There are more ways than ever to find out about jobs, whether you’re browsing Media Guardian for marketing jobs or The Register for technology jobs, getting daily emails from Jobsite or a feeding frenzy of calls when you accidentally leave your CV public on Monster. Yet what are the implications for recruitment and job seekers in a world were relationships are ended with Facebook status updates and international news stories are first published on Twitter.
How do you make the most of the opportunities to find jobs via social networks?
Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn are all great products but how do you navigate them to your advantage when you’re looking for a job, especially when your networks of contacts on these site is a combustible mix of friends, current colleagues and business contacts. There isn’t one right way to do this but we believe there are key principles to bear in mind on each of these platforms.
Linked In
LinkedIn is recognised as the No1 Professional Networking tool and recently announced its 45th million user. Its great success has been its clear focus on users creating networks of colleagues and business partners and allowing them to communicate with and find people in their extended network. This creates a perfect infrastructure for recruiters to find qualified candidates with relevant experience whilst there are also many jobs posted there directly every day
Ensuring your status and career history is only the first step to maximising the potential of being on LinkedIn. Here’s a few suggestions
- When writing you profile think of yourself as trying to appear on Google for certain searches Make sure use relevant keywords and think of what recruiters may look for e.g. “5 years in computing” is very different to “5yrs Java / C+ programming”
- Joining groups is a great way to broaden your contacts and also a way to show your interest in areas that are not directly linked to your current role. Recruiters will often post jobs in a relevant groups.
- Explore Linkedin’s own recommendations for Job Seekers. http://learn.linkedin.com/job-seekers/
- For more great tips on using LinkedIn try http://blog.guykawasaki.com/2009/02/10-ways-to-use.html#axzz0OBcloPGB
At its core Facebook isn’t really a great place to find a job. If you accept a recruiter as a friend on Facebook then don’t be suprised if they question your assertions that you’re a ‘diligent, team player’ when your status says you’re “taking a sickie to watch the Ashes ”
However you can display your current job and career history on Facebook as well as joining groups of current or ex employees.
Even if you do steer clear of recruiters then still bear in mind that employers may even check up on potential interview candidates so even if you keep you profile for Friends only remember how public some elements of Facebook are – especially when you are tagged in other people’s pictures. Facebook can even get you in trouble when you are safely installed in a new job – but Everyrecruiter doubts it’s users are this foolish
Twitter is still somewhat of an unknown quantity as a job finding tool for most people. But it is a growing channel for recruiters and job sites. What is most apparent about recruitment via Twitter is the pace of it, you can hear of a job and have an interview in minutes.
Roles are posted and aggregated on Twitter faster than you can possibly process them so the difficulty here is that you still need to de dupe the same role being retweeted by 20 different job feeds.
Specific Twitter Job Searches are emerging that should help such as http://www.twitterjobsearch.com/ . However never forget that these are social networks so the best way to find out about the latest jobs is via following the people who will be recruiting for them. Follow corporate tweets and even see whether your LinkedIn contacts have Twitter accounts worth keeping an eye on.
As ever we wish you the best of luck!
The EveryRecruiter Team