Today it becomes even easier to tell a friend about a great employment opportunity: you can refer a job through Facebook. Hopefully the process speaks for itself, but here it is in more detail. (more…)

Now that the supply and demand equation has definitely tilted in favour of the employer for most jobs and recruiters are faced with the problem of digital information overload. Recruiters have turned to evaluating the social footprint of a potential candidate before contacting them ( great post by @BINC on mashable about your social footprint here ).  Boris talks about what recruiters and search consultants are evaluating, I thought it would be helpful to the job seeker if I elaborated on how to create the right social footprint with some tips.

Tips

1. LinkedIn
   1. Profile: Make sure your profile is complete with all of your work history, education details, blogs, avatar, interests and specialties. This is your digital CV and more often that not this will be what recruiters look for first.
   2. Connect to Recruiters: Seek out recruiters that have good reputations in your industry and connect with them.
   3. Public Profile: Make sure you allow a ‘Full View’ on your public profile settings. This is critical in allowing the search engines to index your profile. Recruiters use search strings via the search engines like google to hack into Linkedin and search profiles outside of their network. So if you want to be found and you don’t have a big network switch this setting on.  To do this you go to Edit My Profile > Edit Public Profile Settings > Full View. This is normally a default setting but just make sure.
   4. Recommendations: Request recommendations from present and past colleagues, managers, partners, direct reports and customers. Having a healthy set of recommendation from credible people adds a heap of value and could be the difference between receiving the call or not.
   5. Contact Settings: Make sure you select that you are interested in ‘Career Opportunities’ and ‘Job Inquiries’
   6. Phone and Email: This is controversial and probably against Linkedin’s terms of service but hey if you want to be found and contacted list your email and phone number in “headline” of your profile. If it is an issue Linkedin will contact you.
   7. Status Updates: This will keep you regularly in the news feed of the recruiters I advised you connect with previously. This also kind of gives them subtle reminders.
   8. Groups: Search the Group Directory and join Industry Groups, Groups created by companies you would like to work for or why not start a group yourself about a topic you are passionate and knowledgeable about. This is just another way for recruiters to evaluate your views on a particular subject and for you to build a network that you can share and learn with.
2. Twitter
   1. Profile: Complete your profile, ensure that your bio describes accurately who you are and what you do. My bio is ‘CEO at 2Vouch and Social Recruiting Strategist.’
   2. Avatar: Have a picture of you as your avatar, so people know who they are building a relationship with.
   3. Hashtags: ‘Hashtags are a community-driven convention for adding additional context and metadata to your tweets’ you can learn more about hashtags here. Use hashtags at the end of some of your tweets as recruiters can search for specific hashtags.
   4. Twitter Search: Recruiters will do searches using Twitter Search on key words. So if you are looking for a job as a creative director then I would suggest tweeting about the fact the ‘ you’ve been updating your creative portfolio’
   5. Follow: HR, recruiters, recruiting companies and employers in the areas you are looking for a job in. Now here I mean follow and engage in conversation and build a relationship, don’t stalk if you really want to get value from twitter. As Boris talks about, some recruiters will look at the follow to following ratio and use that as a filtering tool.
3. Facebook
   1. Profile: complete your profile and ensure that you have the same detail as your Linkedin profile in the ‘Info’ part of your FB profile.
   2. Avatar: In my view, FB is a little more relaxed than Linkedin but if your looking for a job, I would ere on the side of caution and have a respectable looking avator on your profile.
   3. Status Updates: with so many social networks it’s hard to keep up with them, so a cool service like Ping.fm allows you to update all of your social networks at once. Caution: don’t tweet drunk as it will appear on your Linkedin status too. I’ve been there and it’s not a good look.
   4. Fan Pages: Join the fan pages of companies that you are interested in working for. If they are being used correctly as a recruiting tool, then you’ll be updated with opportunities that exist within that company, you can connect with and get advice from people who are currently working there and hopefully start to build a relationship with the recruiter at that company.
   5. Applications: Add job search applications: Cheezhead posted a great list of job search apps for FB here. For all the Aussies there is a SEEK one here
   6. Photos: well we’ve all heard a lot about this issue. Need I say more! Job seekers can rant about if it’s ethical to look at photos etc whilst in the recruiting process but bottom line it happens. So once it’s in the public domain, recruiters will find it. So keep your nudie and drunken shots on your hardrive.
4. RSS
   1. Use a RSS reader to get a live feed of jobs from the job boards that are relevant to you.
   2. There are a number of feed readers for RSS, Google Reader is an example
5. Website
   1. Your Name: Now this is not really ’social’, but have your registered your name as the domain name? This is a personal branding issue and not my area of expertise but Dan Schawbel has a book called Me 2.0 that looks like a good read.
   2. Content: This should include your resume and links to your profiles on social networks.
6. Blog
   1. Subject Area: If you have an opinion on something that your are passionate about like your industry, cooking, sports etc blog about it. This ads another dimension to your social media footprint and gives recruiters a more complete picture of who you are.
   2. Contact details: Mare sure your contact details are visible and easily accessible.
   3. Blogging Platforms: there are a number of them but I find Wordpress easy to use

There are many other things that I would suggest you do in your job search like networking at industry events, and with past colleagues to gain referrals from them to recruiters and companies that may be hiring but this post is long enough already.

Are you using any other social media tools for your job search?

By Riges Younan

You can listen to the interview I did with @keithkeller and @annemariecross here

A plug for Career Communique below - they are nice people!

Career Communique Radio - A positive alternative to the doom and gloom
Career Communique Radio - a weekly Internet radio show based in Australia  - is hosted every Monday morning (Melbourne time) by Keith Keller and Annemarie Cross.
Each week Keith and Annemarie provide practical tips to help you find real meaning and purpose from your work, as well as giving you proven strategies to help you in your job search.
To listen to the next weeks show or to download previous shows, simply click on the link below
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