Business Week Online featured an article by Dan Schawbel in which he declares that “LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, and blogging are much better tools for finding jobs that speak to your passions than job boards and corporate Web sites”. The original article can be found here.
The article presents a staggering statistic regarding employee recruitment; “72% of companies plan to invest more in recruiting through social networks”. To give an idea of how many professionals are currently using social networking, as of the publication of the article, LinkedIn has “more than 40 million professional member profiles across all industries”. Also, “with 250 million users, Facebook is the largest social network and is home to both corporate recruiters and headhunters”. Schawbel describes one user that “landed his current job as a sales associate for EMC without even submitting his resume”. He goes on to describe how potential employees can use each of these three social media to their advantage in finding a job “faster than the competition.”
When using social networking for professional advancement, Schawbel offers several tips including:
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- “Construct a flawless profile that will impress recruiters”.
- Use your professional headline “to position yourself for the job you want, not the job you have.
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“Obtain your unique LinkedIn URL so that it appears as http://linkein.com/in/yourfullname”
**this is called a vanity URL, which many social networking sites are using because it comes up faster in search engines.
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Blogging
- “Recruiters can gain a better understanding of an individual based on a blog, compared to a resume that has the same boring standard fields, such as experience and education.”
- Blogging gives hiring managers an idea of how an applicant “may fit into an organization’s culture and the specific role that needs to be filled”.
- “To be a successful blogger, passion, hard work, integrity, and the ability to take criticism are required”.
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- A potential employee can post their resume “on Twitter using twtjobs.com”.
- “You can search for jobs by going to twitterjobsearch.com”.
- Because of the restrictions placed on Twitter users, Schawbel suggests that users “go to twitbacks.com and create a custom background, which can include more of your information to paint a stronger portrait of your personal brand.
- “Focus your tweets on your expertise instead of randomly tweeting about anything that comes to your mind, so you can become the go-to source for information on that topic”.
- “Follow people in your field, especially those employed at companies that you want to work for”.
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- “Hide those party pictures and set privacy settings”.
- “Get your custom URL by going to facebook.com/usernames and selecting facebook.com/yourfullname”.
- “Status updates can be a job-seeking tool”…”as a way of networking old contacts without harassing them”.
With applicable tips and good advice, this article is like a mini-guide for social media and job hunting. Schawbel calls social media “the great equalizer” because it gives job seekers the ability to “connect directly with hiring managers who work for companies you have genuine interest in instead of applying mindlessly through job boards”.
