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?

You would had to have been living under a rock to miss the fact that the global economic situation is currently rather poor. The Australian Treasury released a report indicating that the average Australian family has lost thousands of dollars in wealth in the last few months.

Treasury’s broadest measure of wealth — covering shares, property and other assets — fell 9.9 per cent in real terms over the year to September, the biggest slide since the figures were first collated in 1960.

It suggests that even without a recession, Australian wealth has suffered more from the current financial crisis than from any of the previous four recessions or from the 1987 sharemarket collapse.

The trouble is not just with families, organisations are feeling the pinch as well, with up market retailer David Jones and miner BHP Billiton cutting jobs as revenue projections fall.

For the average recruiter or hiring manager when they have the opportunity to hire someone today they will experience two factors. Lots of applicants and a reduced budget for advertising.

This is when you need to use innovative recruitment practices.

Placing your job on a mainstream job board is guaranteed to get you lots and lots of candidates. But are they the best candidates and how long will it take to sort through that number of applications?

There are several ways to lower your recruitment costs.

Leveraging tools such as LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and even Google can help you actively target the right candidate for your positions. What is more very few of these tools require you to spend money mining their data. Yes these approaches take time, but so does sorting through 100 applications!

Of course referrals will help you save time and money.

A report by Dr John Sullivan in 2006 found that while referrals might directly cost more than traditional online job boards the other benefits far outweighed job boards.

Further referrals are also faster. Vodafone in Europe found that by focusing recruiting activities on employment brand management and employee referral, the average recruiting cycle time per hire was reduced by more than two-thirds. The “CareerXRoads 7th Source of Hire” survey supports the reduced time to hire metrics, finding that the efficiency or yield of the referral process is second to none; in 20% of the time it took 2 referrals to make the hire, and 16% of the time it took 3 referrals to make the hire.

When these other benefits are translated into business performance, significant real dollar benefits were achieved. From Dr Sullivan’s report:

Here is the scenario: (Note: This scenario omits all impacts except individual performance improvement.)

• The firm has 40,000 employees.
• It hires 6,000 people per year (to replace turnover of 10 percent as well as new positions created by 5 percent growth).
• The current “revenue per employee” at this firm is $250,000 (total firm revenue divided by the number of employees).
• If you shifted all hires to referrals, you could expect to hire people with a 14.36 percent better on-the-job performance than an average employee.
• That would result in an increased revenue of $35,900 per hire (14.36 percent of $250,000).

That adds up to:

• Added revenue of $215.5 million in just one year. (Because the new hires would also stay longer, the savings would continue over multiple years.)
• Even if it was applied only to two-thirds of the hires, the added revenue would be more than $140 million.

Even using a smaller example of only 400 employees, you would be looking at a revenue increase of $21.5 million. So why not start using these tools today!

By Michael Specht, Consultant to 2Vouch on Social Media and Recruiting

Over the last five to ten years the process of finding a job has changed dramatically! Now not only do you have to have a resume, you have to know how the internet works, visit job boards, be on LinkedIn and other such tools, search online social networks. It can be very confusing.

Here are a 10 ideas to help you kick start your job search in 2009.

1. Set up specific job alerts on your favourite job boards, make sure you are targeted in your keywords so you receive relevant results.
2. Let your network of contacts know you are looking for a job, many times someone will know of a job.
3. Upgrade your resume, cull old irrelevant information and add new information.
4. Do a Google search on your name, see what potential employers might find about you.
5. Setup your own website to promote your professional activities, try and secure your name as the domain as this will help the site appear in the first page of search results. This can help if some not so good information is appearing when people search for your name.
6. Set up or update your LinkedIn profile, make sure it matches you resume!
7. Speak to you friends and work colleagues, get an idea what improvements you can make both professionally and personally.
8. Practice interviewing techniques with friends and family.
9. Start an exercise routine. People who exercise regularly tend to be happy, not to mention fitter and healthier, which can help during those “down” days during your job search.
10. Also sign up for 2Vouch ;-).

What are your tips?

By Michael Specht, Consultant to 2Vouch on Social Media and Recruiting

A social recruiting services such as 2Vouch relies on the fact that people know other people who might need a new job. But what happens if your network is small? How do you go about growing the network?

There are lots of ways to grow your network. Even if you have a large network your network is a living organism the participants are always changing. People change jobs, move industries, cities, and even countries. This means you need to keep “feeding” your network with new contacts to keep it fresh and up to date.

The list below was originally published on my personal blog but are worth reviewing as they are easy to implement tips on how to build up your professional network.

1. Join the social networks online
   The first step for anyone today wanting to expand their network is to join LinkedIn. Further look to join more specialised services such as FaceBook, MySpace and industry specific services ad these will provide you with different connections.
2. Attend industry gatherings
   All industries have key groups and organisations where people of similar background gather, many are free or require minimal investments other than your time.
3. Get a personal business card
   When you build your network you want to make sure that it is transportable from employer to employer. By handing out a personal business card, not one from your current employer will assist with this process.
4. Meet 5 new people
   Don’t always associated with the same people. Every time you go to a professional or social event make sure you meet at least 5 new people.
5. You are a brand
   Brand yourself to your network in order to build it further, the more people know you to more people will want to know you.
6. Globalise the network
   When you were growing up, perhaps you had a pen-pal in a different country, in a global marketplace you never know when knowing someone in Tanzania will come in handy.
7. Become an information sponge
   Use a contact management tool to record e-mails, phone numbers, and everything else you can about the people you know.
8. Take control of your virtual presence
   Make sure that when people look for you online, your image is both accurate and flattering.
9. Join the virtual communities where your target market lives
   Once you have joined one group, ask the members where else they connect with like-minded people. Be sure to look for smaller groups within larger sites.
10. Take a leadership role in your industry
    Write a blog to cover your domain, and perhaps create an online community around your unique interests.

By Michael Specht, Consultant to 2Vouch on Social Media and Recruiting