Advancing your career or changing jobs for better prospects in life is always challenging. Social media can provide information and connections that are vital to your career and job search. It is also a cost effective way of hiring the desired candidate quickly.
As the competition is rising, hiring managers are looking for innovative ways to reach out to the suitable candidate. They are now going beyond regular resume to assess your credentials. Apart from a candidate’s past professional experiences and other general information, companies are also checking their social profiles to verify credentials before making the final selection. Companies use social sourcing and referrals for encouraging employees to refer right talent. Similar corroboration and recommendations also happen when we wish to grow our network and connections for exploring career opportunities.
Information Source: Jobvite Social Recruiting Survey
Each social media property has its own unique way of enhancing your reputation online. Ensuring certain best practices on this medium can increase your commercial and professional viability. Your daily interactions on social networking sites can have a great impact on how prospective recruiters frame you as a potential employee for their organization. It is therefore important for serious job seekers to utilize social media skills in an effectively smarter way for attracting talent hunters.
Here are 3 important social platforms to help you optimize your job search strategy and build wider contact through effective use of this technology.
LinkedIn is the most widely used social network by HR professionals for talent search. It is therefore a popular tool to connect with a large community of recruiters and expand your professional network. Your LinkedIn profile provides a quick glance of your professional competence to head hunters online. Besides, it is also a useful way of connecting with other professional communities and groups online for the purpose of networking and knowledge sharing/creation. Some of the useful tips to attract hiring managers have been listed below:
- Your profile should be complete with all key information added. Job descriptions must highlight core strengths and professional skills. Market intelligence suggests that having a complete profile ensures proper indexing of your profile when any search is performed and increases chances of receiving job opportunities on account of higher ranking during profile searches by companies.
- It is crucial to include major accomplishments, experiences, education, skills, honors, professional achievements or any other aspect of your dossier you wish to highlight.
- Profile image should be chosen carefully.
- Apart from your profile, prospective employers also check your social interactions on LinkedIn. So, ensure that your LinkedIn engagements (posts, share, comment or follow) are of professional content.
- Make sure to include recommendations in your profile page from appropriate persons like previous heads, colleagues, friends etc. Their comments will act as word of mouth publicity for you.
- You can use LinkedIn to connect to professionals from other or related field to grow your network.
- Join LinkedIn groups that align with your professional interests, including alumni groups, trade associations and organizations of which you’re a member.
- Use LinkedIn to search jobs or prospective employers. LinkedIn Jobs allows you to search jobs based on different categories. You can also see how you are linked to the person who posted the job opening.
- To understand your recruiters or interviewers better you can search their LinkedIn pages.
Twitter is the favorite place of high-level executives. Most of the top management of leading companies manage their own Twitter account and are open to join a conversation with you. While searching for a jobs, try to build talking points around your prospective companies with your tweets, re-tweets and replies. Use relevant keywords and hashtags feature to connect with followers talking about those companies. Follow those companies on twitter for more information and updates. Make connections with people who are working for potential employers.
Contrary to popular perception, 83 percent of job seekers are currently on Facebook. Facebook can be a great site for screening social profiles of people who will interview you. You can also find out whether or not you have common friends with your future hiring manager. To make yourself searchable for hiring managers, your current and past employment information, location and professional skills/interests should be made public in your account settings. The content you post and share on Facebook can help recruiters in psychological profiling of your personality. So, you will have to be a little cautious while actively engaging on this social media. Similar to LinkedIn and Twitter, on Facebook also you can connect with other people in your field and engage with industry specific communities.
These are few of the things that not only help you connect with key industry people and get you future job roles but it also gives a glimpse to other people into finer aspects of your personality that can be crucial while offering you a responsible job role or making new connections with you.
So, go ahead and put your best foot forward on social media to create an image that is impactful and at the same time convincing to the outside world.
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