Читать книгу Resumes For Dummies - DeCarlo Laura - Страница 10

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.

Because the music plays on but the lyrics keep changing in online networking tools, jump on the website of each social network to obtain the service’s latest operating guides and opportunities. Here’s a starting peek at each of these industry leaders.

Google+ is another up-and-coming social media site you can use in your job search. To find out more about this platform, check out the free article at www.dummies.com/extras/resumes.

LinkedIn keeps focus on professionals

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.

Facebook hands adults important search tools

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, keep your network in the loop with regular progress reports – you don’t want them to forget to help you.

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.

Twitter opens quick, slick paths to employers

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) compiles open positions from thousands of companies worldwide.

● Listorious.com (www.listorious.com) lists people of interest in your target companies or profession.

Twitter upshot

Twitter is a great channel for quickly sharing news, asking questions, and connecting. At a basic level, it’s simple to use. You can find helpful insider employment news by following the right people. Unlike LinkedIn and Facebook, you need not ask for anyone’s acceptance – you just click “follow” on a Twitter user’s name and you’re in the game.