Social Media and Your Job Search

Joshua John, Social Media & Outreach Coordinator at 2U

Job hunting isn’t what it used to be. Just pulling out the weekly Classifieds section and going through job listings item by item isn’t going to cut it. Ditto with career services, which tend to be helpful with finding specialized employment, but even then job-seekers can do a lot of that work themselves in this age of free electronic information. The Internet really has provided job seekers with a tremendous amount of autonomy and opportunity when it comes to finding employment. But having access to information isn’t the same as knowing how to use it. With that in mind, here are a handful of tips job seekers can use to help find work through their social media networks: Continue Reading

4 Job Hunting Tips for Recent College Grads

· You may have more experience than you realize – While recent college grads are likely to highlight internships and part-time jobs on their resumes, they may not know that many employers will consider volunteer work (53 percent), class work (33 percent), managing activities for sororities or fraternities (26 percent) and sports (20 percent) as relevant experience. One-in-ten employers (12 percent) would also consider social media (personal or school-related blogs, social networking pages) to qualify as relevant experience.

· Expand your network of contacts online and offline – The number one way employers recruit recent college grads is through employee referrals (49 percent) followed by postings on online job sites (42 percent). Continue Reading

Selling Yourself Short – 5 Ways to Promote Your Job Search

“We must become the change we want to see.” – Mahatma Gandhi

Team leader or “individual contributor”? Manager or supporter?

Successful organizations are filled with all personality types. The best leaders in the world would be very unsuccessful if they had no followers.

When you are looking for a job, it is no time to be modest. You need to be your biggest cheerleader and sell yourself to whomever will listen. And, while you need to take credit for all of your achievements, you also need to be careful not to exaggerate your achievements to the “unbelievable” level. Continue Reading

The Sexy Side of HR

Jessica Miller-Merrill of Blogging 4 Jobs recently contacted me to ask if I would be interested in partnering with her and a few other human resource industry professionals to deliver a panel presentation at the SXSW Interactive conference in March 2011 in Austin, Texas. Her vision was to put together a group of us who could talk about how and why employers should use cell phone text messaging, social media, and other technologies to recruit and retain top talent. I gave her the enthusiastic thumbs up.

Jessica submitted the proposal in July and last week was notified by SXSW that her proposal made it to the second round of consideration. This next round consists of voting from visitors to the SXSW Panel Picker Page and those votes count for 30 percent of the score given to each proposal. In short, if you think that this is a good topic, it is really, really important that you vote for our panel.

Jessica (@blogging4jobs) will moderate The Sexy Side of HR panel and we’ll be joined by Joel Cheesman, Blogger & VP at Jobing.com (@cheezhead) and Carrie Corbin of AT&T Talent Attraction (@thealphafemme).

Please take out two minutes and do the following: Go to the Panel Picker Page, click the link to “Sign In” near the top corner, click “create a new account” (assuming you don’t have one already), complete the simple form, and vote for The Sexy Side of HR panel. It really is that simple. Thanks!!

How to Get Free PR on CollegeRecruiter.com for Your Product, Service or Opportunity

The re-launch of CollegeRecruiter.com earlier this week has provided employers, consumer marketers, schools, and even job seekers with the ability to promote their products, services, or other opportunities for free on our site. How? Post a blog article. The process for posting a blog article is quite simple.

First, either login to your existing account with CollegeRecruiter.com or click the Sign-up link on the right side to create a free account:
Then, click the links to Settings:
Then, click the Save button near the bottom of the page:
then My Page near the top center of the page:
then Blog Posts about halfway down the left side:
then post your blog article!

Note that blog articles should not be self-serving and we reserve the right to remove any blog article for any reason but expect to have to remove very, very few. Don’t write an article primarily about your product, service or opportunity. Instead, write something that is likely to be of interest and somewhat related to your product, service, or opportunity. Then, include a byline at the bottom in which you tell the reader a little about yourself and the product, service, or opportunity you want them to consider. A good rule of thumb is a sentence or two about yourself and then a sentence or two about the product, service, or opportunity. Feel free to link from the mention of the product, service, or opportunity in your byline to the web page that to which you want the reader to click through. The byline will look a lot better if you italicize it as the reader will understand that it is somewhat separate from your article.

The staff of CollegeRecruiter.com will regularly feature on our home page and other prominent locations the blog articles which are likely to be of most interest to our readers. The less the article is about your product, service, or opportunity, the more likely it is to be of interest to the reader and the more likely it is that it will be featured. Having your article featured will drive a huge amount of interested eyes to your blog article and therefore to your byline. Your byline will also be more credible to the reader if they haven’t just read through a bunch of self-serving drivel.

Want an example of a great blog article? Carole Martin, the Interview Coach, posted a great one shortly after our re-launch. It is entitled Cut to the Front of the Interview Line.

Questions? Please contact our staff writer, William Frierson.

College Admissions Officers Using Facebook, MySpace, and Other Social Networking Sites to Block Students

It has been pretty well documented that about 75 percent of employers admit to looking at information that candidates post to Facebook, MySpace, and other web pages as part of the hiring process. In other words, today’s college students and recent graduates are often finding in their race to find career opportunities that the finish line is being blocked by the risqué photos or stories about drunken parties that they or their friends posted on-line. What has not been as well documented is that the this same generation is often finding that the starting line is also blocked.
A recent study by the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth found that 25 percent of college admissions offices admit to using search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and MSN to research potential students and that 20 percent look for the same information on social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace. The reality is that the percentages must be even higher because colleges and universities have little incentive to overstate their reliance on these digital dirt web searches but they have a significant incentive to understate their use due to a fear of negative public relations and likely backlash from many Gen Y candidates who view information that they post to MySpace and some of the other social networking sites as somehow being private even though it is accessible through a quick Google search.

Continue Reading

How to find a job using new media (podcasts, blogs, etc.)

I’ve been a part of the hiring process here at the Student Loan Network for several weeks now, reviewing applications for technology and marketing positions. I am consistently shocked at how people who are supposed to be cutting edge in technology and new media fail to incorporate any significant technology in their self-marketing. Out of hundreds of resumes, exactly ONE has had a personal web site with it.
In today’s show, I talk about how you can use new media – podcasting, blogs, video podcasting/vlogging – to land yourself a new job and help you stand out from the crowd, particularly in today’s stagnant economy.
Check it out at:
The Financial Aid Podcast Web Site
If you have iTunes, visit:
FinancialAidPodcast.com/itunes
As always, please contact me with any feedback, either here, on the show, or on the phone.