Job Searching with Social Media For Dummies

Joshua Waldman

• Publisher: For Dummies
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781118678572
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Careers

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.

Part I

Preparing for Your Job Search

For Dummies can help you get started with lots of subjects. Visit www.dummies.com to learn more and do more with For Dummies.

In this part . . .

Find out why social media is now considered the highest leverage tool available for today’s successful job seeker and what you can do about it.

Gain control of your job search and avoid feeling overwhelmed with cutting-edge organization and time-management tools.

Organize your connections and all of your online profiles so that you become an expert networker.

Chapter 1

The Lowdown on Social Media for Job Hunters

In This Chapter

Realizing why you need to have an online presence when searching for a job

Showing recruiters and hiring managers what makes you uniquely qualified

Using social media sites to host your résumé and manage your online reputation

Social media, sometimes called social networking, is nothing more than a technology that facilitates human interaction. Different than a website or a résumé, which are strictly one-way forms of communication, social media sites allow users to comment, share, or chat with each other, often in real time. Further, social media tools have lowered the barrier to publishing content online itself, and an army of bloggers, flip-cam video producers, and armchair article writers have found a voice. Social media has given ordinary people a chance to build an audience or interact with their favorite celebrities. Indeed, with social media comes your online reputation, and your reputation matters.

Social media has also become an important tool for job seekers due in part to the new ways people are finding out about (and getting fired from) jobs. As you may already know, most jobs come about through networking, not applying on job boards or aimlessly sending out résumés. Social media tools make networking much easier and much more powerful due to their interactive nature. Thus when a job seeker really learns to use social networking well, his chances for finding opportunities multiply exponentially.

Nowadays, social media also plays a part in how hiring managers are conducting their research on candidates. More than 80 percent of recruiters use LinkedIn. Additionally, 50 percent of hiring managers can determine whether a particular candidate’s personality is a good fit for their company just by seeing that person’s social media presence.

In this chapter, I help you grasp the bigger picture of why having more than a basic online presence is essential. I also help you figure out how to do all the prep work necessary for job searching with social media, including discovering your personal brand and getting your résumé online. I even offer direction on where to go when you’re ready to expand your online presence and how to keep your job search proactive with the help of various social media tools. Well, what are you waiting for? The job for you is out there — you just need to know how to find it and position yourself as the right person for it!

Discovering Why Managing Your Online Presence Is Important

Information for just about everyone can be found online by someone who knows how to conduct the right search. That’s right. Personal information such as your name, address, and phone number are on the Internet. But if you really want to use social media as a tool to land your dream job, then you need to be willing to expand your presence online beyond just the basics. I explain why in the sections that follow.

Whether or not you can do the job you’re applying for will certainly help you pass screening and get your foot in the door. However, final decisions about your employment come down to your personality. Surveys have found over and over again that fit is the primary reason for hiring one person over another. And one of the best ways to prove how well you can fit in at one of your target companies is by using social media sites to reveal your personality. A printed-out résumé (or even one viewed on a computer screen) can only witness to your skills; a profile on a social media site can demonstrate your passion, your personality, and your uniqueness.

Recruiters will Google you

Regardless of whether you search for your name online to see what comes up, you can bet that someone else will — namely the hiring managers at most (if not all!) of the companies you apply to. Recruiters from almost every field and industry take classes each year to find out about advanced Google techniques that can help them find and screen talent. In fact, many recruiters I’ve interviewed have told me that conducting Internet searches (mostly through Google) on the people they’re placing is part of their due diligence and responsibility. In other words, they wouldn’t be doing their jobs if they didn’t investigate your online presence.

The unfairness of this situation is that most people don’t know how to manage what information is found out about them online. So although you may be making a huge splash with great Google results from social media sites, your online presence may actually be a very serious liability. The solution? Proactively manage your online reputation by using the steps I show you in Chapter 7.

Hiring managers are cheap

During the great recession of 2008 and 2009 (and arguably longer), organizations made some serious cutbacks. The first people to go at many companies were the HR recruiters, which meant the responsibility of finding and screening new talent shifted to the hiring managers — as in the people who make the final decision about your employment and typically become your boss after you come onboard. In other words, hiring managers’ jobs are primarily not about hiring new employees; their day-to-day role usually has little to do with hiring because they’re paid for their performance at other functions.

What does that mean to you? Simply th...