alt="tip" target="_blank" rel="nofollow" href="#i000025800000.jpg"/> The interactive Facebook crowd includes prospective employers (solo operators, recruiters, hiring managers, and human resource specialists). Because Facebook isn’t a professional network (like LinkedIn; see the preceding section), contacting employers through FB can help you get noticed because there’s less competition from other job seekers.
✔ Looking at job listings. A number of job-search pages and apps have sprung up on Facebook. Performing a quick FB search of the words “job search” will bring up pages such as BeKnown and BranchOut. Use the Facebook Application Directory to discover apps. With both you can find job opportunities, networking, and even recruiters with pages such as these.
✔ Milking groups. Groups on Facebook are virtually the same as groups on LinkedIn – a place to share breaking news and developments of collective interest. Join up or start groups for a topic, industry, or interest. By hanging out with people who care about the same things you do, you can be noticed and in a good spot to hear about unadvertised jobs in the hidden job market, as well as advertised jobs you might otherwise overlook.
✔ Cruising relevant pages. Stay abreast of what’s up on Facebook’s job-site pages and company pages. When you spot a company you’d like to work for, click that you “like” its page and get company news that may aid your job search.
✔ Personalizing your search. Because Facebook has integrated with prominent job-search engine SimplyHired, you can try to find jobs through your Facebook friends. After you hop on www.simplyhired.com, find jobs you want, click on the “Who Do I Know” button at the top of search results to see your Facebook friends at the company and send private “can you help me?” inquiries to them.
✔ Creating a web presence. Even when you don’t operate your own website (most people don’t), you can be on digital deck with a profile on Facebook. Direct viewers to your profile with a vanity address that reflects your name, like this: www.facebook.com/FirstLast.
Facebook upshot
Facebook has won the hearts of a big slice of the younger population for finding friends, classmates, staying in touch, gossiping, and more. A number of late-to-the-party older (that is, above age 35) members find Facebook useful as a communications bonanza for job searching and promoting their personal brands.
Free, personal, and highly mobile, Twitter is a web-based message-distribution system for posting messages of up to a concise 140 characters. (If you guessed that the preceding sentence was, with spaces, exactly 140 characters, you’re right. Like wit, brevity is the soul of Twitter talking.)
Twitter talk describes your activities for followers – people who want to keep track of what you’re up to. You can include links to other content in your messages, including a resume you’ve stashed on the web. A Twitter message is known as a tweet; the verb is to tweet; the forwarding of other people’s tweets is retweeting.
Until recently, Twitter was commonly seen as the social site for trivial pursuits – specializing in the “I’m having a veggie sandwich for lunch” kind of thing. But current traffic counts changed that perception, giving Twitter new respect.
Statistics suggest that about one billion visitors worldwide now use Twitter, generating about 200 million tweets a day. A recent study for marketing and advertising firms reveals Twitter’s power in spreading messages far and wide: “The majority of Twitter users never post anything … but they are definitely reading and clicking.”
Twitter offers a stable of techniques to make a successful job search materialize for you, including bumping up your visibility and connecting with employment targets.
One of the techniques – inspiring a friend to tweet for you – is illustrated by the case of a young Chicago woman who told a pal she hoped to find an internship in public relations but was having zero luck. Her friend tweeted a marketing pitch: “Anyone hiring for a PR internship? I know a well-qualified candidate on the hunt.” A follower of the tweeter immediately responded with an offer. An internship was born at a start-up PR firm in Chicago that, after graduation, morphed into a full-time job.
Direct pitching for yourself on Twitter is another way to go. When a woman was laid off from an Idaho-based computer company, she packed up her desk and on the way out tweeted: “Just been laid off from XYZ computer company.” By the time the newly minted employment seeker left the parking lot, she had a job offer from a friend who ran a local web-development company.
Sampling the Twitter benefits buffet
“Short is sweet” describes Twitter’s ability to communicate big ideas in a few words, a feature increasingly appreciated by job searchers and those who advise them. Here’s a taste of Twitter:
✔ Speeding toward jobs. In a job market where every opening attracts unbelievable numbers of resumes and often closes application within the first 24 to 48 hours, speed counts. Through Twitter, you can get new openings sent to you before most recruiters get them by following the right tweeters.
✔ Getting tweets from job boards. Monster reaches out to job seekers in its database to encourage them to apply on Monster for jobs matching their qualifications. Other job boards that tweet jobs announce the collaboration on their websites.
✔ Following recruiters and hiring managers. You can seek out and follow recruiters and get early dibs on breaking job opportunities.
✔ Tweeting for help. Here are examples of tweets you can send to kick-start a job search:
● I’m looking for a sales job. Not retail. Here’s resume link. Can anyone push it around?
● I’m trying to get hired in accounting by XYZ corp. Know anyone inside who could walk my resume to HR or acct. mgr?
● Will you set up meeting, or can I call using your recommendation?
● Have you seen any great job postings for insurance claims adjusters? Pls advise.
● Hey, 300 pals: Who’ll rehearse me for big job interview?
✔ Researching with hashtags. A hashtag is any word in Twitter immediately preceded by the pound symbol (#). Examples: #marketing, #healthcare, #engineering. Hashtags corral all tweets that contain the same hashtag, letting you easily track down a topic.
✔ Teaming up with Twitter sidekicks. Twitter Search (www.twittersearch.com) is a Twitter-operated service that searches the service for jobs. Additionally, legions of third-party ancillary websites have appeared to cash in on the enormous volume of data Twitter generates. The third-party sites are free. Examples:
● JobShouts.com (www.jobshouts.com) tweets job openings to Twitter-users.
● Twitjobsearch.com (www.twitjobsearch.com) is a job search engine that scrapes Twitter for the jobs that match keywords you enter, and you can apply if the particulars are right for you.
● TweetMyJobs (www.tweetmyjobs.com)
