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