How important is social media in your job hunt? What you don’t know *can* hurt you. The founder and CEO of JobMagic gave a blog post on Mashable giving information on how social recruiting is changing the landscape of recruiting away from the “black hole” of resume submissions.
What Job Seekers Need to Know in Today’s Digital Market.
Where I depart from the recommendations in the article (as most are on point), is that you should cater all of your social networks to lean professional. Good advice for job seekers? Not really. Why not? Because interacting in social media is called “social” for a reason. One should use the different networks to highlight different aspects of one’s personality (and keep all partying and drunk photos off all of them). Recruiters will look at your twitter feed, Facebook and LinkedIn profiles — and even Google+, but give them something different to learn about you in each one. Use the platform appropriately to highlight what you want the recruiter to see.
LinkedIn: Keep it totally professional. If you have a blog, attach it to your profile so they can see how you discuss hot topics in your field.
Facebook: Keep it classy. Show that you have many friends and have interests outside of the industry work. Remember, EVERY resume has an additional information section. Make Facebook reflect those interests because it’s the best platform to play those up and not a great platform for career expression.
Twitter: Keep it brief. Focus on one main professional area, perhaps creating a public list for your industry interests for recruiters to follow. Actively interacting with those on that list is a must. Get as many people as you can to follow that list because it lends credibility that you know whom should be followed. On your feed, everyone knows one can’t follow a huge number of people, so keep the number of people you follow manageable and believable.
Google +: Keep it tech-y. Until G+ has a more solid role and identity, there will be many ways to use it. Find the right way to express yourself to your friends and subscribers using the new-ness of the platfrom. At springraise, we find Google+ to be amazing at generating traffic to our blog as well as keeping people up to date on new industry-related findings (such as this post referring to the one on mashable). In fact, we closed our Facebook account once Google+ launched. We’re just getting started with their brand pages.
Lastly, do something different, like visualize your career in a way that is unique to you. That visualization can be posted on all of your social networks and be received well by recruiters and your friends. That kind of creativity can also lead you to a better position in salary negotiation as the company will see how you think through complex challenges.
Check out my career visualization below. What do you think? Drop your thoughts in the comments.
