on with one or more social networking services, you are
✔ Showing the world how hirable you are. By filling out profiles and listing your credentials, you advertise your potential or immediate availability on an “e-billboard” that helps recruiters and employers find you.
✔ Gathering supporters to hold open doors. When you collect, connect, and network with friendly contacts, you gain a potential source of referrals, get updates on their employers’ hiring modes, receive insider fill-ins on company culture, and uncover other useful information.
Eyeing the Big Three of Social Networking Job Search
Of the countless social networking services available to you, three services top the charts in career-management and job-search potential: LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter.
Regardless of your profession, LinkedIn (www.linkedin.com) is the big-league social site you want. Its 332 million worldwide members swing for the fences. Totally business focused? LinkedIn (LI) is your online chance to put a home run up on the board.
Unsurprisingly, case histories of LinkedIn members using the professional social network to find jobs keep rolling out. Here are the LI experiences of two people:
✔ A laid-off engineer landed a promising new post paying more money at a financial services website. This happened shortly after a headhunter found the engineer’s job status on LI had been changed from “current” to “past.”
✔ A radio station marketing manager lost his job and decided to post a forthright status note: “I’m up for grabs, who wants me?” Someone in his network saw it and referred him as a candidate for the position of programs and events manager at a city’s chamber of commerce organization. The former radio man cinched the job offer a week later.
Sampling the LinkedIn benefits buffet
LinkedIn keeps new service features coming at a brisk pace while extending its global reach around the world. Already LinkedIn overflows with free ways that job seekers can work the job market scene. The following options are the tip of the iceberg:
✔ Posting a profile. An LI profile contains the same information as your Core resume. (See Chapter 6 to find out more about this overall resume format.) You include your work history, education, competencies, and skills. “Open to opportunities” means you’re unemployed or about to be, trying to move from part-time to full-time work, or just seeking greener pastures.
✔ Expanding your network. By “working social,” you can continue to add voices to your chorus of colleagues, creating a strong source of referrals and endorsements. You want to stand out, but you don’t have to stand alone when you need professional helping hands.
✔ Joining groups. Much like participating in traditional professional associations and trade groups, LI affinity groups offer camaraderie according to particular occupation, career field, or industry. Getting involved in groups also helps to greatly increase your visibility and stand out with recruiters. If no existing group zeroes in on your requirements, start your own.
Each group maintains a job-posting area where recruiting and hiring managers post their openings before word gets out; as a group member, you see all the posted job openings while they’re fresh. Each LI member can join up to 50 groups.
✔ Periscoping your future. When you’re puzzling over how next to position yourself to reach career goals, LinkedIn Career Explorer can help. Based on its database of real-life personal and company profiles, the LinkedIn service shows what happened to others in your shoes, names companies where you might work, forecasts how much money you can make, and identifies by name the kinds of people you might meet along the way.
✔ Allowing employers to find you. It’s easy to personalize your profile with a custom URL. Instead of setting up and maintaining your own website, direct viewers to your LI profile with a vanity address that includes your name, like this: www.linkedin.com/in/FirstLast.
✔ Using premium search tools. If you want to rev up your search, choose the enhanced version of LinkedIn by paying between $20 and $50 a month for one of three premium levels and get benefits like these:
● Top billing for your profile (comparable to a sponsored link on Google’s first page)
● The ability to communicate with hiring managers, even those outside your network
● Access to full profiles of hiring decision makers
LinkedIn upshot
If you feel you can devote serious job-search and career-management time to only one social network, make it LinkedIn, the recruiters’ favorite. According to a recent social-recruiting survey, 93 percent of hiring companies in the United States use LinkedIn in their recruiting process. (The same survey reports 66 percent of recruiting responders use Facebook, and 54 percent use Twitter. See later sections for more on these social sites.)
The orientation time to sharpen your skills on LinkedIn may cost you a few nights out on the town, but after you get the hang of it, you’ll be glad you’re linked in with other people who are as willing to help you as you are to help them.
From preteens to super seniors, the age curve of the world’s Facebook users is no longer perceptible. This change in Facebook users has heralded more focus on professional-networking and job-finding opportunities.
Facebook is wonderful for chat, status updates, or wall posts to keep your friends and family wired into your life. The social site is also a convenient way to remind your contacts to keep you in mind if they get wind of a job that could blow in your direction, as indicated by the story of a young woman in the American capital:
I used Facebook to get my current job, and I couldn’t be happier. Last year I posted several status updates about my job. A friend of a friend saw the posts and e-mailed me about an opportunity at [the federal agency where she worked]. I went in for an interview and three days later (light speed in the federal government), I had a job offer.
Sampling the Facebook benefits buffet
Facebook is a runaway success offering a heavy slice of opportunities to move forward with your plans for the future. Here are a handful of those opportunities:
✔ Networking to useful faces. Many of your colleagues and the professionals in your field are on Facebook. Remember to update your status with your current job situation and what you’re looking for. When you’re in full job-hunt mode,
