a page where people can connect with you.

  • Contact Me: You can include your contact info as a footer or in a static sidebar throughout your site. However, having a contact page is nice as well. You can use a form that people can fill out directly on the page. Don’t just put your e-mail address there. Tell people what they can contact you about, such as job inquiries, consulting offers, or questions about your work.

To include your e-mail address on your website but avoid getting spam, try an e-mail masking service like scr.im. Scr.im forces viewers to verify that they’re human and also gives you statistics about how many times your e-mail address has been viewed.

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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